Not really... securerom-style copy protection relies on device drivers, which are quagmire of compatibility issues on Linux. not to mention simply defeated.
> I don't believe there was ever a version available at mainstream retailers.
Actually, Quake3 for Linux was a bargain bin classic. "Works with Windows with website download!" said the stickers on the huge stack of forlorn $15 tins.
Yes, having two characters made more sense on teletypes because you want to be able to return the head to overstrike or line feed without moving the carriage. However, if you really believe that having only a single line-end character is a significant technical advance to rant about, CR would be the sensible choice, not LF (how does Unix line-feed anyway?).
Also, CP/M and DOS were more than established before UNIX really got out to the masses, so UNIX compatibility was an arguable consideration at best.
How does adding UNIX support, which is a OS-independant API standard, break backward-compatibility with Win32? I think your fingers started before your brain did.
Trolltastic. Well the historical reason for CRLF is mainframe-compatibility, probably because IBM put a lot of money into MS in the early days, and AT&T didn't. Plus LF only is just stupid and wrong:)
> I would not expect any migration from Windows to Linux to become an uncontrollable Exodus.
I agree, but this is not so much out of blind loyalty, but for applications which Windows has tradionally been a better choice than Unix OSes (file/print, directory, groupware, etc).
Actually, it's already happened. Sun is getting widely dumped in favor of RedHat/x86, who is seen as an top-tier enterprise vendor in Sun's traditional strongholds. As a result they've been forced to adopt a very aggressive x64 strategy.
First -- If SFU isn't the answer, make it the answer. There's no technical reason Windows can't have a good Unix environment on top of it. Get some sort of *nix-like package management on top of it so the OSS world can build and distribute tools. Build in a "registry file system" or whatever you need to make *nix tools work better on the Windows OS.
Second -- Apache. There's no reason people should have to run IIS, so build up Apache to be first class on Win32. Give it windows authentication and a GUI manager.
Third -- Java. It's not going away, so even with.NET, MS should provide better support for J2EE vendors like JBoss or BEA. (I read the biggest chunk of MS's "enterprise" penetration is actually as a platform for running Java servers.)
You're right that POSIX->Win32 is a bogus migration plan. So the real solution is to provide better *nix-like tools that bridge the gap between the unix world and the Windows OS. If the capabilities are there, people will migrate.
> If Apple is willing to do this, why don't they pull the same thing to get AutoCAD on OS X?
IBM tried this sort of thing with OS/2 and it was a total disaster. They paid companies to port their software, and usually ended up with a half-assed port that was discontinued as soon as the checks stopped coming.
I kind of doubt that Apple paid off Adobe (perhaps), but at the very least, Adobe products and customers had a strong base on the Mac. It wasn't a "If you build it they will come" proposition like CAD.
I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. Why would you shell out for an upgraded machine if your plan is to run your main production software in emulation? Rosetta may be "really fast (for MS Word)", but I would be floored if it could run Photoshop faster than any G5 or even the late model G4s.
Atari (or was it Colecovision? It's been so long ago I can't remember) originally had a "no license fee" to their system. Which leads to an overabundance of very crappy games, which lead to death of the system.
That is game industry conventional wisdom, but it is really totally groundless.
There were crappy first party games (ET, Swordquest) and there were excellent third party games (almost anything by Activision). Likewise, the Nintendo Seal of Quality was stamped on hundreds of unplayably bad games.
The truth was that inventory and shelf-space management had a lot more to do with Atari's failure and Nintendo's success than the licence fees did, and that doesn't really apply to IPod acessories at all because Apple controls their own shelfspace.
the reason Apple almost died in the late 90's was because they had too many damn computer lines, and they were confusing and overlapping
While that's true (and Apple had loads of other problems with distribution and manufaturing and QC), the root cause of all those confusing models was the fact that cloning made Macs an open platform.
Companies like Power Computing made cheap boxes with fast CPUs and that completely removed Apple's ability to artificially segment their model lineup with artificial distinctions like CPU speeds, video cards, and slots, and that drove their margins down. "Mobile vs stationary, professional vs home user" is a profit maximization technique that a closed platform allows, which is why Apple operates this way and Dell doesn't.
Back to the iPod, you have seem much more experimentation with things like Video and Radio from the open market of unpopular WM-based devices. But Apple's control over the market with a closed platform allows them introduce features in a staged manner "Video is not needed!" (one year later) "iPod with Video!!" (one year later) "Wide Screen iPod Video!!" (etc). Which is great for them because their control over the market allows them to maximize upgrade revenues by being conservative with new features.
With reveal codes you always had an answer to the question "why has it done that?"
More like: "Why has it done that? I wish it would stop."
Reveal Codes has serious incompatibilities with the GUI select and clipboard model. Either:
1) You always Reveal Codes and have to conciously maniuplate the codes at all times (similar to handcoding html)
2) Or, you accidentially move/change the Hidden Codes with the mouse, producing bizarre and counter-intutitive results. The early WPWin versions had serious problems with this.
3) The software works around (2) by silently inserting and removing codes at the appropriate times, which somewhat defeats the point of having visible codes in the first place.
I can understand the appeal of visible codes to the programmers on this site who look at "coding" a document. But with Hidden Codes the software was never as intuitive as Word's direct formatting model.
When was Office ever released on the Mac first? (Recent history: 97 vs Mac 98, 2000 vs Mac 2001, 2003 versus Mac 2004)
The Mac version is actually a fork off Office 97, and the feature set is slowly diverging. The Mac version tends to get student/home features, but supports none of the groupware/collberation features found in the Windows version.
> What is silly about Mountain View is that if one of the major US pro sports teams...
Is this any sort of factual base for this statement? Seems to me that Mountain View is a well-off NIMBY-esque suburb who wants their high-paying jobs nearby, but are more than happy to let the big cities host the sports teams.
Also, in general, the Bay Area has about zero-interest in public financed stadiums at this point.
If NASA's owned the land for a long time, it's entirely up to them who uses it.
Yes, it's been government land for a long time -- it's an old Zeppelin base from WWI.
And I certainly don't think it's "entirely up to NASA" -- NASA is only acting as stewards for the public with this land, and it's their responsibility to act in the public good.
Is letting Google build an office park in the public's best interest? You have to go and visit the area -- it's entirely surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of office parks, many which have been vacant since the tech economy crashed (and thus not generating much property tax). There's a giant Excite/@Home complex just north of there which looks largely abandoned.
And if NASA really can't think of anything useful to do with the land, why don't they just sell it to a private developer who will then be responsible for all the normal taxes and fees. Why is NASA in the real estate market? And why does Google get to benefit, when Sun Micro, Yahoo, Apple, Excite, Ebay, and all the other companies around there had to pay their share? Because Google is Cool? That's the argument for a fat federal subsidy?
This is the same argument one saw up in the San Francisco Presido -- "George Lucas is cool, so therefore the federal government should give him a tax-free office park". At least the Presidio was a somewhat unique situation -- NASA Ames is just another empty lot in a suburban office gridlock.
Santa Clara county actually taxes itself quite a bit for freeway improvements that aren't being paid for by the state/feds. I believe the US101/CA85 interchange upgrade that is being built right next to the site is locally funded.
> The public should decide how much money the government gets to spend.
Boring stock libertarian dogma. The people of that area have voted in many tax increases for themselves since the internet boom started. It's a highly upper-middle class area that in general wants a high level of government service.
I would say that "the issue on open formats for data storage" has nothing to do with the availablity of MS Office on Linux or anywhere else and is actually about open formats for data storage. At least I would hope so.
> Indeed, I don't really understand Slashdot's love affair with Google.
Well, Chris Dibona, who used to run slashdot now works at Google, and that correlated directly to the daily Google Is Great stories.
I'm sure the thought of either selling OSDN out to Google, or having a soft-landing lined-up has crossed CmdrTaco and others' minds. Not that I blame them.
I think it's more interesting that everyone reads a headline about "Google's Patent Strategy" and it just bounces right off their skulls, and they immediately start going offtopic about AJAX or IBM or MS Office. It's clearly something that nobody really wants to think about.
> Windows on non-x86 platforms failed: On PPC, on Alpha
Probably more accurate to say that non-x86 platforms failed, and Windows was simply the first casualty.
"Portable Windows" was simply bet-hedging as the entire industry incorrectly predicted that Intel was dead-meat. It may have never been a market-factor, but techncally it was a great success as it forced MS to invest in a portable multiuser OS which put them way ahead of the competition at the time (OS/2, MacOS, Novell), which strongly established them in the server market, and also allowed them to eat a big chunk of the Unix Workstation market.
Every now and again you stumble on a Score 5 post which seems to have been routed in from Bizarro World. And you get tidbits of wit-n-wisdom like this:
+ Microsoft's greatest strength (Windows/Office Monopoly) is actually their greatest weakness. No really. They have a direct channel to push technology into stuff that everyone buys and uses, but it will ultimately fail because they can't sell "Ad-Words" or something.
+ Linux is the answer to all Microsoft's problems -- they only way they can handle the current non-factor of the Linux desktop is by coming out with Linux Office and Linux Windows, which wouldn't really improve their situation but Linux is like cool and stuff and isn't that a good enough reason?
+ 10 years from now, Microsoft will be in trouble. They might make two trillion dollars in that period of time, but I will eventually be proven right.
Ultimately these sorts of posts sprout directly from the melancholy and frustration you see in the Linux Advocacy world as reality has sunk in. Linux has not been competitive in any meaningful sense on the desktop. Microsoft does not have any huge immediate structural problems that would cause them to collapse (as boldly predicted by ESR and others in the late 90s). In other words, there's no real end in sight. At least not one you can count on.
Ultimately there's not a lot of insight in "Game Over Microsoft... eventually". Eventually this will be true, the world will change, corporations rise and fall. But that doesn't change the current situation one iota.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really ... securerom-style copy protection relies on device drivers, which are quagmire of compatibility issues on Linux. not to mention simply defeated.
> I don't believe there was ever a version available at mainstream retailers.
Actually, Quake3 for Linux was a bargain bin classic. "Works with Windows with website download!" said the stickers on the huge stack of forlorn $15 tins.
Yes, having two characters made more sense on teletypes because you want to be able to return the head to overstrike or line feed without moving the carriage. However, if you really believe that having only a single line-end character is a significant technical advance to rant about, CR would be the sensible choice, not LF (how does Unix line-feed anyway?).
Also, CP/M and DOS were more than established before UNIX really got out to the masses, so UNIX compatibility was an arguable consideration at best.
I never suggested that they "throw IIS down the drain", or even remove it as the default webserver. You people read way too much into things.
Obviously, ASP.NET/IIS would be MS's preferred route going forward, but when selling Migration to Unix customers, Java/Apache support is important.
How does adding UNIX support, which is a OS-independant API standard, break backward-compatibility with Win32? I think your fingers started before your brain did.
Trolltastic. Well the historical reason for CRLF is mainframe-compatibility, probably because IBM put a lot of money into MS in the early days, and AT&T didn't. Plus LF only is just stupid and wrong :)
> I would not expect any migration from Windows to Linux to become an uncontrollable Exodus.
I agree, but this is not so much out of blind loyalty, but for applications which Windows has tradionally been a better choice than Unix OSes (file/print, directory, groupware, etc).
Actually, it's already happened. Sun is getting widely dumped in favor of RedHat/x86, who is seen as an top-tier enterprise vendor in Sun's traditional strongholds. As a result they've been forced to adopt a very aggressive x64 strategy.
First -- If SFU isn't the answer, make it the answer. There's no technical reason Windows can't have a good Unix environment on top of it. Get some sort of *nix-like package management on top of it so the OSS world can build and distribute tools. Build in a "registry file system" or whatever you need to make *nix tools work better on the Windows OS.
.NET, MS should provide better support for J2EE vendors like JBoss or BEA. (I read the biggest chunk of MS's "enterprise" penetration is actually as a platform for running Java servers.)
Second -- Apache. There's no reason people should have to run IIS, so build up Apache to be first class on Win32. Give it windows authentication and a GUI manager.
Third -- Java. It's not going away, so even with
You're right that POSIX->Win32 is a bogus migration plan. So the real solution is to provide better *nix-like tools that bridge the gap between the unix world and the Windows OS. If the capabilities are there, people will migrate.
Microsoft has always distributed quite a bit of code under a "reference licence", so this isn't anything new.
Good advice, I suggest you take it. The first provision you quote is lifted straight from the GPL section 2A:
> If Apple is willing to do this, why don't they pull the same thing to get AutoCAD on OS X?
IBM tried this sort of thing with OS/2 and it was a total disaster. They paid companies to port their software, and usually ended up with a half-assed port that was discontinued as soon as the checks stopped coming.
I kind of doubt that Apple paid off Adobe (perhaps), but at the very least, Adobe products and customers had a strong base on the Mac. It wasn't a "If you build it they will come" proposition like CAD.
I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. Why would you shell out for an upgraded machine if your plan is to run your main production software in emulation? Rosetta may be "really fast (for MS Word)", but I would be floored if it could run Photoshop faster than any G5 or even the late model G4s.
Atari (or was it Colecovision? It's been so long ago I can't remember) originally had a "no license fee" to their system. Which leads to an overabundance of very crappy games, which lead to death of the system.
That is game industry conventional wisdom, but it is really totally groundless.
There were crappy first party games (ET, Swordquest) and there were excellent third party games (almost anything by Activision). Likewise, the Nintendo Seal of Quality was stamped on hundreds of unplayably bad games.
The truth was that inventory and shelf-space management had a lot more to do with Atari's failure and Nintendo's success than the licence fees did, and that doesn't really apply to IPod acessories at all because Apple controls their own shelfspace.
the reason Apple almost died in the late 90's was because they had too many damn computer lines, and they were confusing and overlapping
While that's true (and Apple had loads of other problems with distribution and manufaturing and QC), the root cause of all those confusing models was the fact that cloning made Macs an open platform.
Companies like Power Computing made cheap boxes with fast CPUs and that completely removed Apple's ability to artificially segment their model lineup with artificial distinctions like CPU speeds, video cards, and slots, and that drove their margins down. "Mobile vs stationary, professional vs home user" is a profit maximization technique that a closed platform allows, which is why Apple operates this way and Dell doesn't.
Back to the iPod, you have seem much more experimentation with things like Video and Radio from the open market of unpopular WM-based devices. But Apple's control over the market with a closed platform allows them introduce features in a staged manner "Video is not needed!" (one year later) "iPod with Video!!" (one year later) "Wide Screen iPod Video!!" (etc). Which is great for them because their control over the market allows them to maximize upgrade revenues by being conservative with new features.
With reveal codes you always had an answer to the question "why has it done that?"
More like: "Why has it done that? I wish it would stop."
Reveal Codes has serious incompatibilities with the GUI select and clipboard model. Either:
1) You always Reveal Codes and have to conciously maniuplate the codes at all times (similar to handcoding html)
2) Or, you accidentially move/change the Hidden Codes with the mouse, producing bizarre and counter-intutitive results. The early WPWin versions had serious problems with this.
3) The software works around (2) by silently inserting and removing codes at the appropriate times, which somewhat defeats the point of having visible codes in the first place.
I can understand the appeal of visible codes to the programmers on this site who look at "coding" a document. But with Hidden Codes the software was never as intuitive as Word's direct formatting model.
When was Office ever released on the Mac first? (Recent history: 97 vs Mac 98, 2000 vs Mac 2001, 2003 versus Mac 2004)
The Mac version is actually a fork off Office 97, and the feature set is slowly diverging. The Mac version tends to get student/home features, but supports none of the groupware/collberation features found in the Windows version.
> What is silly about Mountain View is that if one of the major US pro sports teams ...
Is this any sort of factual base for this statement? Seems to me that Mountain View is a well-off NIMBY-esque suburb who wants their high-paying jobs nearby, but are more than happy to let the big cities host the sports teams.
Also, in general, the Bay Area has about zero-interest in public financed stadiums at this point.
If NASA's owned the land for a long time, it's entirely up to them who uses it.
Yes, it's been government land for a long time -- it's an old Zeppelin base from WWI.
And I certainly don't think it's "entirely up to NASA" -- NASA is only acting as stewards for the public with this land, and it's their responsibility to act in the public good.
Is letting Google build an office park in the public's best interest? You have to go and visit the area -- it's entirely surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of office parks, many which have been vacant since the tech economy crashed (and thus not generating much property tax). There's a giant Excite/@Home complex just north of there which looks largely abandoned.
And if NASA really can't think of anything useful to do with the land, why don't they just sell it to a private developer who will then be responsible for all the normal taxes and fees. Why is NASA in the real estate market? And why does Google get to benefit, when Sun Micro, Yahoo, Apple, Excite, Ebay, and all the other companies around there had to pay their share? Because Google is Cool? That's the argument for a fat federal subsidy?
This is the same argument one saw up in the San Francisco Presido -- "George Lucas is cool, so therefore the federal government should give him a tax-free office park". At least the Presidio was a somewhat unique situation -- NASA Ames is just another empty lot in a suburban office gridlock.
Santa Clara county actually taxes itself quite a bit for freeway improvements that aren't being paid for by the state/feds. I believe the US101/CA85 interchange upgrade that is being built right next to the site is locally funded.
> The public should decide how much money the government gets to spend.
Boring stock libertarian dogma. The people of that area have voted in many tax increases for themselves since the internet boom started. It's a highly upper-middle class area that in general wants a high level of government service.
I would say that "the issue on open formats for data storage" has nothing to do with the availablity of MS Office on Linux or anywhere else and is actually about open formats for data storage. At least I would hope so.
> Indeed, I don't really understand Slashdot's love affair with Google.
Well, Chris Dibona, who used to run slashdot now works at Google, and that correlated directly to the daily Google Is Great stories.
I'm sure the thought of either selling OSDN out to Google, or having a soft-landing lined-up has crossed CmdrTaco and others' minds. Not that I blame them.
I think it's more interesting that everyone reads a headline about "Google's Patent Strategy" and it just bounces right off their skulls, and they immediately start going offtopic about AJAX or IBM or MS Office. It's clearly something that nobody really wants to think about.
> Windows on non-x86 platforms failed: On PPC, on Alpha
Probably more accurate to say that non-x86 platforms failed, and Windows was simply the first casualty.
"Portable Windows" was simply bet-hedging as the entire industry incorrectly predicted that Intel was dead-meat. It may have never been a market-factor, but techncally it was a great success as it forced MS to invest in a portable multiuser OS which put them way ahead of the competition at the time (OS/2, MacOS, Novell), which strongly established them in the server market, and also allowed them to eat a big chunk of the Unix Workstation market.
Every now and again you stumble on a Score 5 post which seems to have been routed in from Bizarro World. And you get tidbits of wit-n-wisdom like this:
... eventually". Eventually this will be true, the world will change, corporations rise and fall. But that doesn't change the current situation one iota.
+ Microsoft's greatest strength (Windows/Office Monopoly) is actually their greatest weakness. No really. They have a direct channel to push technology into stuff that everyone buys and uses, but it will ultimately fail because they can't sell "Ad-Words" or something.
+ Linux is the answer to all Microsoft's problems -- they only way they can handle the current non-factor of the Linux desktop is by coming out with Linux Office and Linux Windows, which wouldn't really improve their situation but Linux is like cool and stuff and isn't that a good enough reason?
+ 10 years from now, Microsoft will be in trouble. They might make two trillion dollars in that period of time, but I will eventually be proven right.
Ultimately these sorts of posts sprout directly from the melancholy and frustration you see in the Linux Advocacy world as reality has sunk in. Linux has not been competitive in any meaningful sense on the desktop. Microsoft does not have any huge immediate structural problems that would cause them to collapse (as boldly predicted by ESR and others in the late 90s). In other words, there's no real end in sight. At least not one you can count on.
Ultimately there's not a lot of insight in "Game Over Microsoft