My TV monitor is a Sony GVM-1311Q, which was also used as high-end Amiga monitor.
It does Progressive NTSC, SVGA up to 800x600, RGB, and EGA. Same tube as the old AppleColor 13 monitors -- it weighs a ton. My Commodore 1084S is now sitting on a shelf.
I'm not sure that any marketing brainpower was put into "MS-DOS". Back then, [Company Name] DOS was pretty much standard convention for the disk operating system:
Apple DOS Atari DOS IBM PC DOS (as opposed to IBM Mainframe DOS) Compaq DOS
There wasn't really a product called "MS-DOS" until many years later (DOS 4?). It was an internal name or techie jargon before then, much like "MacOS" was before a certain point.
Yeah, I should mention that I also run normally as a Power User and I locked down IE. Those two steps saved my bacon more than once.
My opinion is that the "Windows mysteriously rots" phenomenon can almost entirely be traced back to the FAT filesystem, spyware, and crappy antivirus software.
I would disagree. I ran the same Windows 2000 install for about 4 years (it was even upgraded from NT4). I swapped hardware, installed and uninstalled tons of software and never had any unsolvable problems.
Recently, I reinstalled the box to give to a relative. It didn't seem any "snappier" with the new install.
Although, maybe I was just lucky because the box was a very dull PIII/BX system with no funky vendor chipset drivers.
Hopefully that was implied by the comparison to IBM, AC. The DotNet strategy is looking a little like SAA.
Of course, IBM is still around and still huge, so Microsoft becoming IBM might not be the worst thing, although a lot of their existing customers are going to have to adapt.
I won't deny they used bare knuckle or 'sleazy' practices, but it's ridiculous to say that Microsoft never developed new markets.
Simply compare the number of personal computers sold when MS was founded versus the number sold today. Or the number of wordprocessor/spreadsheet users in 1990 versus today. Etc. An enormous amount of that market developed only because Microsoft was significantly cheaper than the competition.
Well, they had universal adoption in certain markets going back to the 1970s, and a full scale desktop monopoly by 1993 or so. It took a long time for the "new" vertical strategy to develop.
Actually, I think the case is ugly. But one can pop it open and get a PCI card in just a few seconds. Never seen a whitebox case like it.
And. if you think noise level doesn't matter, you are the one that's gone over, my friend. Perhaps the powerful whir of your Dual Athlon Turbojet system has driven you a little mad.
For thirty years, Microsoft competed in a market that had essentially zero competition.
Actually, they had a tons of competition. However MS usually was usually off creating new markets for their products, while the competition was maximizing profits in the old markets.
Despite the fanboyism of the editorial, it's a real point that now Microsoft is the one playing profit maximization, and others are off blazing new markets.
They'll learn to improve, and we'll once again have the good microsoft we did in the pre-1999 days
At least as far as I can tell, the "old" Bill Gates Microsoft is pretty much gone. That's the MS that valued universal adoption over vertical lock-in. That MS commoditized technology, priced things cheap, let people pirate them like crazy, and used it's muscle to get it's stuff everywhere possible.
(Whether or not the old MS was "good" is debatable. They certainly seemed like it coming out of the war with IBM in the early 90s, not so coming out of the war with Netscape.)
The "new" Ballmer Microsoft is trying to go Up Market and become a new mini-IBM. They don't really try to compete on price, they compete on a the level of integration they provide. Their new tier of products really only have value add when combined with other MS products.
Microsoft probably no longer cares if Office has a 95% marketshare or not. They are probably only really interested in Office customers that use all the network groupware, collaboration, and security functions. Much like IBM in the old days, if you aren't interested in becoming an end-to-end "Microsoft Shop", you aren't a very valuable customer anymore and you can go use StarOffice.
Problem is that this story is about top-end workstation systems, not the $500 loss-leader at dell.com or the gamer system you built at home.
I have a Dell Precision 650 workstation under my desk. It has a custom low-profile Antec 460W power supply (sits at bottom of the case), a very nice clamshell case (almost as nice as the Powermac G4), and custom cooling vents and large variable speed fans that reduce noise to about nothing. The RAM is (must be) CAS2. Basically, it's a topshelf machine and built like it.
It's probably more expensive than whitebox, but it's significantly cheaper than what IBM or HP charge for the same iron. I used to hate Dell as well, but I converted after seeing the build quality of their upper-end machines and the fact that price-wise they can't be beat in the Tier 1.
I'm pretty sure that what Microsoft is trying to figure out. Do these people dislike us for our (a) Technology or our (b) Business Practices?
Obviously, there's a lot of disagreement on this question in the Linux world, but it would be useful to get some rough percentages.
The thing is that Technology can be fixed. People opinons of their business practices probably can't. (People still bitch about that Windows 3.1 beta that wouldn't run on DRDOS, for example). If Microsoft finds that a large number of people are set against them for business reasons, they are as screwed as IBM was in the 80s.
thing I've learned to watch out for is any company trying to run a Java solution on an AS/400
That's one of my warning signs as well. It indicates that a company's grasp of the IT market begins and ends with their IBM Salesman tells them. The latest order from IBM is to run Linux on the AS/400, which is usally a disaster in the hands of the underpaid "operators".
Also, watch out for any company who is still running Lotus Notes R4 or ccMail. A company who can't get basics like e-mail down simply does not care about IT.
(Note that I've got nothing against 400s in the hands of clued users. Just the people who buy a low-end ASS/400 and then overload it with file and web server stuff where it's 10x more expensive to run).
I can't comment about how patent dates work, but there might be prior art for this kind of application.
Netscape 4 used HTML pages to do things like certificate management. I assume these pages interfaced with local code in a "trusted" manner. See also the NS4 docs about Signed Scripts which allowed you to dthings like read/write local files.
I tend to think that Mozilla chrome has nothing to do with this patent. Most importantly, they aren't HTML.
HTML Applications (HTAs) appeared with Internet Explorer 4.0, which was introduced in 1997, I believe. Long before the Mozilla project started.
HTAs are basically web pages that have no security model and can bind with local COM objects. They are deployed by copying them to your hard drive rather than pulling them from the network. As the article mentions, Windows now uses these heavily for things like control panels.
As a side-note, the HTA "feature" is of the main causes of IE security problems. Apparently the browser can be easily confused as to what 'zone' it is in, which can allow malicious code to bypass security checks.
Generally, recent demographic change has made gerrymandering easier, not harder. There's a lot more income segregation in where people live than there used to be. That makes it easy to slice up suburban districts that include the 'right' kinds of voters.
Also, in some cases the only way you could make a "fair" district is through gerrymandering. I live in a sensibly-shaped district, and my congresswoman generally wins with 90% of the vote.
SO where is the PNG equivelent for FAT? When Unisys pulled this crap with GIF alot of places went with PNG.
It took 3-4 years to even complete the spec for "GIF2" (which became PNG).
Then it took another 3-5 years before PNG software implementations were wide-spread. Even today, many implementations are feature-incomplete or buggy.
And this is a rather simple image format that exists in userspace as a portable library. Not a filesystem driver that runs in privledged mode, which could crash your computer and corrupt all your data, and must be recoded for every single OS and device firmware out there.
In short, the FAT patents will probably expire before there's an alternative. Sound familiar?
> Just because HTML 3.2 "worked" didn't make it good, or right
Tell that to all the Linux users who started browsing this site back in the 1990s with Nutscrape. Back then CSS meant "Optimized for Internet Explorer".
I can't believe the folks getting their undies in a wad because a webapp is a whole two years behind the brower state-of-the-art. Taco could spend his days adding new features to the moderation system... or he could appease some HTML fetishists by performing an expensive rewrite that results in the same look and no new features.
You're trolling, but basically Windows cheats by caching hardware details, while Linux goes through a complete redetect sequence on every boot and requires manual IDE tweaking (a big issue for both Win and Lin because modern IDE controllers aren't really compatible with each other).
But, that won't help in a recovery situation. I'd say the Windows way is a fair decision, given how infrequently mobo changes happen. Although, it would be much less painful if they supported a/REDETECT switch in the boot.ini.
The problem with this story is the OS/2 PM versions of WordPerfect and Lotus were just as bad, or worse, than the Windows versions.
I also don't believe that the people running these companies were dumb enough to do whatever BillG told them to do. It seems like they were perfectly content making 640K DOS console software, and were thinking that this whole GUI thing might just go away. Also, both Windows & OS/2 removed a lot of the platform lock-in these companies had (such as print drivers in WP or host integration in Lotus).
MS bundled Office Pro with every station coming from Gateway, Dell, Northgate etc.
Keep in mind that at this point in history, most computer users had never seen a real full-fledged GUI application. People say MS Office first, and they took to it like water, including experienced WP and Lotus users, but primarily *new users* that could never figure out that Ctrl+F7 stuff. Lotus and WP had a big piece of the pie, but they never were interested in making the pie bigger.
Back on topic however, WordPerfect had turned into complete crap by the time Novell bought them. Novell PerfectOffice was the first half-decent attempt from them in years, and did start to regain marketshare. However the confusion surrounding the sale to Corel and their silence over Win32 plans pretty much killed that momentum.
Go to http://www.info.apple.com/ and search for "open terminal". Admittedly not all those results are relevant, but a lot of them are. And this is from a company that used to run television ads ripping on Microsoft's reliance on the CLI.
My argument is not that OS 9 was superior technology, just that it was designed from the ground up to be simple and easy to maintain -- and that's the real source of Apple's Ease of Use advantage, not the widget factor.
OS X could have maintained some of this, but it doesn't. For example, there's no real good reason one couldn't (un)install a hardware driver by dragging-n-dropping. Instead you get stuff all over the place just like Windows or something.
Don't get me wrong, I use OS X all the time and stopped trying to get work done on Classic MacOS in about 1997. I just think in a lot of ways, it's just another OS and isn't really fundementally better than the competition.
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My TV monitor is a Sony GVM-1311Q, which was also used as high-end Amiga monitor.
It does Progressive NTSC, SVGA up to 800x600, RGB, and EGA. Same tube as the old AppleColor 13 monitors -- it weighs a ton. My Commodore 1084S is now sitting on a shelf.
One of the features about SFU/Interix is that you supposedly can write hybrid Unix/Win32 apps. (I'm unsure if this is supported with Cygwin.)
So, you can share your backend logic between the Windows and Unix versions, and write a native frontend for Windows and a X11 frontend for Unix.
My feeling is that this will vastly increase the level of Open Source support on Windows within the next few years.
I'm not sure that any marketing brainpower was put into "MS-DOS". Back then, [Company Name] DOS was pretty much standard convention for the disk operating system:
Apple DOS
Atari DOS
IBM PC DOS (as opposed to IBM Mainframe DOS)
Compaq DOS
There wasn't really a product called "MS-DOS" until many years later (DOS 4?). It was an internal name or techie jargon before then, much like "MacOS" was before a certain point.
Now, "CP/M" -- that sounded super technical.
Yup, In ye olden days, almost every 3rd party Mac Ethernet card was "register compatible" with the Apple-branded hardware.
That means 99.9% of the time, the driver you need is bundled with MacOS.
Yeah, I should mention that I also run normally as a Power User and I locked down IE. Those two steps saved my bacon more than once.
My opinion is that the "Windows mysteriously rots" phenomenon can almost entirely be traced back to the FAT filesystem, spyware, and crappy antivirus software.
I would disagree. I ran the same Windows 2000 install for about 4 years (it was even upgraded from NT4). I swapped hardware, installed and uninstalled tons of software and never had any unsolvable problems.
Recently, I reinstalled the box to give to a relative. It didn't seem any "snappier" with the new install.
Although, maybe I was just lucky because the box was a very dull PIII/BX system with no funky vendor chipset drivers.
seriously.. what did 1000 people organizations use for global co-ordination, communication, and messaging before MS?
IBM PROFS goes back the 80s. Lotus Notes goes back the early 90s.
Hopefully that was implied by the comparison to IBM, AC. The DotNet strategy is looking a little like SAA.
Of course, IBM is still around and still huge, so Microsoft becoming IBM might not be the worst thing, although a lot of their existing customers are going to have to adapt.
I won't deny they used bare knuckle or 'sleazy' practices, but it's ridiculous to say that Microsoft never developed new markets.
Simply compare the number of personal computers sold when MS was founded versus the number sold today. Or the number of wordprocessor/spreadsheet users in 1990 versus today. Etc. An enormous amount of that market developed only because Microsoft was significantly cheaper than the competition.
Well, they had universal adoption in certain markets going back to the 1970s, and a full scale desktop monopoly by 1993 or so. It took a long time for the "new" vertical strategy to develop.
Actually, I think the case is ugly. But one can pop it open and get a PCI card in just a few seconds. Never seen a whitebox case like it.
And. if you think noise level doesn't matter, you are the one that's gone over, my friend. Perhaps the powerful whir of your Dual Athlon Turbojet system has driven you a little mad.
For thirty years, Microsoft competed in a market that had essentially zero competition.
Actually, they had a tons of competition. However MS usually was usually off creating new markets for their products, while the competition was maximizing profits in the old markets.
Despite the fanboyism of the editorial, it's a real point that now Microsoft is the one playing profit maximization, and others are off blazing new markets.
They'll learn to improve, and we'll once again have the good microsoft we did in the pre-1999 days
At least as far as I can tell, the "old" Bill Gates Microsoft is pretty much gone. That's the MS that valued universal adoption over vertical lock-in. That MS commoditized technology, priced things cheap, let people pirate them like crazy, and used it's muscle to get it's stuff everywhere possible.
(Whether or not the old MS was "good" is debatable. They certainly seemed like it coming out of the war with IBM in the early 90s, not so coming out of the war with Netscape.)
The "new" Ballmer Microsoft is trying to go Up Market and become a new mini-IBM. They don't really try to compete on price, they compete on a the level of integration they provide. Their new tier of products really only have value add when combined with other MS products.
Microsoft probably no longer cares if Office has a 95% marketshare or not. They are probably only really interested in Office customers that use all the network groupware, collaboration, and security functions. Much like IBM in the old days, if you aren't interested in becoming an end-to-end "Microsoft Shop", you aren't a very valuable customer anymore and you can go use StarOffice.
Problem is that this story is about top-end workstation systems, not the $500 loss-leader at dell.com or the gamer system you built at home.
I have a Dell Precision 650 workstation under my desk. It has a custom low-profile Antec 460W power supply (sits at bottom of the case), a very nice clamshell case (almost as nice as the Powermac G4), and custom cooling vents and large variable speed fans that reduce noise to about nothing. The RAM is (must be) CAS2. Basically, it's a topshelf machine and built like it.
It's probably more expensive than whitebox, but it's significantly cheaper than what IBM or HP charge for the same iron. I used to hate Dell as well, but I converted after seeing the build quality of their upper-end machines and the fact that price-wise they can't be beat in the Tier 1.
I'm pretty sure that what Microsoft is trying to figure out. Do these people dislike us for our (a) Technology or our (b) Business Practices?
Obviously, there's a lot of disagreement on this question in the Linux world, but it would be useful to get some rough percentages.
The thing is that Technology can be fixed. People opinons of their business practices probably can't. (People still bitch about that Windows 3.1 beta that wouldn't run on DRDOS, for example). If Microsoft finds that a large number of people are set against them for business reasons, they are as screwed as IBM was in the 80s.
thing I've learned to watch out for is any company trying to run a Java solution on an AS/400
That's one of my warning signs as well. It indicates that a company's grasp of the IT market begins and ends with their IBM Salesman tells them. The latest order from IBM is to run Linux on the AS/400, which is usally a disaster in the hands of the underpaid "operators".
Also, watch out for any company who is still running Lotus Notes R4 or ccMail. A company who can't get basics like e-mail down simply does not care about IT.
(Note that I've got nothing against 400s in the hands of clued users. Just the people who buy a low-end ASS/400 and then overload it with file and web server stuff where it's 10x more expensive to run).
I can't comment about how patent dates work, but there might be prior art for this kind of application.
Netscape 4 used HTML pages to do things like certificate management. I assume these pages interfaced with local code in a "trusted" manner. See also the NS4 docs about Signed Scripts which allowed you to dthings like read/write local files.
I tend to think that Mozilla chrome has nothing to do with this patent. Most importantly, they aren't HTML.
HTML Applications (HTAs) appeared with Internet Explorer 4.0, which was introduced in 1997, I believe. Long before the Mozilla project started.
HTAs are basically web pages that have no security model and can bind with local COM objects. They are deployed by copying them to your hard drive rather than pulling them from the network. As the article mentions, Windows now uses these heavily for things like control panels.
As a side-note, the HTA "feature" is of the main causes of IE security problems. Apparently the browser can be easily confused as to what 'zone' it is in, which can allow malicious code to bypass security checks.
Generally, recent demographic change has made gerrymandering easier, not harder. There's a lot more income segregation in where people live than there used to be. That makes it easy to slice up suburban districts that include the 'right' kinds of voters.
Also, in some cases the only way you could make a "fair" district is through gerrymandering. I live in a sensibly-shaped district, and my congresswoman generally wins with 90% of the vote.
SO where is the PNG equivelent for FAT? When Unisys pulled this crap with GIF alot of places went with PNG.
It took 3-4 years to even complete the spec for "GIF2" (which became PNG).
Then it took another 3-5 years before PNG software implementations were wide-spread. Even today, many implementations are feature-incomplete or buggy.
And this is a rather simple image format that exists in userspace as a portable library. Not a filesystem driver that runs in privledged mode, which could crash your computer and corrupt all your data, and must be recoded for every single OS and device firmware out there.
In short, the FAT patents will probably expire before there's an alternative. Sound familiar?
Show me the difference with gzip, oh clueful one.
> Just because HTML 3.2 "worked" didn't make it good, or right
... or he could appease some HTML fetishists by performing an expensive rewrite that results in the same look and no new features.
Tell that to all the Linux users who started browsing this site back in the 1990s with Nutscrape. Back then CSS meant "Optimized for Internet Explorer".
I can't believe the folks getting their undies in a wad because a webapp is a whole two years behind the brower state-of-the-art. Taco could spend his days adding new features to the moderation system
You're trolling, but basically Windows cheats by caching hardware details, while Linux goes through a complete redetect sequence on every boot and requires manual IDE tweaking (a big issue for both Win and Lin because modern IDE controllers aren't really compatible with each other).
/REDETECT switch in the boot.ini.
Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall
But, that won't help in a recovery situation. I'd say the Windows way is a fair decision, given how infrequently mobo changes happen. Although, it would be much less painful if they supported a
The problem with this story is the OS/2 PM versions of WordPerfect and Lotus were just as bad, or worse, than the Windows versions.
I also don't believe that the people running these companies were dumb enough to do whatever BillG told them to do. It seems like they were perfectly content making 640K DOS console software, and were thinking that this whole GUI thing might just go away. Also, both Windows & OS/2 removed a lot of the platform lock-in these companies had (such as print drivers in WP or host integration in Lotus).
MS bundled Office Pro with every station coming from Gateway, Dell, Northgate etc.
Keep in mind that at this point in history, most computer users had never seen a real full-fledged GUI application. People say MS Office first, and they took to it like water, including experienced WP and Lotus users, but primarily *new users* that could never figure out that Ctrl+F7 stuff. Lotus and WP had a big piece of the pie, but they never were interested in making the pie bigger.
Back on topic however, WordPerfect had turned into complete crap by the time Novell bought them. Novell PerfectOffice was the first half-decent attempt from them in years, and did start to regain marketshare. However the confusion surrounding the sale to Corel and their silence over Win32 plans pretty much killed that momentum.
Like what?
Go to http://www.info.apple.com/ and search for "open terminal". Admittedly not all those results are relevant, but a lot of them are. And this is from a company that used to run television ads ripping on Microsoft's reliance on the CLI.
My argument is not that OS 9 was superior technology, just that it was designed from the ground up to be simple and easy to maintain -- and that's the real source of Apple's Ease of Use advantage, not the widget factor.
OS X could have maintained some of this, but it doesn't. For example, there's no real good reason one couldn't (un)install a hardware driver by dragging-n-dropping. Instead you get stuff all over the place just like Windows or something.
Don't get me wrong, I use OS X all the time and stopped trying to get work done on Classic MacOS in about 1997. I just think in a lot of ways, it's just another OS and isn't really fundementally better than the competition.