I recall when people were waving the Monopoly tag around when microsoft introduced their own memory manager in DOS, killing QuarterDeck QEMM.
"How dare they make an OS that manages memory!!! Evil Monopolistic Bastards!"
Fact is, virus scanning is a basic network service nowdays, and people expect it as part of the standard deal.
Think I'm wrong? Just look at all the people flaming MS in every Slashdot story about the latest virus. The the lan admin didn't patch it, the mail admin didn't block it, the end user didn't head the warning and ran it anyway, and yet it's still Big Bad MS's fault. When "No Viruses" is a prominent advocacy point from the Linux guys, what do you expect them to do?
OK, I recall when the GIF submarine surfaced in about 1989 -- it was huge talk on the BBS circuit (probably because sysops were worried that someone would make them delete their porn).
It was clear back then that a non-patented algorithm could be used to create a "GIF2" format (in fact, AOL did just that with ART), but the consensus was that a new format would be a *bad* thing. People believed that Standards were more important than ownership, and that vendors were going to have to pay the piper, because GIF was here to stay.
The funny thing is that nearly every current internet user agrees with this position. Only an extrememly tiny group of people perceive a "fractured market" or the lack of a "uniform standard" (he says under a row of GIFs). There's always been enough alternatives that Unisys's $20K Server License has never seen any serious consideration where I've been.
PNG has advanced the state-of-the-art, but it has all the hallmarks of the Second System Effect -- more complex, implementation differences, bad downlevel support, and so on. I think the woman's point is pretty much right on -- GIF was fabulously successful despite being patented, so much so that no 1:1 replacement was ever seriously considered. Instead people invented different formats like PNG to solve different problems.
There may have been some LISP Machines with NuBus.
Of course, the use of NuBus was a very defensible decision -- Macs were being sold as mid-range workstations ($3-$10K) in those days, and it would have been a complete joke if it came with crap like ISA.
Also, NuBus cards were more widely available and even cheaper than PC "standards" like MCA and EISA. Sun, HP, Next also had proprietary buses back then.
I think you can download a free-trial at lotus.com.
The basic idea behind Notes is an "unstructured document database" as the "haystack". Each document has a "form" which describes an arbitrary set of "fields" in the document. You can then setup queries against the fields as "views". Documents can be hyperlinked together, full-text indexed, and so on. So, unlike RDBMS products, it provides a very flexible way to organize data.
I haven't used it for a few years, but the big downside was that that the coding was in a spreadsheet-like "formula language" that was annoying as hell. The other huge downside is that Notes is effectively an island -- it only works well if you are committed to put all of your interesting data into Notes. It would be a much better product if it integrated with your filesystem, other databases, MS Office, and so on.
One reason I'm looking forward to WinFS (etc), is that this is really 80s-level technology and should really be universal by now.
What I would like to have would be something that could integrate all information related to some "project" into a single, powerful interface.
The product you are looking has existed for decades -- it's called Lotus Notes, and is widely used in large companies for document tracking and project management and so on.
However, few people understand the "powerful interface", and it requires putting all your data into a proprietary database with clunky code interfaces.
Right, it was pure speculation based on poor memory of a hearsay story. Hey, it's slashdot.
FWIW, here is the original post from Rosco P. Coltrane:
Novell proceeded to ask us 17% of the money because they still owned DR-DOS and Lineo only had a license to exploit it, or something silly like that, and even threatened to sue.
OK, not "most" of the money... But still, until yesterday it was widely known that Novell, not SCO, is the true owner of UNIX System V. Surely that's an asset they would have to report. Why haven't the "shareholders and analysts" made this arrangement public long ago? (or did they?)
Also, I'm certainly not arguing that that this is all part of some evil master plan borne 10 years ago -- only that Novell and SCO are far too inbred for the public to get a small part of the real story here. If SCO really did send a threating letter to their masters at Novell (while in negotation with them over UNIX IP), they are either dumb dumb dumb, or the whole Novell revelation was a set up for something.
Quite frankly, this 95% royalty deal makes the whole Novell Press Release yesterday quite suspicious. I really wonder if Novell is playing the "Good Cop" to SCO's "Bad Cop"
The management at SCO/Caldera would have to be completely braindead to not realize they are totally beholden to Novell. That might be possible, except both companies are located in the same town, founded by the same man, and Caldera is run exclusively by ex-Novell people. These two companies are blood brothers.
It's only logical to assume they are in this together.
Another interesting bit is a story a former Caldera employee posted in one of these previous SCO stories. Apparently after Caldera successfully settled with Microsoft over DR-DOS ($500M?), most of the money went back to Novell and not into DR-DOS/Linux development. This fact was not widely reported at the time, and makes one wonder exactly why Novell spun off DR-DOS if they still owned all the rights. Perhaps they wanted to keep their name clean in the press.
Anyway, I suspect that SCO will continue to act more irrational and threating, suing everyone they can. Finally Novell well come in and somehow Save The Day -- right about when they introduce their Linux product, positioning as the Good Guys Who Saved Linux, all while profiting from SCOs legal flameout. Should be interesting.
Henchman: Uhhh, we have 2 Linux Counterstrike servers, and one news server with the local alt.binaries feed.
Ballmer: YESSS!!! Cut a $300 check to SCO and issue a press release!
It's very unlikely that MS is funneling money back their bitter enemy Ray Noorda and SCO. However, you can bet it is on the very top of the talking point list for their salesmen: "Well, Microsoft had to pay this SCO licence, so you better watch out if you put Linux in."
Was trying to refer to a programmatic object called a "desktop" that's part of the operating system, not the picture with icons all over it.
Maybe "Window Station" is the correct thing. Anyway, you need these things just to get the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog, and then you get some more after you logon, no matter which shell you start. (I think even service accounts such as sshd will get 'desktops' behind the scenes.)
I'd be real curious about any hack to boot to something other than ctrl+alt+del -- sounds like a huge short-circuit in the OS.
Think it's called the "Local Security Authority" -- whatever it is, it also does the 'desktop' management, which is the reason that you can't do anything useful with NT without a GUI.
The *feel* of Motif was carefully, even assiduously, designed to be the
same as the Windows/Presentation Manager family. A great deal of effort went into ensuring that every gesture you might make had the same (or analogous) effect on the two families of systems.[...] The Motif Style Guide retains a 1988 Microsoft copyright, and this is why.
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as... Common Desktop Environemnt, to junk from Microsoft
A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP's circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not.
Maybe out of envy, Microsoft was demoing a 3D desktop in 1998 or so. Slashdot had some articles, but I can't find them. They ended up cancelling the project because it ran too slowly on a PII-300, which was the top-end computer at the time. Of course, back then a Voodoo card was a big luxury.
>would be to scale windows in an aspect-ratio independent manner
One of their features were windows that swang like doors against the edge of the screen. I think you could even flip through the windows like a flipbook. Seemed kind of obnoxious, but maybe with the right transparency and gloss, it could work
I just deleted it in StartupCPL, and it's gone. Although, I was under the impression qttask was some sort of compatibilty wedge, not spyware.
I can see the upside to AV vendors not making moral judgements, or trying to defeat software vendors like Kazaa, etc. Especially since we have the anti-spyware stuff too. Do you know of any pure trojans in particular that they don't pick up?
Well, the antivirus companies look at how the program installs and not what it does.
"Spyware" installs the exact same way as MS Word or Macromedia Flash -- with the user agreeing to install it in one way or another. (Yeah, there are exceptions with IE bugs and so on.) So, despite the damage it could cause, the AV guys ignore it, but choose to block many completely harmless viruses. Not to mention that you could stop most spyware through ordinary system management -- which fits right in with the AV companies' consulting arms.
The problem is that most people here, and many ISPs, are nerding out and trying to boil this down to some strict technical criteria. But that's not the overall problem.
For example, here's the TOS on my DSL line, written by a smart non-nerd:
Basic ADSL Internet Access, as applicable, is a single IP Service intended for use by a single user. You shall not use the Service in a manner that is inconsistent with this intended use.
And that's it. No mention of numbers of devices, servers, NAT gateways, and so on.
Basically if you are running a "multi-user" service, you need to spring the extra $15/month for the commercial package -- other than that, one can have the most sophisticated network in the world, so long as only one user is on at a time.
Re:WINE is also not a properly licensed MS OS.
on
Catching up with Wine
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it's FoxPro develoment libraries that are freely distributed by the ISV.
Microsoft has every legal right under copyright law to limit the distribution of these DLLs, just as the GPL limits distribution of GNU software.
The user could legally licence FoxPro itself to get access to these DLLs, but at $300/seat, it would be cheaper to buy Windows.
Anyone here ever used a EISA system? Or later Compaq server hardware that uses the "EISA Config" program?
At least with EISA, the BIOS was not on the harddrive -- it and all the settings are still in firmware. What was on the harddrive was a small hidden DOS partition and a the DOS-based configuration program. The paritition is a totally standard PC type that all tools recognize.
The config program allowed OS-independant hardware configuraiton at boot time, as well as all the normal BIOS stuff (with a much better UI). Personally, I think this was a much nicer system than "Plug'n'Pray" and annoying boot messages for each SCSI controller and WoL NIC card...
Reloading the config partition onto a new disk was very simple. Just boot off the config CD or floppy and choose "Create System Partition" from the menu. Since the disk itself only stored the program, not the state, you are right back where you started. You could also choose not to reload the partition and just run the config program from CD/Floppy.
I would be really suprised if EFI worked differently. Putting actual state on the harddrive is lousy idea, but there's advantages to having real software to configure your hardware instead of some hacked-up real mode BIOS screen.
It's the exact same reasoning for why IBM does not produce "IBM Linux":
+ Sun bases "Sun(tm) Linux" on RedHat 7.2 + RedHat cancels support for RedHat 7.2 unexpectedly. + Sun customers are now pissed at Sun for selling them a Sun(tm) product that's essentially unsupported.
By just reselling RedHat (etc) Linux, Sun & IBM can keep it's brandname pure from whatever support hassles are going on in the Linux market.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall when people were waving the Monopoly tag around when microsoft introduced their own memory manager in DOS, killing QuarterDeck QEMM.
"How dare they make an OS that manages memory!!! Evil Monopolistic Bastards!"
Fact is, virus scanning is a basic network service nowdays, and people expect it as part of the standard deal.
Think I'm wrong? Just look at all the people flaming MS in every Slashdot story about the latest virus. The the lan admin didn't patch it, the mail admin didn't block it, the end user didn't head the warning and ran it anyway, and yet it's still Big Bad MS's fault. When "No Viruses" is a prominent advocacy point from the Linux guys, what do you expect them to do?
OK, I recall when the GIF submarine surfaced in about 1989 -- it was huge talk on the BBS circuit (probably because sysops were worried that someone would make them delete their porn).
It was clear back then that a non-patented algorithm could be used to create a "GIF2" format (in fact, AOL did just that with ART), but the consensus was that a new format would be a *bad* thing. People believed that Standards were more important than ownership, and that vendors were going to have to pay the piper, because GIF was here to stay.
The funny thing is that nearly every current internet user agrees with this position. Only an extrememly tiny group of people perceive a "fractured market" or the lack of a "uniform standard" (he says under a row of GIFs). There's always been enough alternatives that Unisys's $20K Server License has never seen any serious consideration where I've been.
PNG has advanced the state-of-the-art, but it has all the hallmarks of the Second System Effect -- more complex, implementation differences, bad downlevel support, and so on. I think the woman's point is pretty much right on -- GIF was fabulously successful despite being patented, so much so that no 1:1 replacement was ever seriously considered. Instead people invented different formats like PNG to solve different problems.
There may have been some LISP Machines with NuBus.
Of course, the use of NuBus was a very defensible decision -- Macs were being sold as mid-range workstations ($3-$10K) in those days, and it would have been a complete joke if it came with crap like ISA.
Also, NuBus cards were more widely available and even cheaper than PC "standards" like MCA and EISA. Sun, HP, Next also had proprietary buses back then.
I think you can download a free-trial at lotus.com.
The basic idea behind Notes is an "unstructured document database" as the "haystack". Each document has a "form" which describes an arbitrary set of "fields" in the document. You can then setup queries against the fields as "views". Documents can be hyperlinked together, full-text indexed, and so on. So, unlike RDBMS products, it provides a very flexible way to organize data.
I haven't used it for a few years, but the big downside was that that the coding was in a spreadsheet-like "formula language" that was annoying as hell. The other huge downside is that Notes is effectively an island -- it only works well if you are committed to put all of your interesting data into Notes. It would be a much better product if it integrated with your filesystem, other databases, MS Office, and so on.
One reason I'm looking forward to WinFS (etc), is that this is really 80s-level technology and should really be universal by now.
What I would like to have would be something that could integrate all information related to some "project" into a single, powerful interface.
The product you are looking has existed for decades -- it's called Lotus Notes, and is widely used in large companies for document tracking and project management and so on.
However, few people understand the "powerful interface", and it requires putting all your data into a proprietary database with clunky code interfaces.
IBM made a Model M in ThinkPad Black with a TrackPoint. Check eBay for the "TrackPoint II".
FWIW, here is the original post from Rosco P. Coltrane:
OK, not "most" of the money
Also, I'm certainly not arguing that that this is all part of some evil master plan borne 10 years ago -- only that Novell and SCO are far too inbred for the public to get a small part of the real story here. If SCO really did send a threating letter to their masters at Novell (while in negotation with them over UNIX IP), they are either dumb dumb dumb, or the whole Novell revelation was a set up for something.
Quite frankly, this 95% royalty deal makes the whole Novell Press Release yesterday quite suspicious. I really wonder if Novell is playing the "Good Cop" to SCO's "Bad Cop"
The management at SCO/Caldera would have to be completely braindead to not realize they are totally beholden to Novell. That might be possible, except both companies are located in the same town, founded by the same man, and Caldera is run exclusively by ex-Novell people. These two companies are blood brothers.
It's only logical to assume they are in this together.
Another interesting bit is a story a former Caldera employee posted in one of these previous SCO stories. Apparently after Caldera successfully settled with Microsoft over DR-DOS ($500M?), most of the money went back to Novell and not into DR-DOS/Linux development. This fact was not widely reported at the time, and makes one wonder exactly why Novell spun off DR-DOS if they still owned all the rights. Perhaps they wanted to keep their name clean in the press.
Anyway, I suspect that SCO will continue to act more irrational and threating, suing everyone they can. Finally Novell well come in and somehow Save The Day -- right about when they introduce their Linux product, positioning as the Good Guys Who Saved Linux, all while profiting from SCOs legal flameout. Should be interesting.
Above post was not at all offtopic. Crying of Lot 49 is a good nerd book, so go read it.
In the book, W.A.S.T.E is an underground postal system that allowed people to exchange messages without the authorities finding out.
Ballmer: Does this SCO thing affect us?
Henchman: Uhhh, we have 2 Linux Counterstrike servers, and one news server with the local alt.binaries feed.
Ballmer: YESSS!!! Cut a $300 check to SCO and issue a press release!
It's very unlikely that MS is funneling money back their bitter enemy Ray Noorda and SCO. However, you can bet it is on the very top of the talking point list for their salesmen: "Well, Microsoft had to pay this SCO licence, so you better watch out if you put Linux in."
Was trying to refer to a programmatic object called a "desktop" that's part of the operating system, not the picture with icons all over it.
Maybe "Window Station" is the correct thing. Anyway, you need these things just to get the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog, and then you get some more after you logon, no matter which shell you start. (I think even service accounts such as sshd will get 'desktops' behind the scenes.)
I'd be real curious about any hack to boot to something other than ctrl+alt+del -- sounds like a huge short-circuit in the OS.
Think it's called the "Local Security Authority" -- whatever it is, it also does the 'desktop' management, which is the reason that you can't do anything useful with NT without a GUI.
FWIW, here's an interesting post:
...and...
Please don't compare reasonable software, such as
link
In the song, it didn't. But how about 15 years?
1977 Cadillac
1992 Cadillac
Probably 98% of the parts are interchangable.
>Microsoft has been jealous
Maybe out of envy, Microsoft was demoing a 3D desktop in 1998 or so. Slashdot had some articles, but I can't find them. They ended up cancelling the project because it ran too slowly on a PII-300, which was the top-end computer at the time. Of course, back then a Voodoo card was a big luxury.
>would be to scale windows in an aspect-ratio independent manner
One of their features were windows that swang like doors against the edge of the screen. I think you could even flip through the windows like a flipbook. Seemed kind of obnoxious, but maybe with the right transparency and gloss, it could work
I just deleted it in StartupCPL, and it's gone. Although, I was under the impression qttask was some sort of compatibilty wedge, not spyware.
I can see the upside to AV vendors not making moral judgements, or trying to defeat software vendors like Kazaa, etc. Especially since we have the anti-spyware stuff too. Do you know of any pure trojans in particular that they don't pick up?
Well, the antivirus companies look at how the program installs and not what it does.
"Spyware" installs the exact same way as MS Word or Macromedia Flash -- with the user agreeing to install it in one way or another. (Yeah, there are exceptions with IE bugs and so on.) So, despite the damage it could cause, the AV guys ignore it, but choose to block many completely harmless viruses. Not to mention that you could stop most spyware through ordinary system management -- which fits right in with the AV companies' consulting arms.
The GIF patent expires on June 30, 2003 -- that's only a month away, so get your complaining in ASAP!
Thanks for the tip -- I have the 1500/128 static package rignt now -- $160/mo might be a little too rich though.
I live one block from a SBC CO -- How do I find out more about this service?
The problem is that most people here, and many ISPs, are nerding out and trying to boil this down to some strict technical criteria. But that's not the overall problem.
For example, here's the TOS on my DSL line, written by a smart non-nerd:
Basic ADSL Internet Access, as applicable, is a single IP Service intended for use by a single user. You shall not use the Service in a manner that is inconsistent with this intended use.
And that's it. No mention of numbers of devices, servers, NAT gateways, and so on.
Basically if you are running a "multi-user" service, you need to spring the extra $15/month for the commercial package -- other than that, one can have the most sophisticated network in the world, so long as only one user is on at a time.
Actually, it's FoxPro develoment libraries that are freely distributed by the ISV.
Microsoft has every legal right under copyright law to limit the distribution of these DLLs, just as the GPL limits distribution of GNU software.
The user could legally licence FoxPro itself to get access to these DLLs, but at $300/seat, it would be cheaper to buy Windows.
Anyone here ever used a EISA system? Or later Compaq server hardware that uses the "EISA Config" program?
At least with EISA, the BIOS was not on the harddrive -- it and all the settings are still in firmware. What was on the harddrive was a small hidden DOS partition and a the DOS-based configuration program. The paritition is a totally standard PC type that all tools recognize.
The config program allowed OS-independant hardware configuraiton at boot time, as well as all the normal BIOS stuff (with a much better UI). Personally, I think this was a much nicer system than "Plug'n'Pray" and annoying boot messages for each SCSI controller and WoL NIC card...
Reloading the config partition onto a new disk was very simple. Just boot off the config CD or floppy and choose "Create System Partition" from the menu. Since the disk itself only stored the program, not the state, you are right back where you started. You could also choose not to reload the partition and just run the config program from CD/Floppy.
I would be really suprised if EFI worked differently. Putting actual state on the harddrive is lousy idea, but there's advantages to having real software to configure your hardware instead of some hacked-up real mode BIOS screen.
It's the exact same reasoning for why IBM does not produce "IBM Linux":
+ Sun bases "Sun(tm) Linux" on RedHat 7.2
+ RedHat cancels support for RedHat 7.2 unexpectedly.
+ Sun customers are now pissed at Sun for selling them a Sun(tm) product that's essentially unsupported.
By just reselling RedHat (etc) Linux, Sun & IBM can keep it's brandname pure from whatever support hassles are going on in the Linux market.