More outright wrongness. As long as it's the Retail and not the OEM version, there's no restrictions on selling it or selling a computer with it installed. New computers usually come with XP because of steep OEM discounts.
What can I say except that you are 100% wrong and that you used a car-computer analogy to boot. You can buy Windows 98 ($35 on ebay right now), and corporations can "downgrade" licenses to any previous version -- MS even sends them the 98 CD.
There's lots to complain about the MS Monopoly, but new software versions hardly one of them, nor unique at all to Microsoft.
I don't think it was a "mistake" at all -- when Gates started, the dominate business model from IBM and those guys was Software Subscriptions. And the result was a bunch of slow-moving maintenance mode stuff that people paid an arm-n-leg for. After all, if the revenue kept coming in, why make any improvements?
Customers flocked to PCs and Microsoft/Lotus/Adobe/Apple/Novell because you could buy it once and forget it for 5 years. When Gates had something new, he usually made it better/sexy enough to get people to upgrade. For all your moaning, I don't see any laws forcing people to upgrade to Windows XP. Run Windows 3.1 if you'd like -- nothing stopping you but model year envy.
One big problem with "Enterprise Linux" is that it's basically Ye Olde IBM business model where you pay annually for stability. Which is fine for Oracle servers and the like, but probably will never be competitive with the featuritus of shrinkwrap software. This should be obvious if you compare the relative advancement of (say) Solaris against Windows in the 90s.
Yeah, I rode the busses in that area growing up. The point is that the line does not go to Uptown, it goes to the Target stripmall. I agree that Uptown/Central So. Mpls would be a good candidate for 'streetcar' service.
I'm not sure if they've made up their minds whether to build an 'urban' street-level system or a long-distance commuter service. Hiawatha is really neither.
The PCCs are great (better ride than the new streetcars), but the old orange trains left over from the roman empire really suck. Loud and uncomfortable to ride on.
BTW, I think you missed the point of the F line, which is Tourism. You don't see many locals riding it, especially as the subway works pretty well nowdays.
First, I agree that parts of the US badly need a rail upgrade. If you've ridden Amtrak in the midwest, you'll find yourself putzing through a lot of small towns at 20mph on tracks that were built in 1875 or whenever. It would makes sense to look to a national Interstate Rail System, even if it was only for freight.
However, they're talking about High Speed Rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco in CA, One thing that's come up, "post-911", is that the security and baggage procedures would have to be just as stringent as the airports. That alone could kill a lot the percieved advantage of high-speed rail. (And the fact that politics would demand stops in every central valley town.)
I'd tell the Regents to go F themselves because any rail line to the U would be better than nothing for the students. Sounds like they asked for a subway and got nothin'.
Just steal a lane from the (1 mile long) "Washington Ave Freeway", remove some street parking, and use surface platforms and forget all the fancy infrastructure features (which I assume would involve a new or rehab Mississippi bridge as well).
Fact is that building a "choo-choo" that nobody rides is going to kill the political support any "system". Furthermore, Hiawatha Ave with it's grain elevators and stripmalls is never going to achieve the greater social objectives of having urban street life.
Transit just doesn't work with a "If you build it, they will come" method -- look at San Jose where the traffic is 100x worse than MN. You need to make it the most convenient option for people, and that usually means higher density and some parking constriction. (I guess the thing bothers me because they built it for visiting salesmen rather than the people who need it. And I say that as someone who grew up 4 blocks from the route.)
I think you're confusing Light Rail (aka "streetcar") with a Heavy Rail/Subway system. LRV is really just a sexy high-capacity bus. It's also an order of magnitude less expensive than a subway system or something like BART.
I grew up and went to school in Minneapolis, and I'm surprised the Hiawatha LRV ever got off the ground. If they wanted a rail line there, Hiawatha wasn't the best choice for a route. The area is what people outside of MN would call "suburban" (free standing homes with yards and tons of parking), and the existing transit ridership along the route was pretty low.
I'd guess they built it down Hiawatha only because (1) the land was sitting there (failed 60s freeway), and (2) the business community wanted to show up Shelbyville by having a train from the airport to downtown. (Most stuff gets done in Minneapolis because they're a small city with a chip on their shoulder.)
The worst case is this will end up like the San Jose LRV system, where "ghost trains" putter around in suburban industrial districts while the freeway system cracks under the pressure. Although downtown San Jose makes downtown Saint Paul look like Metropolis.
A much better choice would have been to connect downtown Minneapolis with the University and downtown St Paul. That corridor already has high transit ridership and something approaching urban densities. Well, at least they didn't build a stadium.
I just looked into this program ("Empower ISV"). In order to qualify you need to: 1) Look like a software company when they check you out 2) Ship a product and have it certified for some version of Windows (anyone know what this costs?) 3) Get an employee MCP certified.
So, it's not for everyone.
As for the high price of the "Universal" package, I think MS feel they need to price it in the same range as BEA and IBM's enterprise development packages (which list for $10 grand or so). However, if you are small shop and give them a ring, they arent cutting you any deals.
You can also get the a C# or C++ only version for about $100 each -- not much more than this "Express" version and probably sufficient for many folks.
In 1986, Seattle Computer was going out of business and planned to sell it's right to print DOS to a large vendor like Compaq. This lead to a lawsuit, and eventually a settlement where Microsoft bought them out for about $1 Mill. ("Hard Drive", Wallace & Erickson, 1992)
It's only used to install packages for the browser
I don't think so -- some of the realworld XPI stuff is just ordinary spyware EXE files packaged up.
Also, I thought the point of XUL is that it was NOT sandboxed -- that you could write any sort of local application with it. It certainly has access to Mozilla internals.
I suspect that some of this stuff was added back when Mozilla was being targetted as a base for the AOL Client, and not because there a big developer demand for it.
I would instead say that "They integrated File Management and Control Panels into the Web Browser". Same bad result though.
This would have worked OK if their sandbox system was worth a damn, but the "zone" system is just too easily confused. Somehow Mozilla and even Netscape 4 can reliably distingish between local trusted components and remote stuff -- Microsoft should have never done the "integration" until they had the security air tight.
At this point the only real fix probably would be to make a new IE binary that's designed explicity for Internet browsing, while leaving the existing holey IE stuff in the shell.
I'm also curious how well Konquerer will handle close scrutiny. On the surface, it seems they copied Microsoft's design wholesale.
While it's easy to rip on the idea behind ActiveX, Mozilla.org thought it was a good enough idea to copy it as XPI*.
The basic idea is that plugins and toolbars should be easy to install, and due to the nature of these things, they often can not be "sandboxed" or run in a Java VM. One of the big complaints about Mozilla is that people find it difficult to install the Flash/Java/Real plug-ins. If vendors supported XPI, this would be mostly resolved.
The real security problems with IE are not directly related to ActiveX, but instead the holey and flawed "zone" system. There's also some operational annoyances with ActiveX (like throwing up dialogs even though ActiveX is disabled and the lack of an easy way to whitelist), but it sounds like XP SP2 is going to try to fix some of those things.
* ? Apologies if I'm confused about the moz alphabet soup.
Never knew you could have menus in WP5.1 without a mouse driver loaded. Worthless trivia now, but probably would have saved a ton of grief back in the day. (or did I have WP4.2?)
However, WP wasn't a CLI program -- it was a full screen program with a massive amount of features crammed into one 80col line of text. (I personally thought WP's UI sucked -- there were many other DOS wordprocessors that were actually designed to be easy to use.)
(And MacWord wasn't really all that different than modern Word -- a proficient Word user would feel right at home.)
MS Word 5.1 could do simple page layout like drop caps, columns, having text flow around graphics, etc. It couldn't do "frames", IIRC.
While WordPerfect was very powerful, much of that functionality was hidden behind codes you had to enter. Even doing a simple table was a total pain, as opposed to clicking a button in Word.
Last time I used WordPerfect (v6 or 7), the Hidden Codes were horribly incompatible with GUI Cut-n-Paste. You never knew if you were just moving text or moving the 'Codes' -- a simple operation could totally screw up formatting of an entire document.
The only work around was to leave Reveal Codes on all of the time -- and any feature which basically forces to the user to look at a bunch of 'Codes' is a horrible kudge.
(Word isn't pefect in this regard either, with it's 'secret paragraph mark' holding the style information.)
I'm sure some people swear by it, but like all advances (Word 5.1 up to 2003, CLI to GUI, etc.) it's really more a form of nostalgia than praise.
This might be true, but Word 5.1 was essentially Feature Complete -- there's nothing that you can do in Word 11 that you can't do just as easily in Word 5.1 running on a 2MB Mac Plus. The style and formatting model is basically identical to the modern versions.
The only real word-processing advances in the product are real-time spell checking/correction and the extemely annoying auto-formatting. (Word5 had auto-correct, but the list wasn't prepopulated like modern versions.) And those are mainly just outgrowths of faster CPUs.
Of course, there's also a lot of new macro and IPC features, as well as help cartoons and wizards. But for just sitting down and writing, Word 5 had it all.
(And for the WordPerfect 5.1 fans out there, Word5 ruled for any real formatting beyond monospaced documents with only tabs & margins.)
Yeah, I imagine the history will look something like this:
1983 -- BSD UNIX 3 1984-2003 -- AT&T, Novell, and Sun spend 15 years adding tens of millions of lines of proprietary sourcecode 2004 -- Solaris 9 !
If you back to when the code was open enough to track, you are really talking about ancient, obsolete crap that's not relevant anymore. Levenez's chart is interesting as an overview, but trying to nail down exactly which code went where seems to be overkill.
Instead of the History of Unix on a byte level, it would be a lot more interesting to have a place where oldtimers could reminisce and submit their stories. But that would be a lot like alt.folklore.computer.
See my other post where I had a similar issue with grub misdetecting the drive order.
I don't understand if you are having a CHS problem or a grub problem. Are you sure that you are getting out of grub and into the win boot loader? You might be able to boot from the XP CD and recover the windows mbr. Since you have Windows on hd0, I would chainload grub out of the boot.ini, if your Windows isn't totally hosed.
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More outright wrongness. As long as it's the Retail and not the OEM version, there's no restrictions on selling it or selling a computer with it installed. New computers usually come with XP because of steep OEM discounts.
What can I say except that you are 100% wrong and that you used a car-computer analogy to boot. You can buy Windows 98 ($35 on ebay right now), and corporations can "downgrade" licenses to any previous version -- MS even sends them the 98 CD.
There's lots to complain about the MS Monopoly, but new software versions hardly one of them, nor unique at all to Microsoft.
I don't think it was a "mistake" at all -- when Gates started, the dominate business model from IBM and those guys was Software Subscriptions. And the result was a bunch of slow-moving maintenance mode stuff that people paid an arm-n-leg for. After all, if the revenue kept coming in, why make any improvements?
Customers flocked to PCs and Microsoft/Lotus/Adobe/Apple/Novell because you could buy it once and forget it for 5 years. When Gates had something new, he usually made it better/sexy enough to get people to upgrade. For all your moaning, I don't see any laws forcing people to upgrade to Windows XP. Run Windows 3.1 if you'd like -- nothing stopping you but model year envy.
One big problem with "Enterprise Linux" is that it's basically Ye Olde IBM business model where you pay annually for stability. Which is fine for Oracle servers and the like, but probably will never be competitive with the featuritus of shrinkwrap software. This should be obvious if you compare the relative advancement of (say) Solaris against Windows in the 90s.
Yeah, I rode the busses in that area growing up. The point is that the line does not go to Uptown, it goes to the Target stripmall. I agree that Uptown/Central So. Mpls would be a good candidate for 'streetcar' service.
I'm not sure if they've made up their minds whether to build an 'urban' street-level system or a long-distance commuter service. Hiawatha is really neither.
The PCCs are great (better ride than the new streetcars), but the old orange trains left over from the roman empire really suck. Loud and uncomfortable to ride on.
BTW, I think you missed the point of the F line, which is Tourism. You don't see many locals riding it, especially as the subway works pretty well nowdays.
First, I agree that parts of the US badly need a rail upgrade. If you've ridden Amtrak in the midwest, you'll find yourself putzing through a lot of small towns at 20mph on tracks that were built in 1875 or whenever. It would makes sense to look to a national Interstate Rail System, even if it was only for freight.
However, they're talking about High Speed Rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco in CA, One thing that's come up, "post-911", is that the security and baggage procedures would have to be just as stringent as the airports. That alone could kill a lot the percieved advantage of high-speed rail. (And the fact that politics would demand stops in every central valley town.)
I'd tell the Regents to go F themselves because any rail line to the U would be better than nothing for the students. Sounds like they asked for a subway and got nothin'.
Just steal a lane from the (1 mile long) "Washington Ave Freeway", remove some street parking, and use surface platforms and forget all the fancy infrastructure features (which I assume would involve a new or rehab Mississippi bridge as well).
Fact is that building a "choo-choo" that nobody rides is going to kill the political support any "system". Furthermore, Hiawatha Ave with it's grain elevators and stripmalls is never going to achieve the greater social objectives of having urban street life.
Transit just doesn't work with a "If you build it, they will come" method -- look at San Jose where the traffic is 100x worse than MN. You need to make it the most convenient option for people, and that usually means higher density and some parking constriction. (I guess the thing bothers me because they built it for visiting salesmen rather than the people who need it. And I say that as someone who grew up 4 blocks from the route.)
I think you're confusing Light Rail (aka "streetcar") with a Heavy Rail/Subway system. LRV is really just a sexy high-capacity bus. It's also an order of magnitude less expensive than a subway system or something like BART.
I grew up and went to school in Minneapolis, and I'm surprised the Hiawatha LRV ever got off the ground. If they wanted a rail line there, Hiawatha wasn't the best choice for a route. The area is what people outside of MN would call "suburban" (free standing homes with yards and tons of parking), and the existing transit ridership along the route was pretty low.
I'd guess they built it down Hiawatha only because (1) the land was sitting there (failed 60s freeway), and (2) the business community wanted to show up Shelbyville by having a train from the airport to downtown. (Most stuff gets done in Minneapolis because they're a small city with a chip on their shoulder.)
The worst case is this will end up like the San Jose LRV system, where "ghost trains" putter around in suburban industrial districts while the freeway system cracks under the pressure. Although downtown San Jose makes downtown Saint Paul look like Metropolis.
A much better choice would have been to connect downtown Minneapolis with the University and downtown St Paul. That corridor already has high transit ridership and something approaching urban densities. Well, at least they didn't build a stadium.
I'll back you up -- I recall getting versions of this email back in 1991-2, and seeing it frequently on corporate mail systems 1993-96.
There was also a Disney version, and Nordstroms or someone. Even if the guy did write the email, it wasn't a very new idea by 1997.
I just looked into this program ("Empower ISV"). In order to qualify you need to:
1) Look like a software company when they check you out
2) Ship a product and have it certified for some version of Windows (anyone know what this costs?)
3) Get an employee MCP certified.
So, it's not for everyone.
As for the high price of the "Universal" package, I think MS feel they need to price it in the same range as BEA and IBM's enterprise development packages (which list for $10 grand or so). However, if you are small shop and give them a ring, they arent cutting you any deals.
You can also get the a C# or C++ only version for about $100 each -- not much more than this "Express" version and probably sufficient for many folks.
In 1986, Seattle Computer was going out of business and planned to sell it's right to print DOS to a large vendor like Compaq. This lead to a lawsuit, and eventually a settlement where Microsoft bought them out for about $1 Mill. ("Hard Drive", Wallace & Erickson, 1992)
It's only used to install packages for the browser
I don't think so -- some of the realworld XPI stuff is just ordinary spyware EXE files packaged up.
Also, I thought the point of XUL is that it was NOT sandboxed -- that you could write any sort of local application with it. It certainly has access to Mozilla internals.
I suspect that some of this stuff was added back when Mozilla was being targetted as a base for the AOL Client, and not because there a big developer demand for it.
I would instead say that "They integrated File Management and Control Panels into the Web Browser". Same bad result though.
This would have worked OK if their sandbox system was worth a damn, but the "zone" system is just too easily confused. Somehow Mozilla and even Netscape 4 can reliably distingish between local trusted components and remote stuff -- Microsoft should have never done the "integration" until they had the security air tight.
At this point the only real fix probably would be to make a new IE binary that's designed explicity for Internet browsing, while leaving the existing holey IE stuff in the shell.
I'm also curious how well Konquerer will handle close scrutiny. On the surface, it seems they copied Microsoft's design wholesale.
While it's easy to rip on the idea behind ActiveX, Mozilla.org thought it was a good enough idea to copy it as XPI*.
The basic idea is that plugins and toolbars should be easy to install, and due to the nature of these things, they often can not be "sandboxed" or run in a Java VM. One of the big complaints about Mozilla is that people find it difficult to install the Flash/Java/Real plug-ins. If vendors supported XPI, this would be mostly resolved.
The real security problems with IE are not directly related to ActiveX, but instead the holey and flawed "zone" system. There's also some operational annoyances with ActiveX (like throwing up dialogs even though ActiveX is disabled and the lack of an easy way to whitelist), but it sounds like XP SP2 is going to try to fix some of those things.
* ? Apologies if I'm confused about the moz alphabet soup.
Never knew you could have menus in WP5.1 without a mouse driver loaded. Worthless trivia now, but probably would have saved a ton of grief back in the day. (or did I have WP4.2?)
However, WP wasn't a CLI program -- it was a full screen program with a massive amount of features crammed into one 80col line of text. (I personally thought WP's UI sucked -- there were many other DOS wordprocessors that were actually designed to be easy to use.)
(And MacWord wasn't really all that different than modern Word -- a proficient Word user would feel right at home.)
MS Word 5.1 could do simple page layout like drop caps, columns, having text flow around graphics, etc. It couldn't do "frames", IIRC.
While WordPerfect was very powerful, much of that functionality was hidden behind codes you had to enter. Even doing a simple table was a total pain, as opposed to clicking a button in Word.
Last time I used WordPerfect (v6 or 7), the Hidden Codes were horribly incompatible with GUI Cut-n-Paste. You never knew if you were just moving text or moving the 'Codes' -- a simple operation could totally screw up formatting of an entire document.
The only work around was to leave Reveal Codes on all of the time -- and any feature which basically forces to the user to look at a bunch of 'Codes' is a horrible kudge.
(Word isn't pefect in this regard either, with it's 'secret paragraph mark' holding the style information.)
Oops -- replied to the wrong comment. That was supposed to be for SilentChris.
I'm sure some people swear by it, but like all advances (Word 5.1 up to 2003, CLI to GUI, etc.) it's really more a form of nostalgia than praise.
This might be true, but Word 5.1 was essentially Feature Complete -- there's nothing that you can do in Word 11 that you can't do just as easily in Word 5.1 running on a 2MB Mac Plus. The style and formatting model is basically identical to the modern versions.
The only real word-processing advances in the product are real-time spell checking/correction and the extemely annoying auto-formatting. (Word5 had auto-correct, but the list wasn't prepopulated like modern versions.) And those are mainly just outgrowths of faster CPUs.
Of course, there's also a lot of new macro and IPC features, as well as help cartoons and wizards. But for just sitting down and writing, Word 5 had it all.
(And for the WordPerfect 5.1 fans out there, Word5 ruled for any real formatting beyond monospaced documents with only tabs & margins.)
Yeah, I imagine the history will look something like this:
1983 -- BSD UNIX 3
1984-2003 -- AT&T, Novell, and Sun spend 15 years adding tens of millions of lines of proprietary sourcecode
2004 -- Solaris 9 !
If you back to when the code was open enough to track, you are really talking about ancient, obsolete crap that's not relevant anymore. Levenez's chart is interesting as an overview, but trying to nail down exactly which code went where seems to be overkill.
Instead of the History of Unix on a byte level, it would be a lot more interesting to have a place where oldtimers could reminisce and submit their stories. But that would be a lot like alt.folklore.computer.
You're right. I should have never gotten into it and just let the Apple Fans have their battle with their imaginary anti-Apple faction.
See my other post where I had a similar issue with grub misdetecting the drive order.
I don't understand if you are having a CHS problem or a grub problem. Are you sure that you are getting out of grub and into the win boot loader? You might be able to boot from the XP CD and recover the windows mbr. Since you have Windows on hd0, I would chainload grub out of the boot.ini, if your Windows isn't totally hosed.
Why? Companies create divisions for marketing reasons all the time. The sales channel for the ipod is very different than for the Mac.
I don't think Apple breaks out iPod R&D (maybe next quarter), but it's a pretty simple device when compared to Mac hardware + software.