The problem with the "Plug-in" idea is that everyone within an organization needs the exact same plug-ins, or they can't collaborate on documents effectively. (Maybe not everyone needs Revision Tracking, but it only takes one guy using it...) And if everyone has the exact same plugins, what's the point? IT Depts would rather install a single package (Word) than manage the rollout of 200 plugins. I already have this problem with the "Solver" plugin for Excel (useful, but not installed by default).
The fact that DOC is a defacto interchange format makes this problem a million times worse.
Apple put a lot of work into this problem with OpenDoc, and their solutions were never that compelling when you started thinking aobut real world scenarios.
IIRC, it was reported that they were using old US "Export" encyrption tech (Win2000's built-in?). If so, that's somewhat of a vindication of US Crypto policy.
A Service Bureau (copy shop or whatever) will do OCR in bulk for about 10 cents a page, and that includes the scanning labor (which is sometimes done offshore).
So, $400 buys you a lot of OCR -- especially when you consider you have to pay labor costs, document management costs, etc on top. So, I wouldn't deploy OCR software unless it's a once-in-a-while thing or something thats central to your business process.
But they couldn't just pull away from DOS or else no one would buy their product
And Microsoft didn't figure this out until they tried and failed twice -- first with OS/2, and then with Windows NT 3.1
Windows 95 was an enormous technical achivement -- almost all of the application features of a "modern OS", yet still maintaining 99% backward compatiblity with DOS and Win3.1, even down to the driver level. (Many many corporate shops ran huge CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files under 95)
Plus, a well-designed shell, and almost Mac-like Plug-n-Play -- better in some respects, as I was still typing Hayes AT strings into my Mac in 1995.
And before the IE-integration (and maybe some race-conditions on faster machines), it was actually pretty stable. Too bad all that work went into what was fundementally a piece of crap.
Back on topic, Apple's response of "Windows 95 = Mac 87 Hawhaw" was pretty pathetic. The introduction of 95 was pretty much the deathblow for the Mac outside of its core markets. Only recently has that been changing.
But by that point, they were already committed to the Mac platform.
But they still did a Mac-like GUI for the GS, as well as hypercard, appletalk, and a bunch of other Mac-like features, probably at considerable development cost. The IIGS GUI was much better than any PC GUI for years.
A big mistake of Apple in the 80s was that they treated the Mac as the premium machine and the incompatible IIGS as the cheap clone. When it finally came time for Apple II Forever to end, they stranded a bunch of customers on a dead-end platform.
If they'd only built a cheap color Mac rather than the GS, their marketshare numbers might look very different even today.
True, to a point. By 1984, PCs were already shipping with more than 1MB of memory, although the base model of the newly-introduced IBM AT was only 256K
The Commodore 64 was woefully obsolete by then -- a 1978-era PC technology sold dirt cheap.
Either way, if you went back and looked at the Mac reviews from 1984, every one of them would have mentioned the anemic memory. IIRC, the "Fat Mac" followed on fairly quickly.
A) The factual question of whether Linux have something like Longhorn in the same timeframe? This depends on not only the availability of the tech, but it's adoption into major frameworks and applications. Open Issue.
B) The slashdot rhetorical battle where MS Vaporware is countered by links to Open Source Vaporware. Nobody here really doubts MS's abililty to execute, so "So-n-So wrote a paper" or "Here's a sourceforge project" looks a little thin.
OK, after commenting, I went back and read the article. There's a couple major improvements over the current Windows:
+ It sounds like they are getting rid of the old single-threaded event model, which was brought over for Win3 compatibility. (No more GUI locks while Windows probes your CD-ROM, etc.)
+ The processing will be moved to user mode as much as possible (ie, no more "GUI in the Kernel")
The ebay LD market was hot-n-heavy a few years ago, so you might have missed your shot. However, I suspect that any content that hasn't been or likely won't be released on DVD will still sell well there. (It took forever to win "Wings of Desire", and then they finally released it on DVD...)
At the same time, my player is getting funky, some of the old disks are rotting out, so LD is dying here as well, even as a library format.
One thing that's fairly consistent about Microsoft is that they wait for the hardware to catch up to the software, and then, when it's 'ready', they take maximum advantage. That's why they can be 'late' and still catch up and dominate. (eg. GUIs and 386 machines, or web browsers and 56K modems)
Anyway, when Windows 2000 was released, there was only one graphic driver that supported the menu effects in hardware (Matrox). Which is probably why they've been fairly conservative about effects, unlike Apple who forced them onto a bunch of Rage Pro owners for marketing reasons, and then had to wait for the HW to catch up.
I have to say that Apple's TSOD* is pretty sexy. Used to see it all the time when I was running 10.2. Hopefully Microsoft will copy that, but I rather like the BSOD's stack trace, so maybe that can be animated in like the OpenGL screensavers.
Well, in the many years I've been on Slashdot, everytime someone attacks the X11 imaging model, someone replys with a link to Berlin/Fresco. Yet, after all this time, nobody uses it and it has zero applications, and appear in every respect to be someone's academic vaporware. That's what.
3) Apparently, Atari would cram product into the retail channel and let it sit there (Such as "If you want 100 copies of Ms PacMan, you must buy a 100 copies of [game from 2+ years ago]). ET wasn't so much a bad game, but a mediocre adventure game that Atari massively oversold. This sort of thing led to a fallout with major retailers that made an Atari comeback pretty much impossible in the late 80s. (I never saw a 7800 for sale any place other than Kay-Bee Toys. No Target/K-Mart/Sears/etc.)
Nintendo's strategy wasn't so much the total control or "seal of quality" aspect, but just that they bought back unsold product and made sure the store shelves were filled with the latest & greatest. It's conventional wisdom that 3rd Parties killed Atari, but I suspect the reality was that Atari killed Atari.
Back on topic, I don't see how Apple can prevent Real from selling music for the iPod. The DMCA angle is pretty tenuous because there isn't any copyright infringement, and the Interoperability angle is covered by the video game lawsuits.
Yes, but Nintendo had/has no legal power to stop unlicensed 3rd parties from making games, at least in the US. It's all incentive based -- developer kits and marketing programs. Atari (Tengen) and others did make unlicensed Nintendo games.
So, Apple might not like 3rd party iPod developers, but what (legally) can they do about it? If they wanted to reign in RealMedia, they should have negotiated an agreement rather than publicly saying No.
(I also think that Atari's problem in the 80s wasn't "Too Many Crap Games", but instead "Too Many Crap Games In the Stores" -- millions of unsold copies of Atari ET for example. One of the smart things Nintendo did was to keep fresh games in the store.)
I imagine that with IE at least, the issues are more complicated than just adding a library. (Might be MS Office issues etc). Although, I agree they've had many years to work this out.
Where's the problem?
Probably lack of customer demand. PNG is sort of like XHTML or Linux-on-the-Desktop -- it matters dearly to 1% of the people, but others are largely ambivalent. Outside of the web, I've generally seen PNG used more in the role of TIFF or PSD, and not GIF. (TIFF being another good example of extremely uneven software support.)
It was actually only a couple of months after Unisys announced its patent and its intent to enforce
Compuserve was aware of the patent for several years before this, and there was some discussion of simply replacing LZW rather than designing a new image format. (According to second hand BBS posts from ~1991.)
I hope that someone in the Free Software world is trying to pull some strings with IBM about their patent (which they've never made a dime from, AFAIK). But, unfortunately, now it's tied up with this SCO thing. Maybe Darl will do everyone a favor and get it thrown out.
Yes, the developers are lazy and should have better support. However, the reality is what it is:
+ It took many years after the GIF Patent was identified to develop and release the PNG standard. + It took many years after that until there was even basic software support was in place. + For whatever reason, there's not enough customer demand for vendors to fully support PNG. + The patent expired, so there's no real objection to using GIF anymore.
With hindsight, PNG was too much, too late. Which is why "Burn All GIFs" didn't succeed.
All of this talk about IE, Photoshop, and "pngcrush" just shows that PNG is still not living up as totally suitable replacement for GIF.
PNG seems to be a good example of the second-system effect, where a simple implementation is replaced by "elephantine feature-laden monstrosity", that took a long time to develop, and is difficult to implement correctly. When the largest graphics companies, Adobe & Macromedia, have problems, you have to wonder.
Not that PNG doesn't have its uses, but if the goal was to create a patent-free replacement, it would have been a lot quicker and easier to come up with a "GIF2" rather than the be-all-end-all replacement. Anyway, it shouldn't come as a shock that people lived with the GIF patent for many years, and that PNG will probably never fully replace GIF. Just something for the "Burn All GIFs" crowd to consider.
I have yet to find a PHB who even questions the intelligence of modifying a business process to meet the needs of a software application.
The guys at the top certainly understand that they aren't buying software, they're buying an operational methodology. Which is why these deployments always come with a boatload of business consultants.
The problem is that in larger corporations, the processes were not so much "designed" but grew up around bureaucratic lines and software constraints. Furthermore, very few can think outside the box, and fall back to The Way Its Always Been Done. Your average worker drone hates change and will fight it to the death.
The other problem (on the software side) is transparency -- having your core business rely on 30-year old mainframe spaghetti where everyone who understood the decisions is retired or dead is a big problem (even if you just look at the expense of running mainframes).
I share your cynicism, and it always sucks to see a software system where nobody bothered considering the line workers, but there is some good reasoning behind this stuff.
(And the "monoculture" stuff makes for "insightful" jawjacking, but I'm not sure if it holds up when you are talking about inventory management. Anyway, these things are always highly customized.)
Better yet, the hardware industry (Intel, AMD, ATI, NVidia) should come up with a rating system like "Game:A", "Game:B" and so on.
Then game vendors could just say "Game:C class PC required, Game:D or better recommended".
Right now, they've dug themselves into a hole by making it difficult for regular users to buy games. I know when SimCity 4 came out, there were a lot of confused people saying "I just bought a fancy new Dell and this game won't run!" because they had Intel video.
(And I was thinking of OS/2 v2. Also Win3.1 could run on a 286, but it wasn't really useful unless you had a faster 386 at least.)
Right on. I'm sure that "justifying" a 486 for the original Doom was easier because it also meant you could run Windows or OS/2, MS Office, Mosaic/Netscape, etc etc etc.
You could also play the old games on pretty much every 486 ever made -- no need to check the vendor + model of the graphics card. We used to have a lot of deathmatches in the office after work, something that's now pretty much impossible due to the video card specs.
PC Games sales would probably be a lot better if they could find a way to date label them: "ALL PCS AFTER JAN 2002" instead of requiring people to know their components.
I disagree that it's at all uncommon. I think it's very common
It's pointless to argue this issue. However, if your software is really "designed", at this point the GUI Nazi would step in and say "Yes it is", or "No it isn't" and the software would be designed around that point. The issue with Unix GUIs is that nobody wants to accept being on the losing side of that argument, so the CLI is for "us" and the GUI is for "the little people". [As a gross generalization, anyway.]
Really, I think the way most end users think about how to use computers is a negative result of the document-centric model
OK, if you are planning some long-term comeback of the CLI over the GUI as the predominant mode, there's not much to talk about because it doesn't really solve an immidate problem. (Such As: I should be able to copy a list of files from Explorer to Notepad.)
However, I do agree that there's a lot of really big issues with searchability and data manipulation that aren't being solved very well. But a lot of that has to do with the data being stashed behind RDBMS frontends, in groupware, or in impenetrable Office software formats. Such as it is, Unix tools like find/grep aren't the real answer either.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the "Plug-in" idea is that everyone within an organization needs the exact same plug-ins, or they can't collaborate on documents effectively. (Maybe not everyone needs Revision Tracking, but it only takes one guy using it...) And if everyone has the exact same plugins, what's the point? IT Depts would rather install a single package (Word) than manage the rollout of 200 plugins. I already have this problem with the "Solver" plugin for Excel (useful, but not installed by default).
The fact that DOC is a defacto interchange format makes this problem a million times worse.
Apple put a lot of work into this problem with OpenDoc, and their solutions were never that compelling when you started thinking aobut real world scenarios.
I'd never heard "x64" before today.
My preference is "86-64" -- get rid of the "x" business all together.
They never mention breaking AES256 or anything.
IIRC, it was reported that they were using old US "Export" encyrption tech (Win2000's built-in?). If so, that's somewhat of a vindication of US Crypto policy.
A Service Bureau (copy shop or whatever) will do OCR in bulk for about 10 cents a page, and that includes the scanning labor (which is sometimes done offshore).
So, $400 buys you a lot of OCR -- especially when you consider you have to pay labor costs, document management costs, etc on top. So, I wouldn't deploy OCR software unless it's a once-in-a-while thing or something thats central to your business process.
But they couldn't just pull away from DOS or else no one would buy their product
And Microsoft didn't figure this out until they tried and failed twice -- first with OS/2, and then with Windows NT 3.1
Windows 95 was an enormous technical achivement -- almost all of the application features of a "modern OS", yet still maintaining 99% backward compatiblity with DOS and Win3.1, even down to the driver level. (Many many corporate shops ran huge CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files under 95)
Plus, a well-designed shell, and almost Mac-like Plug-n-Play -- better in some respects, as I was still typing Hayes AT strings into my Mac in 1995.
And before the IE-integration (and maybe some race-conditions on faster machines), it was actually pretty stable. Too bad all that work went into what was fundementally a piece of crap.
Back on topic, Apple's response of "Windows 95 = Mac 87 Hawhaw" was pretty pathetic. The introduction of 95 was pretty much the deathblow for the Mac outside of its core markets. Only recently has that been changing.
But by that point, they were already committed to the Mac platform.
But they still did a Mac-like GUI for the GS, as well as hypercard, appletalk, and a bunch of other Mac-like features, probably at considerable development cost. The IIGS GUI was much better than any PC GUI for years.
A big mistake of Apple in the 80s was that they treated the Mac as the premium machine and the incompatible IIGS as the cheap clone. When it finally came time for Apple II Forever to end, they stranded a bunch of customers on a dead-end platform.
If they'd only built a cheap color Mac rather than the GS, their marketshare numbers might look very different even today.
True, to a point. By 1984, PCs were already shipping with more than 1MB of memory, although the base model of the newly-introduced IBM AT was only 256K
The Commodore 64 was woefully obsolete by then -- a 1978-era PC technology sold dirt cheap.
Either way, if you went back and looked at the Mac reviews from 1984, every one of them would have mentioned the anemic memory. IIRC, the "Fat Mac" followed on fairly quickly.
Right Here
There's really two things going here:
A) The factual question of whether Linux have something like Longhorn in the same timeframe? This depends on not only the availability of the tech, but it's adoption into major frameworks and applications. Open Issue.
B) The slashdot rhetorical battle where MS Vaporware is countered by links to Open Source Vaporware. Nobody here really doubts MS's abililty to execute, so "So-n-So wrote a paper" or "Here's a sourceforge project" looks a little thin.
OK, after commenting, I went back and read the article. There's a couple major improvements over the current Windows:
+ It sounds like they are getting rid of the old single-threaded event model, which was brought over for Win3 compatibility. (No more GUI locks while Windows probes your CD-ROM, etc.)
+ The processing will be moved to user mode as much as possible (ie, no more "GUI in the Kernel")
The ebay LD market was hot-n-heavy a few years ago, so you might have missed your shot. However, I suspect that any content that hasn't been or likely won't be released on DVD will still sell well there. (It took forever to win "Wings of Desire", and then they finally released it on DVD...)
At the same time, my player is getting funky, some of the old disks are rotting out, so LD is dying here as well, even as a library format.
One thing that's fairly consistent about Microsoft is that they wait for the hardware to catch up to the software, and then, when it's 'ready', they take maximum advantage. That's why they can be 'late' and still catch up and dominate. (eg. GUIs and 386 machines, or web browsers and 56K modems)
Anyway, when Windows 2000 was released, there was only one graphic driver that supported the menu effects in hardware (Matrox). Which is probably why they've been fairly conservative about effects, unlike Apple who forced them onto a bunch of Rage Pro owners for marketing reasons, and then had to wait for the HW to catch up.
I have to say that Apple's TSOD* is pretty sexy. Used to see it all the time when I was running 10.2. Hopefully Microsoft will copy that, but I rather like the BSOD's stack trace, so maybe that can be animated in like the OpenGL screensavers.
* Transparent screen of death
What about Fresco?
Well, in the many years I've been on Slashdot, everytime someone attacks the X11 imaging model, someone replys with a link to Berlin/Fresco. Yet, after all this time, nobody uses it and it has zero applications, and appear in every respect to be someone's academic vaporware. That's what.
1) As well as Atari suing Activision and failing.
2) Doh!
3) Apparently, Atari would cram product into the retail channel and let it sit there (Such as "If you want 100 copies of Ms PacMan, you must buy a 100 copies of [game from 2+ years ago]). ET wasn't so much a bad game, but a mediocre adventure game that Atari massively oversold. This sort of thing led to a fallout with major retailers that made an Atari comeback pretty much impossible in the late 80s. (I never saw a 7800 for sale any place other than Kay-Bee Toys. No Target/K-Mart/Sears/etc.)
Nintendo's strategy wasn't so much the total control or "seal of quality" aspect, but just that they bought back unsold product and made sure the store shelves were filled with the latest & greatest. It's conventional wisdom that 3rd Parties killed Atari, but I suspect the reality was that Atari killed Atari.
Back on topic, I don't see how Apple can prevent Real from selling music for the iPod. The DMCA angle is pretty tenuous because there isn't any copyright infringement, and the Interoperability angle is covered by the video game lawsuits.
Yes, but Nintendo had/has no legal power to stop unlicensed 3rd parties from making games, at least in the US. It's all incentive based -- developer kits and marketing programs. Atari (Tengen) and others did make unlicensed Nintendo games.
So, Apple might not like 3rd party iPod developers, but what (legally) can they do about it? If they wanted to reign in RealMedia, they should have negotiated an agreement rather than publicly saying No.
(I also think that Atari's problem in the 80s wasn't "Too Many Crap Games", but instead "Too Many Crap Games In the Stores" -- millions of unsold copies of Atari ET for example. One of the smart things Nintendo did was to keep fresh games in the store.)
PNG is to Photoshop as is JPG is to a Calculator?
Better bone up if you're planning on taking any standardized tests. (Also, "IS TOO!" isn't a very convincing argument.)
I imagine that with IE at least, the issues are more complicated than just adding a library. (Might be MS Office issues etc). Although, I agree they've had many years to work this out.
Where's the problem?
Probably lack of customer demand. PNG is sort of like XHTML or Linux-on-the-Desktop -- it matters dearly to 1% of the people, but others are largely ambivalent. Outside of the web, I've generally seen PNG used more in the role of TIFF or PSD, and not GIF. (TIFF being another good example of extremely uneven software support.)
It was actually only a couple of months after Unisys announced its patent and its intent to enforce
Compuserve was aware of the patent for several years before this, and there was some discussion of simply replacing LZW rather than designing a new image format. (According to second hand BBS posts from ~1991.)
I hope that someone in the Free Software world is trying to pull some strings with IBM about their patent (which they've never made a dime from, AFAIK). But, unfortunately, now it's tied up with this SCO thing. Maybe Darl will do everyone a favor and get it thrown out.
Yes, the developers are lazy and should have better support. However, the reality is what it is:
+ It took many years after the GIF Patent was identified to develop and release the PNG standard.
+ It took many years after that until there was even basic software support was in place.
+ For whatever reason, there's not enough customer demand for vendors to fully support PNG.
+ The patent expired, so there's no real objection to using GIF anymore.
With hindsight, PNG was too much, too late. Which is why "Burn All GIFs" didn't succeed.
All of this talk about IE, Photoshop, and "pngcrush" just shows that PNG is still not living up as totally suitable replacement for GIF.
PNG seems to be a good example of the second-system effect, where a simple implementation is replaced by "elephantine feature-laden monstrosity", that took a long time to develop, and is difficult to implement correctly. When the largest graphics companies, Adobe & Macromedia, have problems, you have to wonder.
Not that PNG doesn't have its uses, but if the goal was to create a patent-free replacement, it would have been a lot quicker and easier to come up with a "GIF2" rather than the be-all-end-all replacement. Anyway, it shouldn't come as a shock that people lived with the GIF patent for many years, and that PNG will probably never fully replace GIF. Just something for the "Burn All GIFs" crowd to consider.
(totally offtopic time)
I have yet to find a PHB who even questions the intelligence of modifying a business process to meet the needs of a software application.
The guys at the top certainly understand that they aren't buying software, they're buying an operational methodology. Which is why these deployments always come with a boatload of business consultants.
The problem is that in larger corporations, the processes were not so much "designed" but grew up around bureaucratic lines and software constraints. Furthermore, very few can think outside the box, and fall back to The Way Its Always Been Done. Your average worker drone hates change and will fight it to the death.
The other problem (on the software side) is transparency -- having your core business rely on 30-year old mainframe spaghetti where everyone who understood the decisions is retired or dead is a big problem (even if you just look at the expense of running mainframes).
I share your cynicism, and it always sucks to see a software system where nobody bothered considering the line workers, but there is some good reasoning behind this stuff.
(And the "monoculture" stuff makes for "insightful" jawjacking, but I'm not sure if it holds up when you are talking about inventory management. Anyway, these things are always highly customized.)
Better yet, the hardware industry (Intel, AMD, ATI, NVidia) should come up with a rating system like "Game:A", "Game:B" and so on.
Then game vendors could just say "Game:C class PC required, Game:D or better recommended".
Right now, they've dug themselves into a hole by making it difficult for regular users to buy games. I know when SimCity 4 came out, there were a lot of confused people saying "I just bought a fancy new Dell and this game won't run!" because they had Intel video.
(And I was thinking of OS/2 v2. Also Win3.1 could run on a 286, but it wasn't really useful unless you had a faster 386 at least.)
Right on. I'm sure that "justifying" a 486 for the original Doom was easier because it also meant you could run Windows or OS/2, MS Office, Mosaic/Netscape, etc etc etc.
You could also play the old games on pretty much every 486 ever made -- no need to check the vendor + model of the graphics card. We used to have a lot of deathmatches in the office after work, something that's now pretty much impossible due to the video card specs.
PC Games sales would probably be a lot better if they could find a way to date label them: "ALL PCS AFTER JAN 2002" instead of requiring people to know their components.
I disagree that it's at all uncommon. I think it's very common
It's pointless to argue this issue. However, if your software is really "designed", at this point the GUI Nazi would step in and say "Yes it is", or "No it isn't" and the software would be designed around that point. The issue with Unix GUIs is that nobody wants to accept being on the losing side of that argument, so the CLI is for "us" and the GUI is for "the little people". [As a gross generalization, anyway.]
Really, I think the way most end users think about how to use computers is a negative result of the document-centric model
OK, if you are planning some long-term comeback of the CLI over the GUI as the predominant mode, there's not much to talk about because it doesn't really solve an immidate problem. (Such As: I should be able to copy a list of files from Explorer to Notepad.)
However, I do agree that there's a lot of really big issues with searchability and data manipulation that aren't being solved very well. But a lot of that has to do with the data being stashed behind RDBMS frontends, in groupware, or in impenetrable Office software formats. Such as it is, Unix tools like find/grep aren't the real answer either.