Microsoft has claimed that in the past -- there used to be a list of DOS and Win3.1 applications that were certified to run on NT.
Notice "run" and not install and run correctly. There are still major applications (Mozilla!) that have no clue about NT's multiuser-ness and treat it just like a slightly different version of Win95. Microsoft refuses to break these applications, because they include their own products (like Office 97).
So many Win3.1 apps worked under 9x, that it easier to list the ones that didn't work.
Your point is right on -- Microsoft lives and grows by it's binary back compatibility. Linux accomplishes it's political goals through it's source compability and openness. (But to be fair, the idea of source compatibility instead of binary is much older than Linux and goes back to the roots of UNIX.) --
System File Protection is a hack because there are so many broken and Win9x-specific installers out there (even from Microsoft), that it's not even funny.
If Windows was working right to begin with (system DLLs are upgraded only in service packs, not by app vendor installers), there would be absolutely no need for SFP.
(SFP is nice because you don't have to wince when you see Fred's Shareware installing MFC42.DLL into your \WINNT\SYSTEM32, but Fred was just doing what Microsoft told him to do.) --
The big exceptions being MSN, which is the default homepage of you-know-what. And Yahoo, which is a portal of sorts, although never followed the heavy HTML and adverted links like the others did. (And maybe iWon.com)
Which is why Yahoo's lack of integration is kinda nice in a way -- a bunch of small services that work and aren't trying to cram each other down your throat (see the MSN Explorer thing recently released). --
NYTimes.com has had my e-mail address since 1994 (and, yes, I have had the same e-mail that long...), and I have never once recieved spam from them or anyone identified as a 'partner' or anything. The spam I do get is so low grade (university diplomas and home morgages and the like), that I'm 99% sure that NYTimes had nothing to do with it. --
I just tried the Java version, and it seems to be a clone of "Mr.Do" without the bouncing weapon. Anyway, if you like that sort of thing, be sure to try Mr.Do under MAME -- it's not the most manly game, sure, but it's addictive as hell. --
Re:Why not? (Score:0, Flamebait)
by kikta on 09:25 AM January 27th, 2001 PDT (#89)
But, that's what Unix did and look what happened to those assholes. That why there's so much talk against proprietary crap - the last thing we want to do is fork the kernel. Unless Linus start taking it down the shitter (and he's not), there's every reason to avoid it. (quoted in whole due to a shithead moderator)
Yeah, but what really doomed UNIX was not kernel forks, it was user space forks and different hardware, dooming binary and even source compatibilty in most cases. Not to mention that admining UNIX meant knowing a different toolchain for each vendor.
Well, now we have the GNU user space and complier emerging as a standard part of even commercial Unix installations (like Solaris), and we have cheap, mostly standard x86 hardware working fine for 90% of the problems out there. And the Linux distributors have already fucked up the admin tool issue, so that will have to solved later anyway.
To k-whore a bit, the unifying part of "Linux" is not the kernel -- it's the free userspace. Commercial vendors are starting to catch on with this with things like AIX-L (runs Linux PPC binaries), and free software vendors know that source compatibility is easy if you can at least make some assumptions about the runtime environ (to a greater degree than you could with commercial UNIX). Once UNIX software vendors have completely standardized on GNU/Gnome/KDE/etc, their really won't be a fractured Unix anymore, and you can mix and match kernels to your hearts content. It's totally likely that we'll see a "Linux-like" OS with a BSD or the Solaris SysV kernel. --
Yes 4.x was that bad (or haven't you ever used it?) -- After a gazillion point revisions, certain badly formed HTML 3.2 can still crash the thing, for example. Don't forget that they hacked on "Netscape 5" for about a year before coming to the conclusion that their old Mosaic-derived codebase was at the end of it's life.
The "particular function" in Netscape's case was the whole renderer. CSS had to work (not JSS and a bridge as in the case of NS4), DOM had to work (W3C, not layers as in the case of NS4). Even plain ol Netscape inventions such as tables had overhauled to work right. And. once they had committed to rewriting the renderer, it's understandable that they decided to shuck the other things that weren't making people happy (such as the Motif UI under Linux). What's unfortuante is that they didn't start the rewrite back in 1995, like Microsoft did with their Mosaic fork. --
It may only be a matter of time before everybody's management gets their act together to suppress developer wages. I'm not saying they would be wrong in trying to do so - that's their job, minimize expenses.
It's happened before -- back in the 70s there was deliberate industry plan to train all sorts of unqualified people as COBOL programmers (Don't laugh youngsters -- COBOL used to be the standard for internal development) This was very successful in depressing programmer wages. Of course most of these retrained secretaries were laid off when COBOL went out of fashion in the 80s, and then the real COBOL guys had to come in and clean up the mess for Y2K, but from what I've heard it really sucked to be looking for programming work in this period.
Another analogous event happend just in the last couple years with the MCSE debacle. Hard to believe, but in the mid-90s, NT admins were actually paid higher than Unix admins. But after the market was flooded with lots of imcompentant book trained people, NT system admin is probably the lowest paid ops job in the business.
So, it's easy to think that one's skills are sharp enough that they are immune to these sorts of tactics, but just remember It Could Happen To You. Even if you are 100x better than those other guys it does make picking up the phone and getting a better/higher-paying job harder if the market were to be flooded with people that look similar to you on paper and charge half as much. --
By "Tech Worker", it includes those doing AOL phone support, people who's only job is to load DLT tapes into the robots all day and other mindless ops chores, and yes those poor guys stuck in a windowless room imaging Windows onto PCs all day. Oh yea, most of these folks are also farmed out through some contract agency where they can be gotten rid of in 5 minutes and get no vaction or benefits, etc.
This kind of stuff is "skilled labor" and not "knowledge work", but it's still considered tech work by the government and outsiders.
So, you can sit at your desk and be one of those elite 1000% coders and you will never need a union and nobody will ever really try to unionize you. That doesn't mean that large parts of the tech sector couldn't use collective bargining to improve working conditions.
I think the real problem is that those in the bottom tier of the tech industry doing phone support or whatever won't admit they're in the ghetto. They tell themselves if they can just pass those MCSE exams or learn Linux, they'll be out of there and be one of those elite highly-paid system admins. Sometimes - but I'd bet 90% in the 'ghetto' eventually wash out of tech. --
I was a union bag boy back in high school too, paid the $20/month dues, and here was the tally:
+ Got paid double minimum wage for what would have been a minimum wage job if it was non-union.
+ Got paid sick time and vacation which would have been unlikely in a non-union shop.
+ (Most importantly) All scheduling was based on seniority rather than management playing favorites. Sure senority is a arbitrary system that rewarded the 'lifers', but at the very least it prevented managment from engaging in the #1 dick-over tactic in these sorts of jobs - fucking with your time off. --
What you are interested in this case is passage of immigration laws which would punish companies abusing H1B employees.
And who will lobby Congress to pass such laws?
Well, there's Unions. And... Nope, that's pretty much it.
Problem is the Unions currently have no stake in the technology sector so aren't really all that interested in using their considerable clout to clear up the H1B situation. If parts of tech work (lets say operations type stuff) would start getting union representation, the H1B abuse that we've seen wouldn't last long. --
I'm going to write that off as hearsay. Lots of parts of NT are from OS/2 (including the bootloader, apparently straight off), but you wouldn't mistake a Blue Screen for a OS/2 Panic. --
more amazing than that is that Bart wasn't extended to the airports and around the whole bay 15 years ago.
Well, the original plan was to circle the bay, but then San Mateo county went and voted it down in the 60s. I don't know if Santa Clara even got a chance after that, but all of those folks probably though they'd live in apple orchards forever. And then, after all of the "rampant" development in Walnut Creek surrounding the BART stations in the 1970s (ha, like San Mateo was any different), there was no chance for BART-around-the-bay for 20 more years.
But at least San Mateo and Santa Clara are getting another chance at that. Unlike poor Marin, who voted it down when there actually *was* a icecube's chance in hell in getting the federal money and political capital it would have taken to put rail on the Golden Gate bridge. Now they can kick themselves forever because they're never going to get it.
As for Santa Clara -- I-880 is a 4 lane freeway that should have been 8 lanes 10 years ago, and it runs right into downtown San Jose, so, well, people aren't happy. You probably could put a $1 gas tax on the ballot to fix the problem and it would pass with 70% --
MP3s sound like crap to *you* (did you know that sound perception changes with age, the older one gets, the worst it gets?), obviously the quality is good enough for other people to prefer the format and for the record industry to worry about it
Yup, and it depends on what you are used to. I can listen to the analog noise of old scratched up LPs all day and it "sounds fine". On the other hand, the digital noise in most low quality MP3s drives me nuts. I can see how a college kid would see it the opposite way. --
If DeCSS had been written before any DVD players were on the market then they would have *serious* encryption & no one would be writing free decoding software.
Isn't CSS based on good 'ol export-level 40-bit RSA with some obscurity thrown in? If so, everyone in the know knew that it would be crackable from day1.
Although putting the CSS decryptor in a software device (DVD softplayers) was a mistake they won't make again... --
Re:Small niggle with the article
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
The only differance between SCSI and IDE is the protocol and controller. It's the same PHYSICAL hardware with a diff chipset.
...
Well that and if you want to pay for that 10K rpm drive, since there is no IDE drives at 10K right now
So, are the drives physically the same or aren't they? If they are, why aren't there 10K IDE drives, and why aren't there 40GB SCSI drives?
Despite your years in the HD industry, I think the answer is that they are not actually the same physically. Maybe back in the 4GB era they were, but now "SCSI" is industry shorthand for "designed for always-on server use" and IDE is shorthand for "designed for desktop machines". Not that that difference necessarily affects the speed, but it sure might because it's probably a safe assumption that a "desktop machine" doesn't necessary need great sustained disk performance. --
Oh, come on. Both Sun and Microsoft signed the Java licencing deal knowing that it would end in a lawsuit. It was bad faith to begin with -- Ballmer pretty much admitted that in a recent Wired interview. Microsoft would have neve entered into that contract if it was all just $3.5M/Year hunky-dory licencing.
Microsoft's strategy was to pretend to be all behind Java for a few months, get in a fight, and then make Sun out to be the bad guy to their customers. It would have worked too, if crappy browser applets were the only use for Java (see the AC comments on this page for a Microsoftie who still think that).
Sun's strategy was of course to make Microsoft look like the bad guy and themselves like the good guys who fought off extend-and-embrace. The only difference is that Sun generally succeeded, won the lawsuit, and now Microsoft is stuck spending millions of dollars reinventing Java in the form of.NET and then millions more trying to sell it to corporations that are already using Java. --
Last year, I read an interview with Ballmer in PCWeek or something. He pretty much admitted that there was *lots* of customer interest in better Java integration on Windows machines. But, it was all Sun's fault that there wasn't, so blame them and get them to drop the lawsuit.
This was all before.NET, so I doubt you'd hear anything like that now. But it shows that Microsoft has percieved that fighting Sun over Java hurt them. (But anyone following IT knows that Servlets/JSP has been the hottest internal development tool since, well, ASP -- and MS has totally cut themselves out of that market, and not being in a market is the worst thing from MS's own point of view. Their fault for making the same stupid assumption that most Slashdotters have made that Java==Applets.)
So, now Microsoft has to fight back with a Java work-alike (.NET), but they've lost years with this lawsuit and lots of mindshare. The only really smart thing about.NET is that it supports VB as a real peer on top of the VM, so it allows MS to get their curly brace-fearing allies in on the act. --
Back in '95-'96 they decided to drop OS/2 and UNIX ports of WordPerfect and compete with MS head-to-head on MS's own platform
Actually, the problem was they completely failed to compete with Microsoft on their own platform. WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows was late and buggy. WordPerfect 6 for Windows was way too buggy. WordPerfect for Win32 didn't ship until mid 1996 (Microsoft shipped their first Win32 version in 1994). After all these late, buggy blunders, it's no wonder all most all of their 80% marketshare had disappeared.
Sticking with the miniscule and shrinking UNIX and OS/2 desktop markets wouldn't have helped either WordPerfect or UNIX&OS/2. (Just as the existance of WordPerfect for Linux won't particularly help Linux either.) --
If it's of any interest to the discussion, Windows 2000 treats the desktop as part of your "home" ("profile") directory structure, and can automatically syncronize it with a central file server.
This is the 'right' way to do it, rather than forcing a user to use a particular directory (although in W2K, "My Documents" is also under the profile directory), or trying to do the impossible -- explain to the end user what the "P:" drive is for. --
I still remember the "old days" [not so old, really]. Before MS quit wasting their time going after friends sharing software. The days where Microsoft threatened (and, I believe, implemented in early betas) to include a phone home feature in Chicago that would report a scan of the users hard drive. I don't think I kept the magazines that discussed it (stuff from '94 is just a little out of date).
Har -- In the "old days" Microsoft was one of the most pro-piracy companies around. MS-Office going from a 10% to a 90% marketshare was driven almost purely by give-away copies and casual piracy. The only anti-piracy feature they ever bothered implementing was the licence key, and even then many products had a 1111-11111... back door.
Now, we have the "new days" coming up -- Office is already registration locked for home/small office users, and the next version will require a licence key server for corporate use. OEM CDs are bios-locked now. Whistler will implement a registration scheme like Office, perhaps even for corporate users and servers.
(As for the Chicago Phone Home feature, that actually shipped as the "registration wizard" in W95. It was completely optional and scanned for certain select programs, mostly Microsoft ones but also DOS WordPerfect and Lotus Notes.) --
If so, that's a profoundly smart way to work around X's limitations, as soon as OGL support is more universal, that is.
Unfortunately tho, that approach only helps E (unless Enlightenment is becoming a 'desktop environment' API like Gnome/KDE). and doesn't address the fundamental problems due to X's archaic nature. I suppose it will take a "X11R7" or something to provide a richer 2D API to all apps.
I think the problem is that X drawing primatives are too small to be accelerated efficiently by cards designed for the Win32 GDI and Apple QuickDraw.
It seems that he is bypassing the X drawing layer somehow ("Raster showed us comparisons between X-accelerated displays and EVAS accelerated displays"). How that works with other X apps and the normal X feature set would be interesting. --
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has claimed that in the past -- there used to be a list of DOS and Win3.1 applications that were certified to run on NT.
Notice "run" and not install and run correctly. There are still major applications (Mozilla!) that have no clue about NT's multiuser-ness and treat it just like a slightly different version of Win95. Microsoft refuses to break these applications, because they include their own products (like Office 97).
So many Win3.1 apps worked under 9x, that it easier to list the ones that didn't work.
Your point is right on -- Microsoft lives and grows by it's binary back compatibility. Linux accomplishes it's political goals through it's source compability and openness. (But to be fair, the idea of source compatibility instead of binary is much older than Linux and goes back to the roots of UNIX.)
--
System File Protection is a hack because there are so many broken and Win9x-specific installers out there (even from Microsoft), that it's not even funny.
If Windows was working right to begin with (system DLLs are upgraded only in service packs, not by app vendor installers), there would be absolutely no need for SFP.
(SFP is nice because you don't have to wince when you see Fred's Shareware installing MFC42.DLL into your \WINNT\SYSTEM32, but Fred was just doing what Microsoft told him to do.)
--
Portals, let's see: Excite, Xoom, Lycos, Go, Netscape, Northern Light ... Yup, pretty much dead.
The big exceptions being MSN, which is the default homepage of you-know-what. And Yahoo, which is a portal of sorts, although never followed the heavy HTML and adverted links like the others did. (And maybe iWon.com)
Which is why Yahoo's lack of integration is kinda nice in a way -- a bunch of small services that work and aren't trying to cram each other down your throat (see the MSN Explorer thing recently released).
--
NYTimes.com has had my e-mail address since 1994 (and, yes, I have had the same e-mail that long...), and I have never once recieved spam from them or anyone identified as a 'partner' or anything. The spam I do get is so low grade (university diplomas and home morgages and the like), that I'm 99% sure that NYTimes had nothing to do with it.
--
I just tried the Java version, and it seems to be a clone of "Mr.Do" without the bouncing weapon. Anyway, if you like that sort of thing, be sure to try Mr.Do under MAME -- it's not the most manly game, sure, but it's addictive as hell.
--
Re:Why not? (Score:0, Flamebait)
by kikta on 09:25 AM January 27th, 2001 PDT (#89)
But, that's what Unix did and look what happened to those assholes. That why there's so much talk against proprietary crap - the last thing we want to do is fork the kernel. Unless Linus start taking it down the shitter (and he's not), there's every reason to avoid it. (quoted in whole due to a shithead moderator)
Yeah, but what really doomed UNIX was not kernel forks, it was user space forks and different hardware, dooming binary and even source compatibilty in most cases. Not to mention that admining UNIX meant knowing a different toolchain for each vendor.
Well, now we have the GNU user space and complier emerging as a standard part of even commercial Unix installations (like Solaris), and we have cheap, mostly standard x86 hardware working fine for 90% of the problems out there. And the Linux distributors have already fucked up the admin tool issue, so that will have to solved later anyway.
To k-whore a bit, the unifying part of "Linux" is not the kernel -- it's the free userspace. Commercial vendors are starting to catch on with this with things like AIX-L (runs Linux PPC binaries), and free software vendors know that source compatibility is easy if you can at least make some assumptions about the runtime environ (to a greater degree than you could with commercial UNIX). Once UNIX software vendors have completely standardized on GNU/Gnome/KDE/etc, their really won't be a fractured Unix anymore, and you can mix and match kernels to your hearts content. It's totally likely that we'll see a "Linux-like" OS with a BSD or the Solaris SysV kernel.
--
Yes 4.x was that bad (or haven't you ever used it?) -- After a gazillion point revisions, certain badly formed HTML 3.2 can still crash the thing, for example. Don't forget that they hacked on "Netscape 5" for about a year before coming to the conclusion that their old Mosaic-derived codebase was at the end of it's life.
The "particular function" in Netscape's case was the whole renderer. CSS had to work (not JSS and a bridge as in the case of NS4), DOM had to work (W3C, not layers as in the case of NS4). Even plain ol Netscape inventions such as tables had overhauled to work right. And. once they had committed to rewriting the renderer, it's understandable that they decided to shuck the other things that weren't making people happy (such as the Motif UI under Linux). What's unfortuante is that they didn't start the rewrite back in 1995, like Microsoft did with their Mosaic fork.
--
It may only be a matter of time before everybody's management gets their act together to suppress developer wages. I'm not saying they would be wrong in trying to do so - that's their job, minimize expenses.
It's happened before -- back in the 70s there was deliberate industry plan to train all sorts of unqualified people as COBOL programmers (Don't laugh youngsters -- COBOL used to be the standard for internal development) This was very successful in depressing programmer wages. Of course most of these retrained secretaries were laid off when COBOL went out of fashion in the 80s, and then the real COBOL guys had to come in and clean up the mess for Y2K, but from what I've heard it really sucked to be looking for programming work in this period.
Another analogous event happend just in the last couple years with the MCSE debacle. Hard to believe, but in the mid-90s, NT admins were actually paid higher than Unix admins. But after the market was flooded with lots of imcompentant book trained people, NT system admin is probably the lowest paid ops job in the business.
So, it's easy to think that one's skills are sharp enough that they are immune to these sorts of tactics, but just remember It Could Happen To You. Even if you are 100x better than those other guys it does make picking up the phone and getting a better/higher-paying job harder if the market were to be flooded with people that look similar to you on paper and charge half as much.
--
By "Tech Worker", it includes those doing AOL phone support, people who's only job is to load DLT tapes into the robots all day and other mindless ops chores, and yes those poor guys stuck in a windowless room imaging Windows onto PCs all day. Oh yea, most of these folks are also farmed out through some contract agency where they can be gotten rid of in 5 minutes and get no vaction or benefits, etc.
This kind of stuff is "skilled labor" and not "knowledge work", but it's still considered tech work by the government and outsiders.
So, you can sit at your desk and be one of those elite 1000% coders and you will never need a union and nobody will ever really try to unionize you. That doesn't mean that large parts of the tech sector couldn't use collective bargining to improve working conditions.
I think the real problem is that those in the bottom tier of the tech industry doing phone support or whatever won't admit they're in the ghetto. They tell themselves if they can just pass those MCSE exams or learn Linux, they'll be out of there and be one of those elite highly-paid system admins. Sometimes - but I'd bet 90% in the 'ghetto' eventually wash out of tech.
--
I was a union bag boy back in high school too, paid the $20/month dues, and here was the tally:
+ Got paid double minimum wage for what would have been a minimum wage job if it was non-union.
+ Got paid sick time and vacation which would have been unlikely in a non-union shop.
+ (Most importantly) All scheduling was based on seniority rather than management playing favorites. Sure senority is a arbitrary system that rewarded the 'lifers', but at the very least it prevented managment from engaging in the #1 dick-over tactic in these sorts of jobs - fucking with your time off.
--
What you are interested in this case is passage of immigration laws which would punish companies abusing H1B employees.
... Nope, that's pretty much it.
And who will lobby Congress to pass such laws?
Well, there's Unions. And
Problem is the Unions currently have no stake in the technology sector so aren't really all that interested in using their considerable clout to clear up the H1B situation. If parts of tech work (lets say operations type stuff) would start getting union representation, the H1B abuse that we've seen wouldn't last long.
--
I'm going to write that off as hearsay. Lots of parts of NT are from OS/2 (including the bootloader, apparently straight off), but you wouldn't mistake a Blue Screen for a OS/2 Panic.
--
more amazing than that is that Bart wasn't extended to the airports and around the whole bay 15 years ago.
Well, the original plan was to circle the bay, but then San Mateo county went and voted it down in the 60s. I don't know if Santa Clara even got a chance after that, but all of those folks probably though they'd live in apple orchards forever. And then, after all of the "rampant" development in Walnut Creek surrounding the BART stations in the 1970s (ha, like San Mateo was any different), there was no chance for BART-around-the-bay for 20 more years.
But at least San Mateo and Santa Clara are getting another chance at that. Unlike poor Marin, who voted it down when there actually *was* a icecube's chance in hell in getting the federal money and political capital it would have taken to put rail on the Golden Gate bridge. Now they can kick themselves forever because they're never going to get it.
As for Santa Clara -- I-880 is a 4 lane freeway that should have been 8 lanes 10 years ago, and it runs right into downtown San Jose, so, well, people aren't happy. You probably could put a $1 gas tax on the ballot to fix the problem and it would pass with 70%
--
MP3s sound like crap to *you* (did you know that sound perception changes with age, the older one gets, the worst it gets?), obviously the quality is good enough for other people to prefer the format and for the record industry to worry about it
Yup, and it depends on what you are used to. I can listen to the analog noise of old scratched up LPs all day and it "sounds fine". On the other hand, the digital noise in most low quality MP3s drives me nuts. I can see how a college kid would see it the opposite way.
--
If DeCSS had been written before any DVD players were on the market then they would have *serious* encryption & no one would be writing free decoding software.
Isn't CSS based on good 'ol export-level 40-bit RSA with some obscurity thrown in? If so, everyone in the know knew that it would be crackable from day1.
Although putting the CSS decryptor in a software device (DVD softplayers) was a mistake they won't make again...
--
The only differance between SCSI and IDE is the protocol and controller. It's the same PHYSICAL hardware with a diff chipset.
...
Well that and if you want to pay for that 10K rpm drive, since there is no IDE drives at 10K right now
So, are the drives physically the same or aren't they? If they are, why aren't there 10K IDE drives, and why aren't there 40GB SCSI drives?
Despite your years in the HD industry, I think the answer is that they are not actually the same physically. Maybe back in the 4GB era they were, but now "SCSI" is industry shorthand for "designed for always-on server use" and IDE is shorthand for "designed for desktop machines". Not that that difference necessarily affects the speed, but it sure might because it's probably a safe assumption that a "desktop machine" doesn't necessary need great sustained disk performance.
--
(OT) AFAIK, the only way to get NT to spit out OS/2-style *SYS* errors is when the boot process goes horridly wrong. You know another way?
--
Oh, come on. Both Sun and Microsoft signed the Java licencing deal knowing that it would end in a lawsuit. It was bad faith to begin with -- Ballmer pretty much admitted that in a recent Wired interview. Microsoft would have neve entered into that contract if it was all just $3.5M/Year hunky-dory licencing.
.NET and then millions more trying to sell it to corporations that are already using Java.
Microsoft's strategy was to pretend to be all behind Java for a few months, get in a fight, and then make Sun out to be the bad guy to their customers. It would have worked too, if crappy browser applets were the only use for Java (see the AC comments on this page for a Microsoftie who still think that).
Sun's strategy was of course to make Microsoft look like the bad guy and themselves like the good guys who fought off extend-and-embrace. The only difference is that Sun generally succeeded, won the lawsuit, and now Microsoft is stuck spending millions of dollars reinventing Java in the form of
--
Last year, I read an interview with Ballmer in PCWeek or something. He pretty much admitted that there was *lots* of customer interest in better Java integration on Windows machines. But, it was all Sun's fault that there wasn't, so blame them and get them to drop the lawsuit.
.NET, so I doubt you'd hear anything like that now. But it shows that Microsoft has percieved that fighting Sun over Java hurt them. (But anyone following IT knows that Servlets/JSP has been the hottest internal development tool since, well, ASP -- and MS has totally cut themselves out of that market, and not being in a market is the worst thing from MS's own point of view. Their fault for making the same stupid assumption that most Slashdotters have made that Java==Applets.)
.NET is that it supports VB as a real peer on top of the VM, so it allows MS to get their curly brace-fearing allies in on the act.
This was all before
So, now Microsoft has to fight back with a Java work-alike (.NET), but they've lost years with this lawsuit and lots of mindshare. The only really smart thing about
--
Back in '95-'96 they decided to drop OS/2 and UNIX ports of WordPerfect and compete with MS head-to-head on MS's own platform
Actually, the problem was they completely failed to compete with Microsoft on their own platform. WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows was late and buggy. WordPerfect 6 for Windows was way too buggy. WordPerfect for Win32 didn't ship until mid 1996 (Microsoft shipped their first Win32 version in 1994). After all these late, buggy blunders, it's no wonder all most all of their 80% marketshare had disappeared.
Sticking with the miniscule and shrinking UNIX and OS/2 desktop markets wouldn't have helped either WordPerfect or UNIX&OS/2. (Just as the existance of WordPerfect for Linux won't particularly help Linux either.)
--
If it's of any interest to the discussion, Windows 2000 treats the desktop as part of your "home" ("profile") directory structure, and can automatically syncronize it with a central file server.
This is the 'right' way to do it, rather than forcing a user to use a particular directory (although in W2K, "My Documents" is also under the profile directory), or trying to do the impossible -- explain to the end user what the "P:" drive is for.
--
I still remember the "old days" [not so old, really]. Before MS quit wasting their time going after friends sharing software. The days where Microsoft threatened (and, I believe, implemented in early betas) to include a phone home feature in Chicago that would report a scan of the users hard drive. I don't think I kept the magazines that discussed it (stuff from '94 is just a little out of date).
Har -- In the "old days" Microsoft was one of the most pro-piracy companies around. MS-Office going from a 10% to a 90% marketshare was driven almost purely by give-away copies and casual piracy. The only anti-piracy feature they ever bothered implementing was the licence key, and even then many products had a 1111-11111... back door.
Now, we have the "new days" coming up -- Office is already registration locked for home/small office users, and the next version will require a licence key server for corporate use. OEM CDs are bios-locked now. Whistler will implement a registration scheme like Office, perhaps even for corporate users and servers.
(As for the Chicago Phone Home feature, that actually shipped as the "registration wizard" in W95. It was completely optional and scanned for certain select programs, mostly Microsoft ones but also DOS WordPerfect and Lotus Notes.)
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If so, that's a profoundly smart way to work around X's limitations, as soon as OGL support is more universal, that is.
Unfortunately tho, that approach only helps E (unless Enlightenment is becoming a 'desktop environment' API like Gnome/KDE). and doesn't address the fundamental problems due to X's archaic nature. I suppose it will take a "X11R7" or something to provide a richer 2D API to all apps.
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I think the problem is that X drawing primatives are too small to be accelerated efficiently by cards designed for the Win32 GDI and Apple QuickDraw.
It seems that he is bypassing the X drawing layer somehow ("Raster showed us comparisons between X-accelerated displays and EVAS accelerated displays"). How that works with other X apps and the normal X feature set would be interesting.
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The AMC Kabuki in SF has a DTS 9.1 system installed. (The only film I've seen that used it was "12 Monkeys" and that was few years ago.)
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