For some of the programmers at least, Kylix represents an honest and helpful direction they can follow away from Billyware and toward working productively in a Linux environment.
My thought is that one of the major points of Kylix is to increase sales of Delphi for Windows. Given a choice between single platform RAD software (VB) and mutli-platform, many MIS managers will play CYA and pick the multi-platform version even if they are on Windows for the time being. If only because it provides a hint of leverage when the Microsoft licence man comes calling.
So, in the short term, I wouldn't expect much increase in the Linux userbase because of tools like Delphi (which is primarly used for internal applications for internal Windows desktops). However, in the long run, it removes the major obstacle to Linux migration of internal Windows-only apps. --
That's some guy from Borland's interpretation of the GPL, and one that some Stalmanistas agree with.
Personally, I think it's rather bogus because it runs counter to the normal means of corporate software distribution. (Can you imagine some poor Unix SA being forced to provide the source to emacs to his/her users?) But, it probably does mean that if you want to use GPL libraries in an internal application, you need to call the corporate IP lawyers. Which sucks for you, if even only politically or bureacratically. Hopefully the GPL v3 will clarify this without making GPL software too restrictive for internal use (which I believe runs counter to the spirit of the licence). --
I don't think.us TLD is as attractive to companies as.com
I saw a public service commercial last night put out by the State of California. Anyway, the URL was something.ca.gov. I thought it sorta funny that the.US domain isn't even attractive to state/local governments -- historically the only people that have ever been there. --
Google got popular among Linux fans because they went out of their way to index Linux-oriented content during their beta period. The PR that they ran on Linux was bandied about slashdot, but wasn't what seduced this crowd. --
most of us who use Google were fans waay back when their database was a fraction of the size..
During Google's Beta period, they focused on indexing tech-related sites, specifically Unix/Linux/Perl/etc related stuff.
I think that's why the fanbase on Slashdot grew so quickly - they were exactly the target market. And the expectation that they would spread the word to their technical and non-technical friends has been successful. I know several non-tech users of Google who must have found them by word-of-mouth (seeing how they don't advertise). --
Don't bother -- Check screenshots at
http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/guis/
http://www.primenet.com/~jforbes/winhist/windows .h tml
The 'control menu' (the bar looking thing which is now an icon) had the exact same functionality as today - drop down for window control functions (alt+space or ctrl+space for child windows) or double-click to close the window. There never was an [X] control until Win95.
(I still double-click that thing most of the time instead of using the close box out of old habits.)
If the MCA bus would have come out earlier we would all be using Apples today.
I would agree, but would restate it to read "If the PS/2 platform would have been earlier and more open, Apple wouldn't be using proprietary hardware today." PS/2 was more than just MCA (Plug-n-Play), it was also standard VGA/XGA graphics, the move towards standard SCSI, and a very maintainable case design.
Don't forget that Intel came to Apple and begged them to port their OS to PC machines. I'm not quite sure what Apple was thinking, but the dismal state of PC hardware (including terrible display tech) in the 80s probably had something to do with it. --
Completely agreed, and I didn't mean to come off as an MS apologist. Maybe I'm just having flashbacks from the era when you had to wade through the FTP site to find any of this stuff. --
This site lets you search for MS patches by product name and applied service pack. A hellava improvement over Microsoft's previous patch search.
Two words of warning:
1) W2K SP2, like all SPs, did not include all of the previous hotfixes. You might need to reapply some after applying the service pack. I think this particular exploit is one of those.
2) For W2K, you need to search under both "Windows 2000" and "IIS 5.0" to get all the patches.
Perhaps this article? , based on a pre-release of IE4.0. Any mention that COMCTRL32.DLL is available outside of IE?
I'm not saying that that the specially restrictive terms of IE redistribution lasted long -- 3rd party vendors yelped and MS backed off after 6 months or so. But there was a window when the only way to get those DLLs was to get into the IE distribution business. --
That's true now, but when IE 4.0 was released, the only way to get the updated COMCTL32.DLL was to sign a IE distribution contract with Microsoft, and install the whole browser package. (And didn't the orginal release of IE make itself the "default browser" without asking first?)
Initially, those distribution contracts had requirements such as using IE-specific features on the company's public website and other IE cross-marketing.
(Don't forget the anti-trust case is all about actions in the past - the IE3/IE4 era.) --
Despite all of the bile you are oozing, I think you have a point about Lotus Notes.
First off, network-based document storage is a good idea. To this day it's still far quicker to write up a Notes form than it is to build an HTML form and server-side processing and the associated database insert/update/delete logic. Now transport yourself back 10 years where the DB server ran on the mainframe and nobody had access to it execpt the mission critical folks. Not to mention replication, which was critical when people were operating over 19.2K and 56K links. (Note that Microsoft is just starting to solve some of these problems with SharePoint and other Office bits.)
Second, despite it's ugly looks, having a simple/cheap RAD environment is a godsend to corporations. Look at the "expense report" test: Notes shops have done electronic expense report approval and routing for 10 years now. Most MS/VB shops are still printing out the Excel spreadsheet.
Flash forward to 2001, and we have a product which still does these things well, but tries to manage to do everything else at the same time. Even with a Windows-only client, custom widgets that predate Windows 3.1 are still in use. An absolutely terrible web application environment has been layered on top. 15 years of Lotus-specific UI inventions have to be supported. The client is trying to do so many different things that modern versions are slower on a PII than v3 was on a 486. Tons and tons of legacy code is floating around inside. I've read the release notes, and your change management comment is right on the mark -- touch almost anything and something else breaks.
I think IBM finally took a hard look at the 60 million userbase which, worse, had 60 million custom applications written on this heap and realized that the support costs were going to destroy them in the long run. I heard every new version of Domino comes with WebSphere in the box. That's a big hint to Notes users to start writing applications the "right" way -- although it's going to take some very tricky engineering to keep the good things about Notes while dumping the rest of the baggage.
Meanwhile, I would expect development to slow down or even stop, with the exception of client usablilty fixes. Ironically, the userbase will continue to grow in the short term. To contradict the article, sometime 10 or 15 years is *too much* development. --
Lotus Notes is also a bad case because there's several huge factors that affected it's adoption.
1) It was a PC-based client-server program in the 1980s. Way ahead of it's time, but that meant it pretty much had to run on the unpopular OS/2 operating system, and even then 10 concurrent users was a miricle on the hardware people had.
2) It was exclusively marketed to large corporations (read: it was ridiculously expensive) until the early 90s. It still is a lousy product for places without dedicated system admins and developers.
3) Lotus also sold cc:Mail which was the #1 corporate e-mail system from about 1987 to 1997. Cancelling cc:Mail and transitioning users to Notes obviously had a huge effect on the Notes user base.
4) Oh, it's true that the email component wasn't close to being "done" until v5 shipped a couple years ago. (insert link to UI Hall of Shame)
And because it's so old, it does carry tons of legacy baggage, including lots of back- and forward-compatibility features. --
It was just when MS put out Windows and AOL came around that this new breed of computer users came about. It was then that the term "computer illiterate" was coined.
The personal computer market is about 100x larger than it was in the 1980s. You absolutely couldn't use a computer in those days unless you were willing to invest some of your own time into the process. Unlike today, if you were "illiterate" you didn't use a computer - Simple as that.
Put it this way: We all could still be using $5000 machines with stagnent hardware and obscure user interfaces from a tiny purchasing base, or we could open up the industry to everyone thus getting us $1000 machines that run at 1Ghz. Which would you rather have? Don't forget that lots of smart people also gained access to personal computing along with the AOLers and typical Windows droolers. --
Actually, I realized the DTV/HDTV brain-o right after hitting submit. Know the difference, but thanks for keeping me honest.
Also, I'm not sure if the logic holds -- rabbitear users are probably more profitable for the broadcast stations because they are a captive market. Someone else posted on this thread that cable/dish still has far less than 50% of the market, and not all of that is po' people. (at least I think I'm a good demographic and I'm on rabbitears.)
But the real reason they'll strech it out is economies of scale won't be at the point where DTV recievers will be $50 or less by 2006. Also, as far as can tell from friends with (H)DTV, the broadcast technology does not work very well as of yet. If people need to get roof arials for it to work, that essentially means that someone has to go and fight 200,000 little zoning boards. There is NO WAY that broadcasters will go dark on standard analog until they feel they've got 100% of their audience on digital, and the FCC/Congress will listen. --
I'm convinced that ads are served based on a browser sniff. If you are running nutscrape you get lots of Java ads (and yes, they do crash like crazy). On IE, these are custom ActiveX or Flash and only very rarely Java. --
It's a good thing the RIAA sued Napster instead of cooperating -- if they had played Let's Make a Deal, they could have done something evil like this back when Napster had 30 million users and gotten the bulk of them to use their new, tightly controlled standard.
Note that the whole business plan of Napster as a for-profit company was to leverage their userbase into a bargining arrangment with the RIAA that would give Napster a cut of online music sales.
I don't think that the RIAA is saavy enough to "coopt" anyone. (That's Microsoft's job:) They just didn't like someone muscling in on their turf. The real wannabe coopters in the whole deal was Napster. --
Why would TV stations do that? They'll just stretch it out for as long as possible and broadcast 2 signals. When 2006 rolls around, expect little old ladies to show up at capital hill crying about how the mean old government is going to shut off their TeeVee, and the deadline will get pushed out and out and out again.
Besides, mass-market HDTV equipment isn't even available! Instead of a 10 year transition, it's looking more like a completely unrealisitic 3 year transition. --
You mean very few *MS designed*.NET apps. The main thrust of.NET (and Mono) is to provide competetion to Java for writing net services. Third party net services developers are not restricted to coding massive amounts of Win32 dependencies in their applications.
No, I'm saying that if I were tasked with developing your typical n-tier application on.NET that needed things like database drivers, a web server, and maybe a RAD-built GUI client, I would end up with something that was tied to Windows. (I highly doubt the VisualStudio GUI sends up a warning when you are doing something non-portable:) Maybe if/when MS breaks up and NET gets 5 more years of development, I might have the pluggable-layer approach of say Java.
'Web Services' in my book is prime example of "Sell the Sizzle, not the Steak". Any web services component would probably a minor part of the whole application package. (And I agree with you in that 3rd party implementations being critical, if only because it will bring out the Windows dependancies in the current platform. Still would probably rather see a full reimplementation of Java.) --
If Sun wants the Free Software Community to use Java, it should open up the platform. It's scary that Microsoft has made C#/.NET more accessible to Free software development than Sun has made Java/EJB.
Thanks for swallowing the MS PR like a good boy.
All of the Java platform is under a published specification, including J2EE. In fact, there's existing open source implementations of most of it, and my guess is that they are looking for more developers, better desktop (read Gnome) integration and so on. Some of the OSS Java stuff is even considered to be of the same quality as many commercial implementations.
Total Sun control might not be a great thing, but at least they are a vendor with some history with "open systems".
Meanwhile, Microsoft has submitted *part* of the.NET platform to ECMA, a body with a reputation of rubberstamping things. Key parts of the platform (IIS, ADO, COM/DCOM) remain under the control of Microsoft. Nobody knows if the new, improved, standards-loving Microsoft is for real or if the next version of.NET will deviate substantially from ECMA (which wouldn't affect MS-allied developers one bit.)
Now, maybe.NET has some features that Java doesn't have that appeals to free software types (like better Perl/Python integration, for example). But the standard argument is a no-op. --
* Would it increase their server platform sales?
No, because people would just run.NET stuff on Linux.
* What about increasing their client platform?
No,.NET is supposed to be client agnostic. Right?
It makes sense if you think about the J++ vs. Java episode.
I gather that there is such a thing as "Pure.NET" application that purely the VM. However, the.NET platform as Microsoft delivers it will have lots of Windows platform dependencies. For example, database access is through ADO.NET which is a layer that sits on top of OLEDB. ASP.NET sits on IIS of course. Windows Forms doesn't even hid the fact that it sits on Win32. Remote components can still be called through DCOM/RPC. And I'm sure there's plenty more.
But even with all of this, MS is playing the open standards song for the core parts of the platform (the VM, C#, etc). They can afford to do that because the standard is extended-n-embraced right out of the box. Even with Corel and Ximian's work at building the standard-compliant stuff, very few real world.NET apps will run on platforms other than Windows without significant extra reverse engineering.
Where this helps Microsoft is that it allows users to connect existing Unix infrastructure to new.NET applications in a much cleaner way that pure COM allowed. But only at the periphery of the app.
To most home users Windows NT and Windows 2000 have never even existed. These folks are about to see what in their minds will be the greatest technological leap in computer technology since the GUI....
And why is that? Microsoft has had decent tech on the shelf for years and despite many past promises to deliver it to home users, they always managed to crap out another 98SE or ME version of DOS/Windows.
(Windows 95 was a genius bit of compatibility engineering, not to mention it hit the 4MB RAM target barely, and I can understand why it was released. It was a critical piece in ending the Really Bad Old Days era of crap PC hardware. However, the irony that MS is still selling this compatibility solution except minus all the compatibility bits is lost on me.)
but because you're running 9x, there is a very slight chance that even if I do everything right your computer will stop working and you'll have to reinstall everything."... Simply the benefit Dell/Compaq/Gateway etc. will get from not having to handle grandma calling and asking why the screen turns blue when the computer turns on is going to dramatically impact a few profit margins.
OEMs have been crying to Microsoft for years to reduce support costs, and Microsoft's answer has usually been More Of The Same. I've yet to get an adequate explaination on why NT has been 'shelved' the way it has over the years. I can suspect internal politics or some bizarre monopoly-driven logic that I can't understand. I can even suspect your.sig argument about support calls, except that MS doesn't really make that much money in the relative sense from support (most of it falls on the OEMs or corporate IT). Maybe it's just the upfront fear of breaking lots of stuff -- Even with XP's compat features, it will be less compatible with previous versions than Win95 was. But still, with MS's weight to throw around, I have to think that any compat issues will be resolved within a year or two.
Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy that Microsoft is finally fulfilling their promise of the early 90s and selling NT as the next-gen conumer OS. I'm just disheartened and confused that it took as long as it did.
My suspicion is that MS has finally prepared themselves for an era where the OS company is either split off (by force or by choice) or that long term desktop OS profit growth will be virutally nil so they are sticking the whole thing in maintenance mode. I can't help to think that maybe XP is the gotterdammerung of Microsoft Operating Systems. --
OK, I'm "dumb", but someone over at Microsoft makes a marketing decision to take an existing product and sell it to home users and you are falling all over yourself to call it "monumental".
Better to be dumb than a wet pantied fanboy.
Sorry, if you want monumental, try NT 3.1. If you want monopolistic marketing strategies try what's happened to NT since then. If you want to be interesting try explaining to me and the rest of Slashdot why "NT Home" was cancelled in the mid 90s, and why "2000 Home" was cancelled last year, and why XP Home is interesting to anyone who isn't ignorant.
(By support gravytrain, I am certainly not talking about PSS -- I'm talking about solving people's support issues by upselling them to a new OS and or computer. And PSS hasn't be free since the dark ages.) --
I agree. A couple years ago Microsoft settled a lawsuit with the state of California over the old MS Office boxes that clearly showed "Microsoft Mail" to be part of the package (but it turned out that you couldn't actually use the Mail software without an additional client licence). The result was tens of millions of dollars worth of free Office licences for CA schools, which cost Microsoft absolutely nothing of course, except lost revenue.
How the fuck is XP "innovation" at all? Let's take the 10 year old NT kernel, bolt on Plug-n-Play (5 years too late), and bolt on a really retarded MS Bob-like inteface. XP is the cheapest new OS in years, excluding marketing costs.
More interesting is that Microsoft used their monopoly to essentially segement the market by downplaying NT for the last 8 years and foisting what was supposed to be a compatibility solution (Win9x) but turned out to be an unreliable pre-modern piece of shit onto 90% of the computing public's desktops.
My guess is that they've realized that the support gravytrain and the upgrade cycle is over. Expect Win XP to hang around for a long time. --
Slashdot Mirror
For some of the programmers at least, Kylix represents an honest and helpful direction they can follow away from Billyware and toward working productively in a Linux environment.
My thought is that one of the major points of Kylix is to increase sales of Delphi for Windows. Given a choice between single platform RAD software (VB) and mutli-platform, many MIS managers will play CYA and pick the multi-platform version even if they are on Windows for the time being. If only because it provides a hint of leverage when the Microsoft licence man comes calling.
So, in the short term, I wouldn't expect much increase in the Linux userbase because of tools like Delphi (which is primarly used for internal applications for internal Windows desktops). However, in the long run, it removes the major obstacle to Linux migration of internal Windows-only apps.
--
That's some guy from Borland's interpretation of the GPL, and one that some Stalmanistas agree with.
Personally, I think it's rather bogus because it runs counter to the normal means of corporate software distribution. (Can you imagine some poor Unix SA being forced to provide the source to emacs to his/her users?) But, it probably does mean that if you want to use GPL libraries in an internal application, you need to call the corporate IP lawyers. Which sucks for you, if even only politically or bureacratically. Hopefully the GPL v3 will clarify this without making GPL software too restrictive for internal use (which I believe runs counter to the spirit of the licence).
--
I don't think .us TLD is as attractive to companies as .com
.US domain isn't even attractive to state/local governments -- historically the only people that have ever been there.
I saw a public service commercial last night put out by the State of California. Anyway, the URL was something.ca.gov. I thought it sorta funny that the
--
I posted this already, but what the hell..
Google got popular among Linux fans because they went out of their way to index Linux-oriented content during their beta period. The PR that they ran on Linux was bandied about slashdot, but wasn't what seduced this crowd.
--
most of us who use Google were fans waay back when their database was a fraction of the size..
During Google's Beta period, they focused on indexing tech-related sites, specifically Unix/Linux/Perl/etc related stuff.
I think that's why the fanbase on Slashdot grew so quickly - they were exactly the target market. And the expectation that they would spread the word to their technical and non-technical friends has been successful. I know several non-tech users of Google who must have found them by word-of-mouth (seeing how they don't advertise).
--
Don't bother -- Check screenshots ats .h tml
http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/guis/
http://www.primenet.com/~jforbes/winhist/window
The 'control menu' (the bar looking thing which is now an icon) had the exact same functionality as today - drop down for window control functions (alt+space or ctrl+space for child windows) or double-click to close the window. There never was an [X] control until Win95.
(I still double-click that thing most of the time instead of using the close box out of old habits.)
--
If the MCA bus would have come out earlier we would all be using Apples today.
I would agree, but would restate it to read "If the PS/2 platform would have been earlier and more open, Apple wouldn't be using proprietary hardware today." PS/2 was more than just MCA (Plug-n-Play), it was also standard VGA/XGA graphics, the move towards standard SCSI, and a very maintainable case design.
Don't forget that Intel came to Apple and begged them to port their OS to PC machines. I'm not quite sure what Apple was thinking, but the dismal state of PC hardware (including terrible display tech) in the 80s probably had something to do with it.
--
Completely agreed, and I didn't mean to come off as an MS apologist. Maybe I'm just having flashbacks from the era when you had to wade through the FTP site to find any of this stuff.
--
This site lets you search for MS patches by product name and applied service pack. A hellava improvement over Microsoft's previous patch search.
Two words of warning:
1) W2K SP2, like all SPs, did not include all of the previous hotfixes. You might need to reapply some after applying the service pack. I think this particular exploit is one of those.
2) For W2K, you need to search under both "Windows 2000" and "IIS 5.0" to get all the patches.
Happy hunting!
--
Perhaps this article? , based on a pre-release of IE4.0. Any mention that COMCTRL32.DLL is available outside of IE?
I'm not saying that that the specially restrictive terms of IE redistribution lasted long -- 3rd party vendors yelped and MS backed off after 6 months or so. But there was a window when the only way to get those DLLs was to get into the IE distribution business.
--
That's true now, but when IE 4.0 was released, the only way to get the updated COMCTL32.DLL was to sign a IE distribution contract with Microsoft, and install the whole browser package. (And didn't the orginal release of IE make itself the "default browser" without asking first?)
Initially, those distribution contracts had requirements such as using IE-specific features on the company's public website and other IE cross-marketing.
(Don't forget the anti-trust case is all about actions in the past - the IE3/IE4 era.)
--
Despite all of the bile you are oozing, I think you have a point about Lotus Notes.
First off, network-based document storage is a good idea. To this day it's still far quicker to write up a Notes form than it is to build an HTML form and server-side processing and the associated database insert/update/delete logic. Now transport yourself back 10 years where the DB server ran on the mainframe and nobody had access to it execpt the mission critical folks. Not to mention replication, which was critical when people were operating over 19.2K and 56K links. (Note that Microsoft is just starting to solve some of these problems with SharePoint and other Office bits.)
Second, despite it's ugly looks, having a simple/cheap RAD environment is a godsend to corporations. Look at the "expense report" test: Notes shops have done electronic expense report approval and routing for 10 years now. Most MS/VB shops are still printing out the Excel spreadsheet.
Flash forward to 2001, and we have a product which still does these things well, but tries to manage to do everything else at the same time. Even with a Windows-only client, custom widgets that predate Windows 3.1 are still in use. An absolutely terrible web application environment has been layered on top. 15 years of Lotus-specific UI inventions have to be supported. The client is trying to do so many different things that modern versions are slower on a PII than v3 was on a 486. Tons and tons of legacy code is floating around inside. I've read the release notes, and your change management comment is right on the mark -- touch almost anything and something else breaks.
I think IBM finally took a hard look at the 60 million userbase which, worse, had 60 million custom applications written on this heap and realized that the support costs were going to destroy them in the long run. I heard every new version of Domino comes with WebSphere in the box. That's a big hint to Notes users to start writing applications the "right" way -- although it's going to take some very tricky engineering to keep the good things about Notes while dumping the rest of the baggage.
Meanwhile, I would expect development to slow down or even stop, with the exception of client usablilty fixes. Ironically, the userbase will continue to grow in the short term. To contradict the article, sometime 10 or 15 years is *too much* development.
--
Lotus Notes is also a bad case because there's several huge factors that affected it's adoption.
1) It was a PC-based client-server program in the 1980s. Way ahead of it's time, but that meant it pretty much had to run on the unpopular OS/2 operating system, and even then 10 concurrent users was a miricle on the hardware people had.
2) It was exclusively marketed to large corporations (read: it was ridiculously expensive) until the early 90s. It still is a lousy product for places without dedicated system admins and developers.
3) Lotus also sold cc:Mail which was the #1 corporate e-mail system from about 1987 to 1997. Cancelling cc:Mail and transitioning users to Notes obviously had a huge effect on the Notes user base.
4) Oh, it's true that the email component wasn't close to being "done" until v5 shipped a couple years ago. (insert link to UI Hall of Shame)
And because it's so old, it does carry tons of legacy baggage, including lots of back- and forward-compatibility features.
--
It was just when MS put out Windows and AOL came around that this new breed of computer users came about. It was then that the term "computer illiterate" was coined.
The personal computer market is about 100x larger than it was in the 1980s. You absolutely couldn't use a computer in those days unless you were willing to invest some of your own time into the process. Unlike today, if you were "illiterate" you didn't use a computer - Simple as that.
Put it this way: We all could still be using $5000 machines with stagnent hardware and obscure user interfaces from a tiny purchasing base, or we could open up the industry to everyone thus getting us $1000 machines that run at 1Ghz. Which would you rather have? Don't forget that lots of smart people also gained access to personal computing along with the AOLers and typical Windows droolers.
--
Actually, I realized the DTV/HDTV brain-o right after hitting submit. Know the difference, but thanks for keeping me honest.
Also, I'm not sure if the logic holds -- rabbitear users are probably more profitable for the broadcast stations because they are a captive market. Someone else posted on this thread that cable/dish still has far less than 50% of the market, and not all of that is po' people. (at least I think I'm a good demographic and I'm on rabbitears.)
But the real reason they'll strech it out is economies of scale won't be at the point where DTV recievers will be $50 or less by 2006. Also, as far as can tell from friends with (H)DTV, the broadcast technology does not work very well as of yet. If people need to get roof arials for it to work, that essentially means that someone has to go and fight 200,000 little zoning boards. There is NO WAY that broadcasters will go dark on standard analog until they feel they've got 100% of their audience on digital, and the FCC/Congress will listen.
--
I'm convinced that ads are served based on a browser sniff. If you are running nutscrape you get lots of Java ads (and yes, they do crash like crazy). On IE, these are custom ActiveX or Flash and only very rarely Java.
--
It's a good thing the RIAA sued Napster instead of cooperating -- if they had played Let's Make a Deal, they could have done something evil like this back when Napster had 30 million users and gotten the bulk of them to use their new, tightly controlled standard.
:) They just didn't like someone muscling in on their turf. The real wannabe coopters in the whole deal was Napster.
Note that the whole business plan of Napster as a for-profit company was to leverage their userbase into a bargining arrangment with the RIAA that would give Napster a cut of online music sales.
I don't think that the RIAA is saavy enough to "coopt" anyone. (That's Microsoft's job
--
Why would TV stations do that? They'll just stretch it out for as long as possible and broadcast 2 signals. When 2006 rolls around, expect little old ladies to show up at capital hill crying about how the mean old government is going to shut off their TeeVee, and the deadline will get pushed out and out and out again.
Besides, mass-market HDTV equipment isn't even available! Instead of a 10 year transition, it's looking more like a completely unrealisitic 3 year transition.
--
You mean very few *MS designed* .NET apps. The main thrust of .NET (and Mono) is to provide competetion to Java for writing net services. Third party net services developers are not restricted to coding massive amounts of Win32 dependencies in their applications.
.NET that needed things like database drivers, a web server, and maybe a RAD-built GUI client, I would end up with something that was tied to Windows. (I highly doubt the VisualStudio GUI sends up a warning when you are doing something non-portable :) Maybe if/when MS breaks up and NET gets 5 more years of development, I might have the pluggable-layer approach of say Java.
No, I'm saying that if I were tasked with developing your typical n-tier application on
'Web Services' in my book is prime example of "Sell the Sizzle, not the Steak". Any web services component would probably a minor part of the whole application package. (And I agree with you in that 3rd party implementations being critical, if only because it will bring out the Windows dependancies in the current platform. Still would probably rather see a full reimplementation of Java.)
--
If Sun wants the Free Software Community to use Java, it should open up the platform. It's scary that Microsoft has made C#/.NET more accessible to Free software development than Sun has made Java/EJB.
.NET platform to ECMA, a body with a reputation of rubberstamping things. Key parts of the platform (IIS, ADO, COM/DCOM) remain under the control of Microsoft. Nobody knows if the new, improved, standards-loving Microsoft is for real or if the next version of .NET will deviate substantially from ECMA (which wouldn't affect MS-allied developers one bit.)
.NET has some features that Java doesn't have that appeals to free software types (like better Perl/Python integration, for example). But the standard argument is a no-op.
Thanks for swallowing the MS PR like a good boy.
All of the Java platform is under a published specification, including J2EE. In fact, there's existing open source implementations of most of it, and my guess is that they are looking for more developers, better desktop (read Gnome) integration and so on. Some of the OSS Java stuff is even considered to be of the same quality as many commercial implementations.
Total Sun control might not be a great thing, but at least they are a vendor with some history with "open systems".
Meanwhile, Microsoft has submitted *part* of the
Now, maybe
--
* Would it increase their server platform sales? .NET stuff on Linux.
.NET is supposed to be client agnostic. Right?
.NET" application that purely the VM. However, the .NET platform as Microsoft delivers it will have lots of Windows platform dependencies. For example, database access is through ADO.NET which is a layer that sits on top of OLEDB. ASP.NET sits on IIS of course. Windows Forms doesn't even hid the fact that it sits on Win32. Remote components can still be called through DCOM/RPC. And I'm sure there's plenty more.
.NET apps will run on platforms other than Windows without significant extra reverse engineering.
.NET applications in a much cleaner way that pure COM allowed. But only at the periphery of the app.
No, because people would just run
* What about increasing their client platform?
No,
It makes sense if you think about the J++ vs. Java episode.
I gather that there is such a thing as "Pure
But even with all of this, MS is playing the open standards song for the core parts of the platform (the VM, C#, etc). They can afford to do that because the standard is extended-n-embraced right out of the box. Even with Corel and Ximian's work at building the standard-compliant stuff, very few real world
Where this helps Microsoft is that it allows users to connect existing Unix infrastructure to new
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To most home users Windows NT and Windows 2000 have never even existed. These folks are about to see what in their minds will be the greatest technological leap in computer technology since the GUI....
... Simply the benefit Dell/Compaq/Gateway etc. will get from not having to handle grandma calling and asking why the screen turns blue when the computer turns on is going to dramatically impact a few profit margins.
.sig argument about support calls, except that MS doesn't really make that much money in the relative sense from support (most of it falls on the OEMs or corporate IT). Maybe it's just the upfront fear of breaking lots of stuff -- Even with XP's compat features, it will be less compatible with previous versions than Win95 was. But still, with MS's weight to throw around, I have to think that any compat issues will be resolved within a year or two.
And why is that? Microsoft has had decent tech on the shelf for years and despite many past promises to deliver it to home users, they always managed to crap out another 98SE or ME version of DOS/Windows.
(Windows 95 was a genius bit of compatibility engineering, not to mention it hit the 4MB RAM target barely, and I can understand why it was released. It was a critical piece in ending the Really Bad Old Days era of crap PC hardware. However, the irony that MS is still selling this compatibility solution except minus all the compatibility bits is lost on me.)
but because you're running 9x, there is a very slight chance that even if I do everything right your computer will stop working and you'll have to reinstall everything."
OEMs have been crying to Microsoft for years to reduce support costs, and Microsoft's answer has usually been More Of The Same. I've yet to get an adequate explaination on why NT has been 'shelved' the way it has over the years. I can suspect internal politics or some bizarre monopoly-driven logic that I can't understand. I can even suspect your
Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy that Microsoft is finally fulfilling their promise of the early 90s and selling NT as the next-gen conumer OS. I'm just disheartened and confused that it took as long as it did.
My suspicion is that MS has finally prepared themselves for an era where the OS company is either split off (by force or by choice) or that long term desktop OS profit growth will be virutally nil so they are sticking the whole thing in maintenance mode. I can't help to think that maybe XP is the gotterdammerung of Microsoft Operating Systems.
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OK, I'm "dumb", but someone over at Microsoft makes a marketing decision to take an existing product and sell it to home users and you are falling all over yourself to call it "monumental".
Better to be dumb than a wet pantied fanboy.
Sorry, if you want monumental, try NT 3.1. If you want monopolistic marketing strategies try what's happened to NT since then. If you want to be interesting try explaining to me and the rest of Slashdot why "NT Home" was cancelled in the mid 90s, and why "2000 Home" was cancelled last year, and why XP Home is interesting to anyone who isn't ignorant.
(By support gravytrain, I am certainly not talking about PSS -- I'm talking about solving people's support issues by upselling them to a new OS and or computer. And PSS hasn't be free since the dark ages.)
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I agree. A couple years ago Microsoft settled a lawsuit with the state of California over the old MS Office boxes that clearly showed "Microsoft Mail" to be part of the package (but it turned out that you couldn't actually use the Mail software without an additional client licence). The result was tens of millions of dollars worth of free Office licences for CA schools, which cost Microsoft absolutely nothing of course, except lost revenue.
New Mexico went cheap.
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How the fuck is XP "innovation" at all? Let's take the 10 year old NT kernel, bolt on Plug-n-Play (5 years too late), and bolt on a really retarded MS Bob-like inteface. XP is the cheapest new OS in years, excluding marketing costs.
More interesting is that Microsoft used their monopoly to essentially segement the market by downplaying NT for the last 8 years and foisting what was supposed to be a compatibility solution (Win9x) but turned out to be an unreliable pre-modern piece of shit onto 90% of the computing public's desktops.
My guess is that they've realized that the support gravytrain and the upgrade cycle is over. Expect Win XP to hang around for a long time.
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