http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17845.htm l indicates it's being added to the protocol spec.
I also believe that the FCC's DTV committee has approved something like this, and Sony is apparently intent at getting 1394 standardized as the digital TV/theater connector of the future.
Considering that Apple is talking about being "the digital hub", they will pretty much have to support the copy-control mechinisms, or your iMac-DV won't be able to talk to your new Sony TV. --
Ironically, I think the industry has solved the HTML DOM problem through a industry coalition. Yes, it took a few years before Netscape stopped treating the W3C as their bitch, but Netscape was a very hypocritcal, arrogant corporation in the old days.
Much the way IBM was in the late 80s. When they were doing nothing more than tweaking open standards ("open" used relatively here), folks were happy to let them lead the way. That ended instantly with MCA, which lead to the industry coalition open standard of EISA.
And sure, I'm overstating the case. The industry has never gotten past the IBM-mandated 1.44MB floppy drive as a base-line standard, for example. In the meanwhile, Intel has gobbled up 75% of the chipset market, which gives them great lattitude to set board-level specs (such as standard USB, for example, which would have never happened in a true open market). --
Not to mention that hotline ops have had their ass dragged in for copyright infringement. That's more than can be said for individual Napster or Gnutella users.
(The biggest 'media' app hotline site for example, there was a slashdot article on it, but the search function here sucks). --
It's understandable, because if you are used to tabulating your work product at (say) $10/hour, $10,000,000 sounds like an uncountable amount of money that will put you in mansions and mercedes for the rest of your life. However, when you boil that down to a yearly payment minus taxes, it really is just a quite average honda-drimiddle-class lifestyle, assuming you quit your job.
Not to mention the scammers that come out of the woodwork and attack these people (who since they were playing the lotto, probably weren't the brightest bulbs to begin with). After they get into debt, they are often forced to sell the remaining prize money at pennies on the dollar to someone.
California switched to a pay-up-front system (where you get less money), and most winners take it. It's supposedly been pretty successful at preventing the total bankrupcy explosion that most lottery winners face. --
Unfortunately, most of the old 3rd party OpenStep apps were swollowed up by Sun in a mercy killing tactic when they shifted to their Java strategy. OpenStep itself should be considered a failed product, and if officially killing it got MS IE and Office ports, that was a business decision that had to be made.
As you indicate, most Mac developers have legacy codebases and are using Carbon and don't have interest in ObjC and Cocoa.
Most old NeXT developers have either moved on or are too busy still pissing and moaning about the whole OpenStep thing to be developing new stuff for Cocoa or GnuStep.
The upshot of all this is that while OpenStep was a cool idea, there's very little legacy or new code out there to port. Thus the whole idea of GnuStep as a compatibility environment pretty much has 0 market utility now and for the next few years. Pretty much the only thing that you'd want is Omniweb. Not to say that the people working on GnuStep aren't following a worthy cause which could stand up on it's own right. --
I have a Win16 proggy on my Windows 2000 system (TOPO! map software), and I can verify the "Run in a seperate memory space" is still an option in shortcut properties (default==off). --
Oops, I forget to say that OS/2 VDM certainly had a some geeky-cool aspects. Being able to boot any version of DOS or CP/M was need, and there was even a commercial version of NetWare that ran on it. I have no doubt that if IBM gave a shit, it would be possible to get Win95 working on it.
Just that practically it wasn't the best way to do something that was horridly ugly but necessary, run Win3.1 apps. --
Actually, as I replyed above, OS X and OS/2 seem to the exact same methodology for back-compatible support.
OS/2 created a virtualized x86 machine emulation, booted a modified DOS 5.0 on that machine, and then booted a relatively unmodified Windows on top of DOS. (There were some hooks into WINOS2 so that DDE could work between environments and there was a special seemless windows video driver, but otherwise as the blue box versions showed, it was pretty much virgin Win 3.1).
AFAICT, Mac OS X does the same. You can even see a window showing the MacOS booting.
IMO, the NT approach is better (not to get in the way of your random OS/2 advocacy!). OS/2 wasn't really a "Better Windows than Windows" because OS2WIN had all the same flaws as regular Windows (and there were a fucking shitload of flaws there), plus some added incompatibility. The "features", such the ability to do hardware-oriented stuff (like comm software) from WINOS2 were usually so fubared that you'd be crazy to try.
Because NT translates Win16 API calls into Win32 API calls, a whole mess of bugs in the underlying system are resolved, and furthermore the WOW environemnt made problems like the "resource pools" to just go away. Compatibility and speed were a little worse, but back when I was running NT 3.5 on a low-end pentium, I really had less problems with 16-bit apps than I did with OS/2 on similar hardware. --
If you frequent the kernel mailing list, you will find it a frequent topic that the kernel API is always changing and backwards compatibility is of little concern. Perfection in its nearest state is more important to them.
This attitude, of course, just means that all the back-compatible cruft gets pushed into glibc (which Linus has repeatedly referred to as "crap"). Of course, the Linux kernel is virutually unusable without glibc (or some other crappy variant), so you end up with "perfection" with a big pile of crap stuck on top of it.
This sort of user/kernel duality has even filtered down to the attitudes of the relatively non-technical advocate crowd. A typical featuritus Linux-based OS is not a very good Unix system, in a lot of people's opinions, and the response usually is "don't look there, look over here at our perfection-oriented kernel". I think the lesson of NT and OS X is that kernal internals are really a minor part of the OS's total utility.
I disagree. The business PC industry pre-IBM was mainly 8080/Z-80 machines with 98% hardware compatibile S-100 bus slots and 98% software compatibile CP/M software.
The main source of pain was that there was no common standard for disk drives which made the most common method of interoperating (sneakerware) impossible.
Things like this were an obvious enough problem at the time, when IBM came in, there was just a mass agreement to just do things their way because it was easy. But if IBM wasn't in the picture, I think there would have been some sort of industry colalition that would have resolved most of the incompatibilies.
It's been at least 14 years since IBM stopped dictating standards. And somehow in that time, despite the fact there's even more players, the things are still basically compatible with each other. --
Don't forget that IBM co-owned all of Windows 3.0 and was getting Windows 3.1 for a very attractive price.
This all came out in the MS anti-trust trial. The cost per copy of Windows 3.1 to IBM was $11. At a time when their computers cost several hundred dollars more than their competitiors, this certainly wasn't a make-or-break amount.
(Not to say that per-CPU Windows licences and the high cost of OS/2 to other PC makers didn't significantly hurt it.) --
The core of the anti-smoking movement is completely hypocritical precisely because they favor legalization of tobacco.
They demonize the tobacco corporations (in California as part of a government-funded propaganda campaign even!) for doing something that even they accept should be a legal activity -- marketing and selling cigarettes as a consumer product.
The continual incremental hikes in the tobacco tax ("for the children!"), and the fact is the state is getting more profit out of a pack of smoke than the tobacco industry is, is just cyncial acceptance of this, with convienent Bad People political cover. I assume that you are in agreement with this.
My own feeling is that if this is a moral issue as it's made out to be, then the government should do the moral thing and make the shit illegal. This is a serious suggestion from a smoker that few anti-smoking types have the balls to break their addition to tobacco tax money and accept. --
I'm pretty sure that the shared/segmented memory space was up to the user even on NT 3.5 (can't remember about 3.1) via an option in the Program Manger.
It's basically a question of stability versus DDE/OLE working properly. --
This is, of course, exactly the same technique that NT4 and 2000 use for 16 bit apps.
No it isn't. NT uses an application layer called WOW to translate Win16 API calls into Win32 API calls. 16-bit apps essentially run as full peers under NT (although interapp communication stuff like OLE doesn't work between 16 and 32).
Windows 9x on the other hand runs a bastardized 16/32-bit kernel that pretty much keeps the whole of Windows 3.1 intact inside of the rest of the OS.
A better comparision for Classic was how OS/2 ran Windows 3.1 apps by booting a virtual dos machine. Both approaches even have the same windowborder problem. Another comparison is the Mac on Unix environment in A/UX, and I'd expect that exactly where the hooks for Classic came from. --
I'm guessing it's implemented as a HTTP header field, just as the PICS content rating stuff is. IIS will probably have a special GUI to help the lazy. --
Re:Do you think a recession will help RedHat/Linux
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 2
Linux needs hardware to run on, and that hardware is expensive.
Actually, hardware is usually the cheapest part of the corporate computing puzzle, although, you are correct that capital purchases tend to get cut back during a recession.
The cost of support and software licences and perhaps even infrastructure (network, Internet, etc) far outweigh the cost of hardware.
When is RedHat planning to convert the dozens of different formats of documentation that they ship into the Unix standard man page format?
As a user, I don't think pointing at the upstream package maintainers (like GNU) is acceptable, and that any OS distribution should have a common, centralized system of documentation and help.
--
Re:Would you really recommend it for desktop use?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 2
Previously, RedHat's line is that "We are not competing with Microsoft". To this outsider, RedHat's goal seems more to be "Ready for the Workstation" (meaning they can sell to developers and engineers used to UNIX, and compete against NT in this space.)
Not to mention that Microsoft lowballs the OEM price of Win9x/ME to the point that it's quite competitive with Linux on price even. The market isn't very profitable unless you look at the aggregate. --
Microsoft basically shot themselves in the PR foot and they deserve to get tweaked on this.
It was only two weeks ago that they announced the "Hailstorm" subscription services, centered around Passport, and then had to dodge the obvious question "Why should I trust my data to you guys?". It would have been alot easier if they weren't already claiming IP rights to data flowing through their system.
Speaking of TRUSTe, apparently IE 6 will include a little status bar icon showing if the site has a privacy policy. Not if the policy is at all acceptable or not, just if it is there. Of course all MS sites will show "Thumbs Up OK!", where visiting any normal site will produce "Oh No! Unknown! Scary!"
Not that this really makes any difference, it's just a small example in the psychological warfare involved in making the next generation of hosting services acceptable to the public. (Netscape did a similar thing with SSL and the overly big broken/unbroken key icon in versions 1-3). And when you get things like this instead of a 'Disable JavaScript' toolbar button, it just shows how the users aren't really driving the specs. --
I was only expressing user frustration, and didn't intend to advocate MS's particular implementation.
But thanks for the very rational response that open stream platforms are testbeds for different techniques and therefore do not necessarily need to be 'productized' (although much of the don't-use-windows rhetoric around here is founded in the idea of Linux as a product). --
Not to mention that IBM Microelectronics was forced by an anti-trust settlement to sell Compaq and others IBM patented parts like the ISA slot and controller. --
Slashdot Mirror
OK that was a crappy link:
m l indicates it's being added to the protocol spec.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/17845.ht
I also believe that the FCC's DTV committee has approved something like this, and Sony is apparently intent at getting 1394 standardized as the digital TV/theater connector of the future.
Considering that Apple is talking about being "the digital hub", they will pretty much have to support the copy-control mechinisms, or your iMac-DV won't be able to talk to your new Sony TV.
--
Windows 2000 and ME do in fact already have some support for Firewire. I think XP just adds built-in drivers for some more host controllers.
Which is why this is kinda non-news. "PCI for Windows XP, but no Infiniband!"
--
Ooops -- meant to say "true", as in Firewire has copyprotection.
--
His claim is false -- copy protection was added to 1394 as part of the HDTV politicing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990528-000013.html and check google.
--
Ironically, I think the industry has solved the HTML DOM problem through a industry coalition. Yes, it took a few years before Netscape stopped treating the W3C as their bitch, but Netscape was a very hypocritcal, arrogant corporation in the old days.
Much the way IBM was in the late 80s. When they were doing nothing more than tweaking open standards ("open" used relatively here), folks were happy to let them lead the way. That ended instantly with MCA, which lead to the industry coalition open standard of EISA.
And sure, I'm overstating the case. The industry has never gotten past the IBM-mandated 1.44MB floppy drive as a base-line standard, for example. In the meanwhile, Intel has gobbled up 75% of the chipset market, which gives them great lattitude to set board-level specs (such as standard USB, for example, which would have never happened in a true open market).
--
Not to mention that hotline ops have had their ass dragged in for copyright infringement. That's more than can be said for individual Napster or Gnutella users.
(The biggest 'media' app hotline site for example, there was a slashdot article on it, but the search function here sucks).
--
It's understandable, because if you are used to tabulating your work product at (say) $10/hour, $10,000,000 sounds like an uncountable amount of money that will put you in mansions and mercedes for the rest of your life. However, when you boil that down to a yearly payment minus taxes, it really is just a quite average honda-drimiddle-class lifestyle, assuming you quit your job.
Not to mention the scammers that come out of the woodwork and attack these people (who since they were playing the lotto, probably weren't the brightest bulbs to begin with). After they get into debt, they are often forced to sell the remaining prize money at pennies on the dollar to someone.
California switched to a pay-up-front system (where you get less money), and most winners take it. It's supposedly been pretty successful at preventing the total bankrupcy explosion that most lottery winners face.
--
Unfortunately, most of the old 3rd party OpenStep apps were swollowed up by Sun in a mercy killing tactic when they shifted to their Java strategy. OpenStep itself should be considered a failed product, and if officially killing it got MS IE and Office ports, that was a business decision that had to be made.
As you indicate, most Mac developers have legacy codebases and are using Carbon and don't have interest in ObjC and Cocoa.
Most old NeXT developers have either moved on or are too busy still pissing and moaning about the whole OpenStep thing to be developing new stuff for Cocoa or GnuStep.
The upshot of all this is that while OpenStep was a cool idea, there's very little legacy or new code out there to port. Thus the whole idea of GnuStep as a compatibility environment pretty much has 0 market utility now and for the next few years. Pretty much the only thing that you'd want is Omniweb. Not to say that the people working on GnuStep aren't following a worthy cause which could stand up on it's own right.
--
I have a Win16 proggy on my Windows 2000 system (TOPO! map software), and I can verify the "Run in a seperate memory space" is still an option in shortcut properties (default==off).
--
Oops, I forget to say that OS/2 VDM certainly had a some geeky-cool aspects. Being able to boot any version of DOS or CP/M was need, and there was even a commercial version of NetWare that ran on it. I have no doubt that if IBM gave a shit, it would be possible to get Win95 working on it.
Just that practically it wasn't the best way to do something that was horridly ugly but necessary, run Win3.1 apps.
--
Actually, as I replyed above, OS X and OS/2 seem to the exact same methodology for back-compatible support.
OS/2 created a virtualized x86 machine emulation, booted a modified DOS 5.0 on that machine, and then booted a relatively unmodified Windows on top of DOS. (There were some hooks into WINOS2 so that DDE could work between environments and there was a special seemless windows video driver, but otherwise as the blue box versions showed, it was pretty much virgin Win 3.1).
AFAICT, Mac OS X does the same. You can even see a window showing the MacOS booting.
IMO, the NT approach is better (not to get in the way of your random OS/2 advocacy!). OS/2 wasn't really a "Better Windows than Windows" because OS2WIN had all the same flaws as regular Windows (and there were a fucking shitload of flaws there), plus some added incompatibility. The "features", such the ability to do hardware-oriented stuff (like comm software) from WINOS2 were usually so fubared that you'd be crazy to try.
Because NT translates Win16 API calls into Win32 API calls, a whole mess of bugs in the underlying system are resolved, and furthermore the WOW environemnt made problems like the "resource pools" to just go away. Compatibility and speed were a little worse, but back when I was running NT 3.5 on a low-end pentium, I really had less problems with 16-bit apps than I did with OS/2 on similar hardware.
--
If you frequent the kernel mailing list, you will find it a frequent topic that the kernel API is always changing and backwards compatibility is of little concern. Perfection in its nearest state is more important to them.
This attitude, of course, just means that all the back-compatible cruft gets pushed into glibc (which Linus has repeatedly referred to as "crap"). Of course, the Linux kernel is virutually unusable without glibc (or some other crappy variant), so you end up with "perfection" with a big pile of crap stuck on top of it.
This sort of user/kernel duality has even filtered down to the attitudes of the relatively non-technical advocate crowd. A typical featuritus Linux-based OS is not a very good Unix system, in a lot of people's opinions, and the response usually is "don't look there, look over here at our perfection-oriented kernel". I think the lesson of NT and OS X is that kernal internals are really a minor part of the OS's total utility.
--
I disagree. The business PC industry pre-IBM was mainly 8080/Z-80 machines with 98% hardware compatibile S-100 bus slots and 98% software compatibile CP/M software.
The main source of pain was that there was no common standard for disk drives which made the most common method of interoperating (sneakerware) impossible.
Things like this were an obvious enough problem at the time, when IBM came in, there was just a mass agreement to just do things their way because it was easy. But if IBM wasn't in the picture, I think there would have been some sort of industry colalition that would have resolved most of the incompatibilies.
It's been at least 14 years since IBM stopped dictating standards. And somehow in that time, despite the fact there's even more players, the things are still basically compatible with each other.
--
Don't forget that IBM co-owned all of Windows 3.0 and was getting Windows 3.1 for a very attractive price.
This all came out in the MS anti-trust trial. The cost per copy of Windows 3.1 to IBM was $11. At a time when their computers cost several hundred dollars more than their competitiors, this certainly wasn't a make-or-break amount.
(Not to say that per-CPU Windows licences and the high cost of OS/2 to other PC makers didn't significantly hurt it.)
--
I take it you favor legalization
The core of the anti-smoking movement is completely hypocritical precisely because they favor legalization of tobacco.
They demonize the tobacco corporations (in California as part of a government-funded propaganda campaign even!) for doing something that even they accept should be a legal activity -- marketing and selling cigarettes as a consumer product.
The continual incremental hikes in the tobacco tax ("for the children!"), and the fact is the state is getting more profit out of a pack of smoke than the tobacco industry is, is just cyncial acceptance of this, with convienent Bad People political cover. I assume that you are in agreement with this.
My own feeling is that if this is a moral issue as it's made out to be, then the government should do the moral thing and make the shit illegal. This is a serious suggestion from a smoker that few anti-smoking types have the balls to break their addition to tobacco tax money and accept.
--
I'm pretty sure that the shared/segmented memory space was up to the user even on NT 3.5 (can't remember about 3.1) via an option in the Program Manger.
It's basically a question of stability versus DDE/OLE working properly.
--
This is, of course, exactly the same technique that NT4 and 2000 use for 16 bit apps.
No it isn't. NT uses an application layer called WOW to translate Win16 API calls into Win32 API calls. 16-bit apps essentially run as full peers under NT (although interapp communication stuff like OLE doesn't work between 16 and 32).
Windows 9x on the other hand runs a bastardized 16/32-bit kernel that pretty much keeps the whole of Windows 3.1 intact inside of the rest of the OS.
A better comparision for Classic was how OS/2 ran Windows 3.1 apps by booting a virtual dos machine. Both approaches even have the same windowborder problem. Another comparison is the Mac on Unix environment in A/UX, and I'd expect that exactly where the hooks for Classic came from.
--
I'm guessing it's implemented as a HTTP header field, just as the PICS content rating stuff is. IIS will probably have a special GUI to help the lazy.
--
Linux needs hardware to run on, and that hardware is expensive.
Actually, hardware is usually the cheapest part of the corporate computing puzzle, although, you are correct that capital purchases tend to get cut back during a recession.
The cost of support and software licences and perhaps even infrastructure (network, Internet, etc) far outweigh the cost of hardware.
--
When is RedHat planning to convert the dozens of different formats of documentation that they ship into the Unix standard man page format?
As a user, I don't think pointing at the upstream package maintainers (like GNU) is acceptable, and that any OS distribution should have a common, centralized system of documentation and help.
--
Previously, RedHat's line is that "We are not competing with Microsoft". To this outsider, RedHat's goal seems more to be "Ready for the Workstation" (meaning they can sell to developers and engineers used to UNIX, and compete against NT in this space.)
Not to mention that Microsoft lowballs the OEM price of Win9x/ME to the point that it's quite competitive with Linux on price even. The market isn't very profitable unless you look at the aggregate.
--
Microsoft basically shot themselves in the PR foot and they deserve to get tweaked on this.
It was only two weeks ago that they announced the "Hailstorm" subscription services, centered around Passport, and then had to dodge the obvious question "Why should I trust my data to you guys?". It would have been alot easier if they weren't already claiming IP rights to data flowing through their system.
Speaking of TRUSTe, apparently IE 6 will include a little status bar icon showing if the site has a privacy policy. Not if the policy is at all acceptable or not, just if it is there. Of course all MS sites will show "Thumbs Up OK!", where visiting any normal site will produce "Oh No! Unknown! Scary!"
Not that this really makes any difference, it's just a small example in the psychological warfare involved in making the next generation of hosting services acceptable to the public. (Netscape did a similar thing with SSL and the overly big broken/unbroken key icon in versions 1-3). And when you get things like this instead of a 'Disable JavaScript' toolbar button, it just shows how the users aren't really driving the specs.
--
I was only expressing user frustration, and didn't intend to advocate MS's particular implementation.
But thanks for the very rational response that open stream platforms are testbeds for different techniques and therefore do not necessarily need to be 'productized' (although much of the don't-use-windows rhetoric around here is founded in the idea of Linux as a product).
--
Before everyone takes this informative post at face value, check the previous discussion
--
Not to mention that IBM Microelectronics was forced by an anti-trust settlement to sell Compaq and others IBM patented parts like the ISA slot and controller.
--