That actually sorta happened - The 1970s Cadillac 8-6-4 engine allowed you to turn off cylinders with a dashboard switch. One of the most profoundly stupid ideas of all time because you ended up with a heavy 4 cylinder engine with 8 cylinders on the crankshaft. After a couple years, the dealers just shorted the switch into 8-cyl mode. --
I thought about that, but I think it would come under the interoperability clause, if you could crack the protection in the first place.
And yes, I'm aware of DeCSS, but IMO that was poor legal reasoning, and also not as clear of a case as "interoperability" (People wanted a Disc licenced by the MPAA to run a drive licenced by the MPAA with software not licenced by the MPAA. Now if someone wanted to make "ReCSS" to make copy-protected DVD disk without paying the MPAA tax, that would probably win over.)
True there's some folks out there that claim Fox News or Rush Limbaugh is "un-biased", but that's only because of some defect in their understanding of bias.
Sometime back in the past, I heard an explaination of how conservatives find "liberal bias" in presumably un-biased reporting. It turns out the act of even broadcasting on a topic which might be disagreable is interpreted of bias.
For example, a report "AIDS cases rising among (some group)" which is nothing but a dry reading of public heath statistics might be interpreted by some individuals as bias. Why? They assume that the reporter is saying "We Ought To Do Something!", when they are not, and as they dislike the group in question, they ascribe the fact that they have to hear about it as a political conspiricy.
To some extent, the media has put themselves in this situation by striving for "non-bias", which is unobtainable to the extent that you could get everyone to agree. The conservative talking heads play this much smarter, wearing their bias loudly and proudly. I think the continual "liberal media" detracters would just rather have Tom Brokaw say "We ought to do something about that" after each report, because at least they could pin them down on something, disagree, and watch the news in peace instead of imagining ghosts in the closet.
Note that "unbiased reporting" is a relatively new concept in journalism, and one that hasn't necessarily made the news media more popular. The country got along just fine when every media outlet was blatently biased. --
Right on. However, put yourself in 1994: Removable hard disk storage 1/5 the size of your main hard drive for $250. You have a 14.4 modem and there are no freedrive sites on the net. If you were a Mac user, they were virtually ubiquitous, making trading easy.
This thing was essentially the Mac "floppy" of the day, and still to this day, to the extent that Mac users need floppies. There was a similar fleeting opportunity to standardize on LS-120 on PCs, but the big OEMs wanted to chase the insanely low price-point of $1500 (!), and it ended up on the cost-cutting room floor.
The equivalant product today would be 10GB and fast enough to run Windows 2000 off of for $200. Hell, if that was on the market, I'd be there in a second. But who's going to design such a thing, only to be steamrolled by cheap writable DVD-9 media in a few years. --
My memory can verify that IDE LS-120 drives were on the market in 1995. Can't recall, but I imagine that SCSI was also available, however the LS-120 seemed to be primarily marketed towards OEMs in the beginning. Compaq even shipped them as standard equipment for maybe a month or two before realizing that that extra couple bucks per machine was costing them.
Of course, by this time the Zip had a full head of steam going, especially among the Mac crowd, who quickly replaced the "service bureau-standard" 5.25 Syquest drives they were using. That spread to the PC crowd when the parallel Zip was released, and the LS-120 pretty much hasn't gone anywhere since.
By 1997, the benifits were certainly leaning towards CD-R. However, I got my Zip when they first came out in 1994 or 1995. In those days a common hardrive was 500MB, which meant that you could back up your entire system for $100, and easily carry around every datafile on your disk on a single disc with the Win95 CAB files to spare. Super-cheap compared to the old Syquest 88MB stuff. It was pretty cool in the day.
However the costs of Zip/Jaz/Any Removable versus fixed disks just got worse and worse over time, while CD-R just got better and better. I don't know if this is due to some sort of engineering limitation on removable disks, or if it's just that Iomega et al feel that they'll never win versus cheap CD-R and DVD-R media so they've given up. --
Just one point. Commerce Server is actually pretty specialized application server platform. It's not really a "shopping cart in a box". You would want to run it on a fairly beefy SMP machine.
I suspect Microsoft is looking at their Hotmail conversion and then thinking "How could we make a conversion at this scale realistic for a 3rd party", meaning that the primary impedement isn't the database software/hardware (Hotmail still runs on a Sun E10K/Oracle instalation) or the application/application server, it's the administrative flexibility and software cost of the clustered webfarm. --
Correct. And the real money corporate customers buy Intel primarily because
1) Intel has better OEM vendors lined up for their market (Dell/Compaq/IBM). This channel is the key. AMD primarily gets what's left (home/soho/BYOB).
2) Intel has a much better reputation. Little things like that "What chipset bugs?" scene when the K7 was launched don't help. The key here is that if Intel tries to force RAMBUST or buggy shit like the i820 down Mr. MIS's throat they are dead in the water, so they are dancing on pinheads.
3) The corporate market could give a shit which processor can do 10fps better in Quake or if some CPU is slightly suboptimal at running legacy code (which after all was designed to run much slower computers to begin with). They are simply looking for a price/performance/supportability sweet spot that they can standardize on. --
I had Netscape lock NT4.0 solid once too. Shouldn't happen, but Netscape found a way. Never once had a any other sort of application-level crash (well, IE can blow at the explorer, but you can always get back to the login screen). The Matrox TV card drivers are flaky as hell, and I've had tons of problems with those. However, I've been using NT long enough to be very cautious about hardware (HCL *system* and SCSI only please).
As for the laptop battery issue, the fact that you have to remove the battery is a pure hardware issue. Have Linux's APM flake out on you and you'll see. --
Still, this thing is 1 DVD-ROM away from being made into a MSN\WebTV unit, or even a subscription-based Windows Terminal. When that happens, bundled services are bound to follow.
Besides, they have to build some sort of automatic ISP setup service into it because most console home consumers probably don't even know what an IP address is. I'd expect a network connection wizard much like Windows currently has.
Microsoft is pretending right now that that isn't going to happen, but IMO, that's just to not confuse the pre-release PR message. Let's see what the installed base looks like. --
Which is something to be said for "name brand" equipment (even if it's a crappy name brand like Packard Bell) -- at they very least you can find BIOS upgrades and memory specs and the like. Most P75 systems probably at least had one last Y2K update or a Win98 patch, for example.
Compaq has information and downloads for everything they've ever made - even back to system disks for the original 8088 luggables. On some IBM FTP server, I found a large cache of PCjr software. Etc etc -- just some of the benifits of buying/getting a name brand system.
On the other hand, I find dealing with older, unknown white box equipement more trouble than it's worth. Maybe that's a good motherboard, maybe it's one with some artifical RAM celing. What the hell is this soundcard? And so on - at least you can use the case for something. --
The Atari & Activision case has no bearing. Atari (and other platform makers of the day) wanted to produce ALL products for their machines.
+Activision ships a 2600 game.
+Atari claims they can't do that without a licence - Negotiations proceed, Atari wants too much money.
+They go to court - Activision wins.
Why? Because US law is clear that you can't require licenced software for your hardware - doesn't matter if it's a PC or a game console. You can't just wave your hands and pretend that this doesn't apply to Sony or Microsoft.
Not to mention that half of the garbage in the pre-crash flood was from Atari itself (and it's horrid inventory control didn't help either).
I pointed out that game licences are still common in the industry for other very good reasons. Perhaps, as you argue, this is the state of highest economic goodness. But that doesn't make it the law. --
My view is that Blade Server, if done correctly, could be a decent idea. Get rid of SMB and RPC (can it be done without breaking the admin tools?), make it netbootable, make it cheaper, etc.
I knew I guy involved in setting up a webfarm on NT4. Horrors of horrors as he somehow hacked the boxes to boot from a read-only network OS install while still using a ram disk to handle all the registry and filesystem writes that NT demands to end up with a totally unsupported configuration that costs $500/box (significant sum when whe are talking about cheap PCs clustered). Anyway, MS's current product line is totally uncompetitive in this market. --
They can use the legal precident of the video game consoles to back the actions up in court....
I think you are blowing hot air -- there are no such legal standards. In fact, just the opposite: Sega sued Accolade (?) for actually including a "Sega(tm)" logo in a unlicenced game. Accolade won because it turned out the console wouldn't boot unless the game contained that bitmap, so breaking copyright was necessary for interoperability.
As Atari versus Activision proved, there is no way a console company can required 3rd parties to obtain a licence to produce software, in the US.
However, licencing has become common for a few reasons:
1) Forcing 3rd parties to licence is legal in Japan, a big market. (This plus Nintendo's US patented cart slot pretty much required 3rd parties to deal with Nintendo.)
2) Game systems have gotten so complex hardware-wise that it's useful to be on the official dev program and get the docs and SDKs.
3) Game systems can use crypto keys to autheniticate media. The first system to do this was the Atari 7800, BTW, but apparently MS will also be implementing this in the XBox. --
The "Quick-click" software actually dates back to the pre-boom pre-NBC era of Xoom (or whoever).
Of course, even after flushing millions of dollars into NBCi, NBC execs were too stupid to spend any airtime marketing the thing until the realized that their portal was one step from death a couple months ago. Now there's a flurry of ads, never mind that they are shutting the thing down. --
I thought Microsoft has announced that there will be some sort of crypto verification in the bootcode of the thing to prevent people from running non-approved software. (If they didn't, their game licencing plan will just be bypassed.)
I believe the quote was "If someone gets Linux running on the XBox, there's a job waiting at Microsoft for them."
Anyway, check ZDNet about Microsoft's murmuring about a Win XP "Blade Server" edition. Essentially a stripped down web server setup designed to compete with Linux/Unix that will no doubt have it's own specialized set of server hardware. MS has enough resources to keep this project seperate from the XBox (and keep the traditional Windows hardware OEMs happy). --
First of all "0" was obviously an exaggeration. But let's take a few of these:
+ Roaming Profiles -- This worked in Office 4.2 for Windows NT. Support was removed and not re-added for 5 years. Whoop.
+ File Open/Save has Places Bar and History -- This is an OS feature in Win2K.
+ 12 Clipboards -- MS had this thing called "Clipbook" in WfW. I never really liked this feature, going back to shareware hacks on MacOS 6. It looks like XP might get this right by changing it to a "galley" (if you've used PageMaker etc, this is a much more intuitive system). Anyway, this thing just creates annoying dialogs when my clipboards are full, so I wish I could turn it off.
+ Better AutoCorrect -- The same autocorrect, with a bigger lookup table.
+ Click and Type (AutoFormatting) -- Horridly broken feature. Don't say that it isn't.
+ Spelling and Grammar check can check other languages -- This was supported in Word 6.0
+ Nested tables -- Good for HTML compatibility, but a minor feature because you could do essentially the same thing with spanning cells in the old tables back to 4.0.
+ Picture bullets -- Bullets and numbering is totally broken in the current version. Who gives a crap about picture bullets when you can barely use the feature. Please revert to the W95 behavior.
+ Vertical/Horizontal alignment in tables -- always been supported.
+ Better text wrapping -- this was a documented non-WYSIWYG bug in earlier versions. Glad it's fixed. However, I still consider the DTP-like 'frames' feature in newer versions of Word very broken relative to the old behavior. It's at best a very useless half-assed attempt at PageMaker/FrameMaker.
+ Web Stuff -- Much better than previous versions, but have looked at that br0ken psuedo-XML? Especially when the CSS3 draft supports many/most wordprocessor features. This will be overhauled again in XP, I'm afraid. Roundtrip HTML is cool, but I don't use it that much.
+ Collaboration -- A great idea, half-implemented in 2000. I expect to see XP and SharePoint expand into a real groupware system. This is Microsoft's long-term solution to the poor customization features of Exchange.
Anyway, modulo the webpage roundtripping, and the collab client (bloat for the 90% of the users that don't use it), I fail to see how this stuff could not have been done with the Word 6/95 codebase. The rewrites have only produced a much bigger, more buggy product. --
I'm glad someone explained that. In my view the system worked in Word 6.0/95, and I created some very long documents that were nearly entirely in outline format using the Bullet/Numbering feature.
Word 97 was broken, and then it got worse for Word 2000 (supposedly necessary so that you could round-trip from HTML.) If I try to open those old Word 6 docs from Word 2000, they show up with no bullets/numbering at all! --
Who said anything about Linux? Devoted Word user since v4.0, myself.
The point is that they've added essentially 0 new features to the product since 1994, yet it grows twice as large and twice as slow with each new release. Do you have a good explaination for that? --
And, then the article goes to sum it up stating in effect that this is just a $30million marketing campaign about a changed default:
That's pretty much the case -- Office has been past the bloat horizon for about 5 years now, and it's pretty sad when the most highly touted new feature is turning something off. --
I dunno about that - do people really do significant amounts of office work with net-based apps?
Maybe they don't, but they certainly could. Look at what's on the average corporate user's desktop:
+ Some form of e-mail/groupware -- Now client-based, but considering how many people use Hotmail/Yahoo for their personal mail, this probably could be entirely web-based and still acceptable to users.
+ Office suite -- How often are people using this just to view/print documents versus editing/creating? Most of the read-only functions could be pushed into a web app.
+ Various vertical-market and internal apps -- Very often client-based now, but the trend is definately towards intranet-based apps. If anyone is working on a large client-server type project with VB (etc) in this day-and-age, I'd like to hear about it. --
I'm curious about that -- I have the older model (1000ADSL) in a similar configuration as you with a fixed IP. Can't get the thing to answer to telnet even if I take the firewall/router out of the way.
Is this only a problem in PPTP mode or something? --
Slashdot Mirror
That actually sorta happened - The 1970s Cadillac 8-6-4 engine allowed you to turn off cylinders with a dashboard switch. One of the most profoundly stupid ideas of all time because you ended up with a heavy 4 cylinder engine with 8 cylinders on the crankshaft. After a couple years, the dealers just shorted the switch into 8-cyl mode.
--
Meant to add that it goes both ways. Thanks.
--
I thought about that, but I think it would come under the interoperability clause, if you could crack the protection in the first place.
And yes, I'm aware of DeCSS, but IMO that was poor legal reasoning, and also not as clear of a case as "interoperability" (People wanted a Disc licenced by the MPAA to run a drive licenced by the MPAA with software not licenced by the MPAA. Now if someone wanted to make "ReCSS" to make copy-protected DVD disk without paying the MPAA tax, that would probably win over.)
--
True there's some folks out there that claim Fox News or Rush Limbaugh is "un-biased", but that's only because of some defect in their understanding of bias.
Sometime back in the past, I heard an explaination of how conservatives find "liberal bias" in presumably un-biased reporting. It turns out the act of even broadcasting on a topic which might be disagreable is interpreted of bias.
For example, a report "AIDS cases rising among (some group)" which is nothing but a dry reading of public heath statistics might be interpreted by some individuals as bias. Why? They assume that the reporter is saying "We Ought To Do Something!", when they are not, and as they dislike the group in question, they ascribe the fact that they have to hear about it as a political conspiricy.
To some extent, the media has put themselves in this situation by striving for "non-bias", which is unobtainable to the extent that you could get everyone to agree. The conservative talking heads play this much smarter, wearing their bias loudly and proudly. I think the continual "liberal media" detracters would just rather have Tom Brokaw say "We ought to do something about that" after each report, because at least they could pin them down on something, disagree, and watch the news in peace instead of imagining ghosts in the closet.
Note that "unbiased reporting" is a relatively new concept in journalism, and one that hasn't necessarily made the news media more popular. The country got along just fine when every media outlet was blatently biased.
--
Right on. However, put yourself in 1994: Removable hard disk storage 1/5 the size of your main hard drive for $250. You have a 14.4 modem and there are no freedrive sites on the net. If you were a Mac user, they were virtually ubiquitous, making trading easy.
This thing was essentially the Mac "floppy" of the day, and still to this day, to the extent that Mac users need floppies. There was a similar fleeting opportunity to standardize on LS-120 on PCs, but the big OEMs wanted to chase the insanely low price-point of $1500 (!), and it ended up on the cost-cutting room floor.
The equivalant product today would be 10GB and fast enough to run Windows 2000 off of for $200. Hell, if that was on the market, I'd be there in a second. But who's going to design such a thing, only to be steamrolled by cheap writable DVD-9 media in a few years.
--
My memory can verify that IDE LS-120 drives were on the market in 1995. Can't recall, but I imagine that SCSI was also available, however the LS-120 seemed to be primarily marketed towards OEMs in the beginning. Compaq even shipped them as standard equipment for maybe a month or two before realizing that that extra couple bucks per machine was costing them.
Of course, by this time the Zip had a full head of steam going, especially among the Mac crowd, who quickly replaced the "service bureau-standard" 5.25 Syquest drives they were using. That spread to the PC crowd when the parallel Zip was released, and the LS-120 pretty much hasn't gone anywhere since.
--
By 1997, the benifits were certainly leaning towards CD-R. However, I got my Zip when they first came out in 1994 or 1995. In those days a common hardrive was 500MB, which meant that you could back up your entire system for $100, and easily carry around every datafile on your disk on a single disc with the Win95 CAB files to spare. Super-cheap compared to the old Syquest 88MB stuff. It was pretty cool in the day.
However the costs of Zip/Jaz/Any Removable versus fixed disks just got worse and worse over time, while CD-R just got better and better. I don't know if this is due to some sort of engineering limitation on removable disks, or if it's just that Iomega et al feel that they'll never win versus cheap CD-R and DVD-R media so they've given up.
--
Just one point. Commerce Server is actually pretty specialized application server platform. It's not really a "shopping cart in a box". You would want to run it on a fairly beefy SMP machine.
I suspect Microsoft is looking at their Hotmail conversion and then thinking "How could we make a conversion at this scale realistic for a 3rd party", meaning that the primary impedement isn't the database software/hardware (Hotmail still runs on a Sun E10K/Oracle instalation) or the application/application server, it's the administrative flexibility and software cost of the clustered webfarm.
--
Can you point me to a corporate desktop from IBM or Compaq that ships with AMD? It's not here: http://www.compaq.com/products/desktops/index.shtm l
(Hint: A "Presario" is not a corporate machine.)
--
Correct. And the real money corporate customers buy Intel primarily because
1) Intel has better OEM vendors lined up for their market (Dell/Compaq/IBM). This channel is the key. AMD primarily gets what's left (home/soho/BYOB).
2) Intel has a much better reputation. Little things like that "What chipset bugs?" scene when the K7 was launched don't help. The key here is that if Intel tries to force RAMBUST or buggy shit like the i820 down Mr. MIS's throat they are dead in the water, so they are dancing on pinheads.
3) The corporate market could give a shit which processor can do 10fps better in Quake or if some CPU is slightly suboptimal at running legacy code (which after all was designed to run much slower computers to begin with). They are simply looking for a price/performance/supportability sweet spot that they can standardize on.
--
I've had Netscape do this to Win2K also
I had Netscape lock NT4.0 solid once too. Shouldn't happen, but Netscape found a way. Never once had a any other sort of application-level crash (well, IE can blow at the explorer, but you can always get back to the login screen). The Matrox TV card drivers are flaky as hell, and I've had tons of problems with those. However, I've been using NT long enough to be very cautious about hardware (HCL *system* and SCSI only please).
As for the laptop battery issue, the fact that you have to remove the battery is a pure hardware issue. Have Linux's APM flake out on you and you'll see.
--
Still, this thing is 1 DVD-ROM away from being made into a MSN\WebTV unit, or even a subscription-based Windows Terminal. When that happens, bundled services are bound to follow.
Besides, they have to build some sort of automatic ISP setup service into it because most console home consumers probably don't even know what an IP address is. I'd expect a network connection wizard much like Windows currently has.
Microsoft is pretending right now that that isn't going to happen, but IMO, that's just to not confuse the pre-release PR message. Let's see what the installed base looks like.
--
Which is something to be said for "name brand" equipment (even if it's a crappy name brand like Packard Bell) -- at they very least you can find BIOS upgrades and memory specs and the like. Most P75 systems probably at least had one last Y2K update or a Win98 patch, for example.
Compaq has information and downloads for everything they've ever made - even back to system disks for the original 8088 luggables. On some IBM FTP server, I found a large cache of PCjr software. Etc etc -- just some of the benifits of buying/getting a name brand system.
On the other hand, I find dealing with older, unknown white box equipement more trouble than it's worth. Maybe that's a good motherboard, maybe it's one with some artifical RAM celing. What the hell is this soundcard? And so on - at least you can use the case for something.
--
The Atari & Activision case has no bearing. Atari (and other platform makers of the day) wanted to produce ALL products for their machines.
+Activision ships a 2600 game.
+Atari claims they can't do that without a licence - Negotiations proceed, Atari wants too much money.
+They go to court - Activision wins.
Why? Because US law is clear that you can't require licenced software for your hardware - doesn't matter if it's a PC or a game console. You can't just wave your hands and pretend that this doesn't apply to Sony or Microsoft.
Not to mention that half of the garbage in the pre-crash flood was from Atari itself (and it's horrid inventory control didn't help either).
I pointed out that game licences are still common in the industry for other very good reasons. Perhaps, as you argue, this is the state of highest economic goodness. But that doesn't make it the law.
--
If Microsoft goes into the hardware business ...
Right on, they won't.
My view is that Blade Server, if done correctly, could be a decent idea. Get rid of SMB and RPC (can it be done without breaking the admin tools?), make it netbootable, make it cheaper, etc.
I knew I guy involved in setting up a webfarm on NT4. Horrors of horrors as he somehow hacked the boxes to boot from a read-only network OS install while still using a ram disk to handle all the registry and filesystem writes that NT demands to end up with a totally unsupported configuration that costs $500/box (significant sum when whe are talking about cheap PCs clustered). Anyway, MS's current product line is totally uncompetitive in this market.
--
They can use the legal precident of the video game consoles to back the actions up in court....
I think you are blowing hot air -- there are no such legal standards. In fact, just the opposite: Sega sued Accolade (?) for actually including a "Sega(tm)" logo in a unlicenced game. Accolade won because it turned out the console wouldn't boot unless the game contained that bitmap, so breaking copyright was necessary for interoperability.
As Atari versus Activision proved, there is no way a console company can required 3rd parties to obtain a licence to produce software, in the US.
However, licencing has become common for a few reasons:
1) Forcing 3rd parties to licence is legal in Japan, a big market. (This plus Nintendo's US patented cart slot pretty much required 3rd parties to deal with Nintendo.)
2) Game systems have gotten so complex hardware-wise that it's useful to be on the official dev program and get the docs and SDKs.
3) Game systems can use crypto keys to autheniticate media. The first system to do this was the Atari 7800, BTW, but apparently MS will also be implementing this in the XBox.
--
The "Quick-click" software actually dates back to the pre-boom pre-NBC era of Xoom (or whoever).
Of course, even after flushing millions of dollars into NBCi, NBC execs were too stupid to spend any airtime marketing the thing until the realized that their portal was one step from death a couple months ago. Now there's a flurry of ads, never mind that they are shutting the thing down.
--
I thought Microsoft has announced that there will be some sort of crypto verification in the bootcode of the thing to prevent people from running non-approved software. (If they didn't, their game licencing plan will just be bypassed.)
I believe the quote was "If someone gets Linux running on the XBox, there's a job waiting at Microsoft for them."
Anyway, check ZDNet about Microsoft's murmuring about a Win XP "Blade Server" edition. Essentially a stripped down web server setup designed to compete with Linux/Unix that will no doubt have it's own specialized set of server hardware. MS has enough resources to keep this project seperate from the XBox (and keep the traditional Windows hardware OEMs happy).
--
First of all "0" was obviously an exaggeration. But let's take a few of these:
+ Roaming Profiles -- This worked in Office 4.2 for Windows NT. Support was removed and not re-added for 5 years. Whoop.
+ File Open/Save has Places Bar and History -- This is an OS feature in Win2K.
+ 12 Clipboards -- MS had this thing called "Clipbook" in WfW. I never really liked this feature, going back to shareware hacks on MacOS 6. It looks like XP might get this right by changing it to a "galley" (if you've used PageMaker etc, this is a much more intuitive system). Anyway, this thing just creates annoying dialogs when my clipboards are full, so I wish I could turn it off.
+ Better AutoCorrect -- The same autocorrect, with a bigger lookup table.
+ Click and Type (AutoFormatting) -- Horridly broken feature. Don't say that it isn't.
+ Spelling and Grammar check can check other languages -- This was supported in Word 6.0
+ Nested tables -- Good for HTML compatibility, but a minor feature because you could do essentially the same thing with spanning cells in the old tables back to 4.0.
+ Picture bullets -- Bullets and numbering is totally broken in the current version. Who gives a crap about picture bullets when you can barely use the feature. Please revert to the W95 behavior.
+ Vertical/Horizontal alignment in tables -- always been supported.
+ Better text wrapping -- this was a documented non-WYSIWYG bug in earlier versions. Glad it's fixed. However, I still consider the DTP-like 'frames' feature in newer versions of Word very broken relative to the old behavior. It's at best a very useless half-assed attempt at PageMaker/FrameMaker.
+ Web Stuff -- Much better than previous versions, but have looked at that br0ken psuedo-XML? Especially when the CSS3 draft supports many/most wordprocessor features. This will be overhauled again in XP, I'm afraid. Roundtrip HTML is cool, but I don't use it that much.
+ Collaboration -- A great idea, half-implemented in 2000. I expect to see XP and SharePoint expand into a real groupware system. This is Microsoft's long-term solution to the poor customization features of Exchange.
Anyway, modulo the webpage roundtripping, and the collab client (bloat for the 90% of the users that don't use it), I fail to see how this stuff could not have been done with the Word 6/95 codebase. The rewrites have only produced a much bigger, more buggy product.
--
I'm glad someone explained that. In my view the system worked in Word 6.0/95, and I created some very long documents that were nearly entirely in outline format using the Bullet/Numbering feature.
Word 97 was broken, and then it got worse for Word 2000 (supposedly necessary so that you could round-trip from HTML.) If I try to open those old Word 6 docs from Word 2000, they show up with no bullets/numbering at all!
--
The site is run by MS's ad agency.
--
Who said anything about Linux? Devoted Word user since v4.0, myself.
The point is that they've added essentially 0 new features to the product since 1994, yet it grows twice as large and twice as slow with each new release. Do you have a good explaination for that?
--
And, then the article goes to sum it up stating in effect that this is just a $30million marketing campaign about a changed default:
That's pretty much the case -- Office has been past the bloat horizon for about 5 years now, and it's pretty sad when the most highly touted new feature is turning something off.
--
I dunno about that - do people really do significant amounts of office work with net-based apps?
Maybe they don't, but they certainly could. Look at what's on the average corporate user's desktop:
+ Some form of e-mail/groupware -- Now client-based, but considering how many people use Hotmail/Yahoo for their personal mail, this probably could be entirely web-based and still acceptable to users.
+ Office suite -- How often are people using this just to view/print documents versus editing/creating? Most of the read-only functions could be pushed into a web app.
+ Various vertical-market and internal apps -- Very often client-based now, but the trend is definately towards intranet-based apps. If anyone is working on a large client-server type project with VB (etc) in this day-and-age, I'd like to hear about it.
--
I'm curious about that -- I have the older model (1000ADSL) in a similar configuration as you with a fixed IP. Can't get the thing to answer to telnet even if I take the firewall/router out of the way.
Is this only a problem in PPTP mode or something?
--