I kind of agree with you but it's still an alternative and while AMD's products aren't intel killers they are very solid.
Ultimately, in a free market, AMD will offer processors with almost identical performance at an almost identical price. AMD has enough credibility to do that and then it becomes a different matter, who includes chip id? who's chipset uses rambus memory? Who uses closed chipset hardware which increases the over all cost? Who will produce another chip I can put in my current motherboard? (Intel has burned me with the Socket8 and the PII slot now...) Who supports SMP?
Intel is getting lazy anymore, the PII is really just a PPro in a differ box with MMX. The PPro wasn't that much better than the pentium. The P3 is humorous. If AMD can cleanly beat Intel with the k7 it will be good for the industry. I'm not holding my breath though because it will probably be a draw...
What this means is that linux is taking root within IBM.. The second IBM starts to canabalize something it's in.
IBM is way too big to focus 100% on something. OS/2 users know this first hand. The people within IBM who talk to the press are seldom technical people, they are seldom technically competant... This was one guy and linux probably competes with what he sells, he struggled and struggled to learn his product or get funding for it or something and now a free system is going to step on his turf? Not in his mind yet. This will get worse, IBM makes a lot of products that compete with linux and the people in those organizations are going to resist it. IBM also hires a huge number of "programmers" who only know Visual Studio and MFC, wait until you hear what they are going to say about linux when they start talking, it will boil your blood. This all just means that people are noticing linux and people are being expected to support it, it's really good news.
In some respects his statments are correct, I don't think most thinkpad customers would be into linux at this point. Even with gnome and kde and staroffice and all the great stuff, it's still a little nerd oriented. On the server end, linux is awesome but it still hasn't proved itself under heavy fire, IBM ran the olympic site with absolutely huge amounts of traffic and it all kind of worked. Linux has run some big sites but not that big, yet. The people who pulled off the really big stuff will be the last to accept linux.
Apple values their OS as one of their crown jewels, this is an incredible step in the right direction for them. It's not perfect and there are still going to be tons of anti-mac biggots but this is an incredible move on their part.
Ignoring the few license restrictions, if you write a finder then you've essentially got the complete source to a MacOS. Which means that if you're a mac user and your motivated enough, your platform will outlive windows, be, and all the other closed systems regardless of Apple's fate (which looks remarkably good compared to 2 years ago)
We can argue and discuss the limits and the problems (I'm surprised how many people are worried about using up all the OSS talent, like the pool is shallow or something...or like anyone does it for any other reason than because they want to) but if you or your org. uses macs then you can now mold mac to better fit your organization, fill your needs, etc.. I used to use OS/2 and I've wondered if I still would or where it would stand if it was OSSed, I'm inclined to believe I'd still have it on a partition.
We're winning the war. The only stumbling block I can see right now is the potential that MS would wake up and release their source code with an even more liberal license... Fortune 500 would be right back in their camp unless the code is so twisted that it is useless. Congratulations apple and congratulations mac users. This is becoming the only way to compete and competition is good, MS spends a billion dollars a year on OS R&D and they are getting beat by Linux and soon they will be getting beat by Linux and Darwin... If it works, I bet they will open the license even more.
Quit dreamin' bud. Be either doesn't want to spend the money to support G3s or they have reasons from intel not to. The specs aren't that secret and it's not that hard without them (OSS linux guys are doing it...) Especially since they have all this talent to create such a superior platform...
Does full support from apple consist of money?
My bet is that funds are tight at be, but that's just a guess.
That is true. While I personally have never worked in techsupport and I generally respect the people who do (it sounds like a tedious and often boring job) I think they are ticking timebombs.
Take the standard 3 tier model. Level one people answer the phone and follow a procedure which involved them taking down user information and plugging it in to an expert system to try and diagnose the problem, I equate this to putting groceries into the bags. Sometimes a little more skill is needed but you can often give this job to a highschool dropout who has never touched a computer before. If you're a more advanced user I imagine that unless you have some special gift of patience, you'll blow a fuse at this job after a while.
Level 2, these are supposed to be more sophisticated tech guys but are often only slightly more advanced than level 1 guys. They know the standard problems and some tricks usually. Depending on the company, these guys can just end up being middle men who play keep away. The level 3 guys are in development and they don't need to spend time doing techsupport so the level 2 guys do everything they can to keep the caller from reaching level 3, sometimes including sending them back to level 1 to get "more information" Not the same kind of stress but we give our tech support guys a hard time when they esculate problems to us that aren't worthy of our time... heck we give them hell period.. Either way, they've got it comming from both directions, and when you burn the candle at both ends...
People will pay for anything. My guess, and I'm not a UO player, would be that the original owner ran out of fun. Games aren't that much fun when there is no challenge and it sounds like his players are pretty much maxed out. I can't imagine it being $500 of fun to own those characters, I'd be worried about losing them.
I can't help but think that most of the linux people here or at least the vocal members of it don't understand the issue here.
This standard wouldn't be arbitrary and linux wouldn't bend to fit it. It would be a dynamic living standard that would change with the community as the community needs it to. It would be more than a package manager (hopefully it could do some god because there isn't a really good one yet, they've all got flaws) that would just be a tiny piece of the puzzle. It would probably even be an optional piece of the installation. I'm sick of hearing people complain about RPM and say this is a bad standard, you've probably already got RPM capability in your linux dist. as it is even if you never use it.
The deal is that if linux is going to be a full desktop OS it is going to have commercial source-code-less software. To support that there needs to be some kind of baseline, it's just unacceptable to include all the possible libraries with an application (what good are sharedlibs then?) and it's unacceptable for an end user to buy an application and be expected to go find, download, and build lesstif to make it run.
Not just will it benefit linux by allowing ISVs to develop software more easily (without worrying about all the 'what ifs' of installing the damn apps) but it will make it easier for OSS to distribute binaries also. And I think it is inevitable, a defacto standard (redhat linux) will become the standard or we can take control of the issue with Redhat's blessing and create a distribution free standard.
I'm willing to say the a Linux99 compatible machine can deal with RPMs, has QT (if they ever release the free version), GTK+ 1.2, GNOME 1.0, KDE 1.1, glibc, JDK 1.1.7, and lesstif on it in working order. I'm also willing to say that linux99 apps can be gnome or kde compliant but need neither to run. Essentially we'd pick some libs, name them with linux99 in the name and put them in when you install, you could upgrade to newer versions without breaking anything. Next year we will change it to match the new landscape. As component ware becomes more of a reality we can add mozilla and other components to the standard (you will need to have a mozilla component to run certain apps.)
This doesn't sound so bad to me, sure it might install a few megs of libraries I'm not fond of but if it's optional I won't install it if I don't need it. I'd much rather be able to just install and run StarOffice, Corel WordPerfect, RealAudio, Netscape, or whatever other apps on my linux box than save a few megs or be tied to redhat linux. Or spend hours trying to force some application to work on my machine. And if I never buy any binary apps then I don't need it but I'll probably end up installing most of the linux99 standard simply because I'll need parts of it for a lot of OSS apps.
Seriously, there are a lot of very intelligent Russians, I'm the first to admit that but this just sounds a little too good to be true. Has anyone here visited Russia?
'Father of Soviet supercomputing' !? Everything I have heard and seen said that Soviet Supercomputing was a smuggling operation. Bring in the fastest workstations they could get from the west. I just find it very hard to believe. Over the past few days this unheard of group has taken credit for inventing pipelining, superscaler chips, EPIC, parallel processing, and some compiler technology. Just a little too good to be true.
Look at the efforts AMD, Cyrix, NexGen, etc. put in to cloning 486 and pentium chips, now some new group from a country that is practically third world is going to beat them to the punch with an IA64 design that is 2-3x faster?? There was a lot of top tallent, money and work put into just matching Intel's processor speed.
It just doesn't smell right to me, they might have a design but their performance claims are lies. Their claims to have invented a lot of that technology are also suspect in my mind. This kind of thing has happened before, even Exponential boasted of inflated performance numbers, they didn't exactly take their investors money and run but they didn't deliver anything. They may have a top chip team but not good enough to beat Intel by that much, Intel (regardless of what you think of their products) has some brilliant designers.
My point was that you don't get anything for free as a developer. The claim was that developers got free upgrades, etc.. they don't. It's not a terrible deal but it's still a ot more than linux.
I don't know that they are worse than MS but they are in the same league (as is any other for-profit software house)
Be isn't ready for primetime, not to offend anybody but it doesn't have that many apps. It won't run on much hardware. When you raise that issue, the classical response is that Be is still at the geek level and it is pre-1.0. I agree with that, it is pre-1.0, so why then is Be trying to ride on the linux hype or even suggesting preloads? To make a buck. I don't remember ever seeing beta copies of windows preloaded.
The developers network is another prime example, after I forked over my hard earned money for the OS and the compiler (which didn't even have a debugger and didn't have a java VM like they had hinted on the website) I find out I'm expected to pay money to be treated like a real developer?!? I was a little angered by that and the response was that Be is still early in the game, it's for the 'hardcore' fans now.
Be has promise, but they have more than enough hype to go around and this is just another stunt by them to try and make some bucks. No different than anything MS would do.
I wish 'em luck. The poor bastards are grasping at whatever they can think of.
I can't remember too many proprietary systems with their own custom language that were successful. Plan 9 and Aleph is running wild! So is MVS and the PL/_ family of languages. MS has such a good track record at engineering this kind of thing too.
It sounds crappy, I don't think I'm ready to move against them though. It's going to hurt them more than anybody else, they will spend moer money on software and pass that on to consumers and stock holders who then act according to free market economics. It's also notable that a name wasn't associated with the post. I understand not wanting to reveal company secrets but this could also just be a rumor designed to make sprint look bad. (they could have picked a larger focus group that actually has more power.. but.)
If it is real and I think it's possible, I'd want to know what the exact reasons were and not the supposed reasons. That sounds like an explicit clause excluding a specific group of software. I would think that if they were out to insure themselves and have the lawsuit option as well as the 24-7 quick support that they could word it in a manner that wouldn't prevent GPLed software explicitly.
Now at IBM (standard disclaimer) I've heard the (L)GPL issure rehashed a number of times and it hinges on what the meaning of use is. GPL doesn't outline what it means to use a GPLed product. It sounds stupid but lawyers take that kind of stuff seriously (ie: Clinton and what sex means) I've been told by some people that I should remove emacs, cygwin32, linux, info-zip, etc.. from my computer until an IPL comes and gives the ok sign. I've also been told that as long as the GPLed software doesn't produce something that we ship or get shipped with a product then I'm cool so I can use emacs but not bison or gcc. I've also been told to do what it takes to get the job done by a few people which I'll take to mean what I need it to mean.. When your pockets are deep enough the tight rope you walk on becomes very narrow and you take careful steps because you fall a lot further. In the warped minds of those who practice law, RMS or Linus or somebody is totally likely to ignore the use of GCC or linux by small software house but when Microsoft or IBM uses it the lure of billions of dollars cause them to fabricate a law suit.
It's also possible that this could be a new wave of anti-free software activity by companies that stand to lose a lot of money. The OSF kind of did this a few years ago. (You'll probably have to see the world through my twisted mind to fully agree with me on this one..) Some (BIG) companies got together and they produced a brand name and got more big powerful companies to buy into it, then they went out with the non-OSF excluding contracts so that some projects were exclusively 'Open' even though 'Open' was mostly a sham. There are still products and companies that brag about 'Open' products even though the OSF is hardly open, it's a codeword used to make a sale. It was a big market protection gimmick (not exactly, but that's pretty much what a lot of it was) the OSF wasn't the cheapest or easiest organization to get involved with and a lot of their technology wasn't so hot but they could force you into using it because you needed the brand to sell your product.
It's probably just the stupidity of some suit wearing chump who doesn't understand technology who thinks that having the source code makes it wildly easier to break through security or something.
That isn't the motherboard you buy for your home PC. Motorolla doesn't sell it as one and they won't support it as one. None the less it might be fun to play with, but at that price? It's like they want PowerPC to die.
Neither Alpha nor PowerPC is in any position to take over the market but they could at least make it look like they're trying. If I could buy an alpha motherboard or powerpc motherboard (and I own an alpha, and it's not nearly as much bang for the buck when it's all said and done) for close to the same price as an intel board I'd buy 10.
That motorolla board looks like it is all standard comodity parts, PCI, IDE, SCSI, ethernet, nothing custom or special, why does it cost so much?
I don't remember advocating piracy in my message. I'm not. I'm just saying that they aren't losing money like they think they are and that if they want it to go away then they are going to have to change the way they do things.
As long as competent hobbiest programmers and engineers can copy ROMs and build emulators that work well it's going to happen. The only way I could see them avoiding it without changing thier practices would be by pricing games so low that it wasn't worth the effort to do and even then there would be a small segment that would do it just for fun. They would never do that as long as they can get away charging $40+ for games (a lot more than that for good N64 games) Not advocating piracy just saying that it's a financial issue and as long as it is it will happen.
About how much would this cost? I've been kicking around the idea of buying an IBM PC110 lately, I know linux installs on it and they are getting pretty cheap. If I could build a pentium based PC/104 for a similar price I'd be willing to do that and help come up with docs and what have you. I fugre you need at least a pentium if you're gonna play music on it.
I have a hard time believing that many emulator authors are in it for the 'elegance of it.' Too many of them have code specifically to read ROMs that can only be created by pirating. The Nintendo is such a fine application programming environment too, why program linux apps when you can program for an emulator that runs under linux?
They're fun too, I've got a few hundred apple II games on disk that I love to play and they're probably illegal and I've played some SNES ROMs. It's wonderful, you are playing real video games on linux... but to use the argument that RMS or ESR would use, emulators are just symptonms of the problem with commercialized software. N64 and PSX games cost $40 or even more, you buy a few and you've spent more on software than you have on the hardware. That is a lot of money. Open it up, let people port games to various platforms and then form distribution companies that copy them onto cartridges or CDs for a fee. As it is now, the N64 and PSX are close enough that it's the software that decides which machine most people get not which machine is better. If they really want to sell hardware then why don't they sell PC and Mac products that give them the features they need to program those games while allowing programmers to opensource games?
When you think about it, piracy is more often not because of cost. The people who do the most pirating usually can't buy the software they are stealing. The industry sees this as a loss of money but it's a loss of money that they would never get in the first place because these people can't afford their software. What do they expect to happen? They market these machines at teenagers and young-adults who can't afford them, then some of them have the technical savvy to figure out how they work and copy it so they can play for free.
I've finally achieved the position in life where I can actually afford to buy that kind of stuff and it doesn't seem worth it to me, that's not to say that I don't think Zelda is an awesome game and I would love to play it through but by the time I buy and N64 and a few games I've spent enough to buy a cheap computer that can do so much more, including emulate those games if I was a pirate, there isn't any decision.
it's not ui features that are the problem, it's the way they are used. You could have the most sophisticated ui features in the world and still have crappy apps. mac programmers tend to be very disciplined about making UIs, windows programmers try to dazzle with the UI.
For example, MS Visual C++ has drag-and-drop text. It's a glitzy marketing checkbox feature, in practice is sucks, half the time you end up dragging text when you try to select it. That kind of feature really doesn't but much and it causes more harm than good.
I think that the mac has a simple design and simple interface. There is one mouse button (now everyone is going to start crying about mouse buttons...) a click needs to be the most commonly intended action and most mac programmers understand that. On Windows, you click on button and get a menu, you click the other and hopefully it does what you want it to, who knows though all the windows apps are different..
Then take button bars, until fairly recently, they were all the rage in windows apps. You fire up Word and you had 3 or 4 rows of buttons, probably 50 in all. It looks like the application can do a lot, you see all those buttons and think, 'damn, this thing has a lot of function..' fact of the matter is, most of them have menu entries and the menus are used more often because you can't figure out what the buttons do and you can't pick the right button very accurately any faster than using a menu. MS has realized this and the trend is away from the really complex button bars. Mac never had that, I can't think of a single app that had a UI feature simply because it was cool. As more sophisticated users of computers, we might be able to get some benefit out of those buttons, it's probably impossible to measure because it is so small, weigh that against the confusion it gives new users.
Mac apps typically have one or two routes to a problem's solution. If you want to spell check there is the hot key or the menu item. Windows apps often have many more routes, hot key, menu item, popup menu item, status bar listbox, button bar, maybe more. The programmers of the world think this flexability is great but it confuses users.
There are tons of other things, I could go on. I think the best thing to do would be to get your hands on a mac and do some work with some applications you've never used before and then try the same thing on windows. The mac doesn't have all the wiz-bang goodies and features windows might but its apps are amazing, and I've been a PC user and owner for 20 years. When you really look at it without bias, the mac is still probably 5 years ahead of windows if windows is even moving in the right direction.
most computers come with some sort of serial numbers, often readable to the bios. Your ethernet card has a unique id. If you've got a static IP you've got a unique id. etc.. What sucks is it will probably raise the price of their hardware.
Why does this topic always come up? I keep hearing it like a paradigm needs to change every few years or else it is less than efficient.
I think we should give up WIMP when there is a compelling reason, we can spend a lot of time thinking about it but until we have some better ideas I don't think we should discount it. STAR is 20 years old?!? Big deal, verbal communication is 50,000 years old, should we switch paradigms? Come to think of it, writing and language are ancient, it's time to move on...
Voice dictation is a key, it's on the way but it's not a paradigm shift. I think that as long as we are visually displaying information (and being the visual animals that we are this trend will probably last quite a while) be it on a screen or in a holographic form or whatever there is going to be a tendancy to touch it or point at it, to group it visually, to move it around, and that stuff is all WIMP ideology. We may change the way things look or change their names but the ideas are still the same. You can replace the mouse with a trackball or a touchscreen or even something that tracks eye movement but it's still the same paradigm and I don't think it's very bad for the technology we have.
even is startrek they still have screens with data divided up and grouped (windows) and buttons to push to do things (icons).
OS/2 is potentially rock solid. If you use it as a desktop OS for everyday use you will eventually cause it to do something which could be equated with a crash unless you have superior self discipline and resist changing things.
WPS has a few bugs, die hards will tell you that making WPS crash is different from making OS/2 crash. I would agree with that if there was any way to make your system come back without a reboot. Doing exotic object operations with WPS can cause crashes.
I've caused the whole system to lockup hard programming the serial interface and doing lowlevel serial access in a DOS box. This would be a misbehaving application taking down the whole system.
There are also ways to screw up your system.ini files and scramble your entire desktop, I couldn't tell you an easy way off the top of my head but I used OS/2 daily for about 4 years and I made it happen about every 6-9 months... I was usually taxing the system but sometimes this just happened when I was doing an everyday task, like installing an application. This isn't a crash but it sure as hell feels like one.
Other than that, OS/2 is remarkably solid. If you have a job for it and you get it working, it will stay working until you change something. If you put it in to protectedmodeonly, it might not crash ever. Even the problems above aren't that bad, IBM could have fixed them (may have, but I doubt it with OS/2's funding) if they wanted to and had the money. OS/2 life and death (or near death if that idea offends you) can be summed up with only a few problems:
Initial goals were way too high. Some upoer managment was expecting OS/2 2.x to take over a majority of the market. It failed to do this and its funding was cut. As early as OS/2 3.0, before win95 even came out, they were cutting support staff (OS/2's customer support was world class at this time) and they started reeling in projects. PenOS/2 never saw full completion, OS/2 for PPC, etc.. I'll ignore the beaurocratic problems that start cropping up when this happens and your development team becomes a divided group at war with the other half..
Developers weren't embraced as partners until way too late in the process. Good cheap tools were hard to come by and IBM underestimated the value of cheesy 'visual development' and went ahead with visual development. (If you compare Visual Age to MS Visual, there is no comparison, Visual Age is 100x better as a visual development evironment. The thing is, people don't want to program visually so MS Visual sells and all it really is is an integrated resource editor. IBM spent tons of money and time building Visual Age when they could have made a product with half the effort that would have been good enough)
IBM never grasped the legacy market and it's true importance. They bent over backwards to support legacy code but instead of supporting it as a way to move forward they crippled the product to support it. Single Message Queue is a legacy issue, 16bit fragilness is a legacy issue, win16 support with no migration path to PM, etc.. This is something that linux has mastered, a.out -> elf transition and libc -> glibc were done beautifully.
I've only heard rumors, but I understand that OS/2 had an incredibly complex build process. Some components hadn't been compiled since v1.x years and might not be compilable any more. other components requiring different compilers and linkers to compile correctly. A really nasty process. Doesn't matter how good you are or how much the people love your product, if it is tough to compile then you will screw it up at some point, there is no excuse for this.
A lot of it was stupidity. IBM paid Borland to port Borland C++ to OS/2, this was good because Borland dominated the market at that time but IBM never secured any kind of future development so Borland produced a product and ran with the money instead of upgrading it. It also jaded the competition because now they think that IBM is partners with Borland and so they will have a disadvantage or worse yet, they feel entitled to a pay check from IBM to port their product because IBM is paying other people to do it.
I the sad thing is that there are a lot of devlopers who put in long hours and long weeks building OS/2 and fighting to get code added and OS/2 does have a loyal core set of users and the lessons never seem to be learned by IBM. OS/2 was really a labor of love for a lot of people and IBM just throws it away. It's only a matter of time before IBM dives into that market again, it is inevitable. Hopefully they will learn from those mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly are the PII's lower? They've got the exact same core as the PPro.
Ultimately, in a free market, AMD will offer processors with almost identical performance at an almost identical price. AMD has enough credibility to do that and then it becomes a different matter, who includes chip id? who's chipset uses rambus memory? Who uses closed chipset hardware which increases the over all cost? Who will produce another chip I can put in my current motherboard? (Intel has burned me with the Socket8 and the PII slot now...) Who supports SMP?
Intel is getting lazy anymore, the PII is really just a PPro in a differ box with MMX. The PPro wasn't that much better than the pentium. The P3 is humorous. If AMD can cleanly beat Intel with the k7 it will be good for the industry. I'm not holding my breath though because it will probably be a draw...
IBM is way too big to focus 100% on something. OS/2 users know this first hand. The people within IBM who talk to the press are seldom technical people, they are seldom technically competant... This was one guy and linux probably competes with what he sells, he struggled and struggled to learn his product or get funding for it or something and now a free system is going to step on his turf? Not in his mind yet. This will get worse, IBM makes a lot of products that compete with linux and the people in those organizations are going to resist it. IBM also hires a huge number of "programmers" who only know Visual Studio and MFC, wait until you hear what they are going to say about linux when they start talking, it will boil your blood. This all just means that people are noticing linux and people are being expected to support it, it's really good news.
In some respects his statments are correct, I don't think most thinkpad customers would be into linux at this point. Even with gnome and kde and staroffice and all the great stuff, it's still a little nerd oriented. On the server end, linux is awesome but it still hasn't proved itself under heavy fire, IBM ran the olympic site with absolutely huge amounts of traffic and it all kind of worked. Linux has run some big sites but not that big, yet. The people who pulled off the really big stuff will be the last to accept linux.
Ignoring the few license restrictions, if you write a finder then you've essentially got the complete source to a MacOS. Which means that if you're a mac user and your motivated enough, your platform will outlive windows, be, and all the other closed systems regardless of Apple's fate (which looks remarkably good compared to 2 years ago)
We can argue and discuss the limits and the problems (I'm surprised how many people are worried about using up all the OSS talent, like the pool is shallow or something...or like anyone does it for any other reason than because they want to) but if you or your org. uses macs then you can now mold mac to better fit your organization, fill your needs, etc.. I used to use OS/2 and I've wondered if I still would or where it would stand if it was OSSed, I'm inclined to believe I'd still have it on a partition.
We're winning the war. The only stumbling block I can see right now is the potential that MS would wake up and release their source code with an even more liberal license... Fortune 500 would be right back in their camp unless the code is so twisted that it is useless. Congratulations apple and congratulations mac users. This is becoming the only way to compete and competition is good, MS spends a billion dollars a year on OS R&D and they are getting beat by Linux and soon they will be getting beat by Linux and Darwin... If it works, I bet they will open the license even more.
Does full support from apple consist of money?
My bet is that funds are tight at be, but that's just a guess.
what's scary about it? Don't support it if it doesn't benefit you or entertain you.
Take the standard 3 tier model. Level one people answer the phone and follow a procedure which involved them taking down user information and plugging it in to an expert system to try and diagnose the problem, I equate this to putting groceries into the bags. Sometimes a little more skill is needed but you can often give this job to a highschool dropout who has never touched a computer before. If you're a more advanced user I imagine that unless you have some special gift of patience, you'll blow a fuse at this job after a while.
Level 2, these are supposed to be more sophisticated tech guys but are often only slightly more advanced than level 1 guys. They know the standard problems and some tricks usually. Depending on the company, these guys can just end up being middle men who play keep away. The level 3 guys are in development and they don't need to spend time doing techsupport so the level 2 guys do everything they can to keep the caller from reaching level 3, sometimes including sending them back to level 1 to get "more information"
Not the same kind of stress but we give our tech support guys a hard time when they esculate problems to us that aren't worthy of our time... heck we give them hell period.. Either way, they've got it comming from both directions, and when you burn the candle at both ends...
People will pay for anything. My guess, and I'm not a UO player, would be that the original owner ran out of fun. Games aren't that much fun when there is no challenge and it sounds like his players are pretty much maxed out. I can't imagine it being $500 of fun to own those characters, I'd be worried about losing them.
This standard wouldn't be arbitrary and linux wouldn't bend to fit it. It would be a dynamic living standard that would change with the community as the community needs it to. It would be more than a package manager (hopefully it could do some god because there isn't a really good one yet, they've all got flaws) that would just be a tiny piece of the puzzle. It would probably even be an optional piece of the installation. I'm sick of hearing people complain about RPM and say this is a bad standard, you've probably already got RPM capability in your linux dist. as it is even if you never use it.
The deal is that if linux is going to be a full desktop OS it is going to have commercial source-code-less software. To support that there needs to be some kind of baseline, it's just unacceptable to include all the possible libraries with an application (what good are sharedlibs then?) and it's unacceptable for an end user to buy an application and be expected to go find, download, and build lesstif to make it run.
Not just will it benefit linux by allowing ISVs to develop software more easily (without worrying about all the 'what ifs' of installing the damn apps) but it will make it easier for OSS to distribute binaries also. And I think it is inevitable, a defacto standard (redhat linux) will become the standard or we can take control of the issue with Redhat's blessing and create a distribution free standard.
I'm willing to say the a Linux99 compatible machine can deal with RPMs, has QT (if they ever release the free version), GTK+ 1.2, GNOME 1.0, KDE 1.1, glibc, JDK 1.1.7, and lesstif on it in working order. I'm also willing to say that linux99 apps can be gnome or kde compliant but need neither to run. Essentially we'd pick some libs, name them with linux99 in the name and put them in when you install, you could upgrade to newer versions without breaking anything. Next year we will change it to match the new landscape. As component ware becomes more of a reality we can add mozilla and other components to the standard (you will need to have a mozilla component to run certain apps.)
This doesn't sound so bad to me, sure it might install a few megs of libraries I'm not fond of but if it's optional I won't install it if I don't need it. I'd much rather be able to just install and run StarOffice, Corel WordPerfect, RealAudio, Netscape, or whatever other apps on my linux box than save a few megs or be tied to redhat linux.
Or spend hours trying to force some application to work on my machine. And if I never buy any binary apps then I don't need it but I'll probably end up installing most of the linux99 standard simply because I'll need parts of it for a lot of OSS apps.
'Father of Soviet supercomputing' !? Everything I have heard and seen said that Soviet Supercomputing was a smuggling operation. Bring in the fastest workstations they could get from the west. I just find it very hard to believe. Over the past few days this unheard of group has taken credit for inventing pipelining, superscaler chips, EPIC, parallel processing, and some compiler technology. Just a little too good to be true.
Look at the efforts AMD, Cyrix, NexGen, etc. put in to cloning 486 and pentium chips, now some new group from a country that is practically third world is going to beat them to the punch with an IA64 design that is 2-3x faster?? There was a lot of top tallent, money and work put into just matching Intel's processor speed.
It just doesn't smell right to me, they might have a design but their performance claims are lies. Their claims to have invented a lot of that technology are also suspect in my mind. This kind of thing has happened before, even Exponential boasted of inflated performance numbers, they didn't exactly take their investors money and run but they didn't deliver anything. They may have a top chip team but not good enough to beat Intel by that much, Intel (regardless of what you think of their products) has some brilliant designers.
My point was that you don't get anything for free as a developer. The claim was that developers got free upgrades, etc.. they don't. It's not a terrible deal but it's still a ot more than linux.
Be isn't ready for primetime, not to offend anybody but it doesn't have that many apps. It won't run on much hardware. When you raise that issue, the classical response is that Be is still at the geek level and it is pre-1.0. I agree with that, it is pre-1.0, so why then is Be trying to ride on the linux hype or even suggesting preloads? To make a buck. I don't remember ever seeing beta copies of windows preloaded.
The developers network is another prime example, after I forked over my hard earned money for the OS and the compiler (which didn't even have a debugger and didn't have a java VM like they had hinted on the website) I find out I'm expected to pay money to be treated like a real developer?!? I was a little angered by that and the response was that Be is still early in the game, it's for the 'hardcore' fans now.
Be has promise, but they have more than enough hype to go around and this is just another stunt by them to try and make some bucks. No different than anything MS would do.
I can't remember too many proprietary systems with their own custom language that were successful.
Plan 9 and Aleph is running wild! So is MVS and the PL/_ family of languages. MS has such a good track record at engineering this kind of thing too.
If it is real and I think it's possible, I'd want to know what the exact reasons were and not the supposed reasons. That sounds like an explicit clause excluding a specific group of software. I would think that if they were out to insure themselves and have the lawsuit option as well as the 24-7 quick support that they could word it in a manner that wouldn't prevent GPLed software explicitly.
Now at IBM (standard disclaimer) I've heard the (L)GPL issure rehashed a number of times and it hinges on what the meaning of use is. GPL doesn't outline what it means to use a GPLed product. It sounds stupid but lawyers take that kind of stuff seriously (ie: Clinton and what sex means) I've been told by some people that I should remove emacs, cygwin32, linux, info-zip, etc.. from my computer until an IPL comes and gives the ok sign. I've also been told that as long as the GPLed software doesn't produce something that we ship or get shipped with a product then I'm cool so I can use emacs but not bison or gcc. I've also been told to do what it takes to get the job done by a few people which I'll take to mean what I need it to mean.. When your pockets are deep enough the tight rope you walk on becomes very narrow and you take careful steps because you fall a lot further. In the warped minds of those who practice law, RMS or Linus or somebody is totally likely to ignore the use of GCC or linux by small software house but when Microsoft or IBM uses it the lure of billions of dollars cause them to fabricate a law suit.
It's also possible that this could be a new wave of anti-free software activity by companies that stand to lose a lot of money. The OSF kind of did this a few years ago. (You'll probably have to see the world through my twisted mind to fully agree with me on this one..) Some (BIG) companies got together and they produced a brand name and got more big powerful companies to buy into it, then they went out with the non-OSF excluding contracts so that some projects were exclusively 'Open' even though 'Open' was mostly a sham. There are still products and companies that brag about 'Open' products even though the OSF is hardly open, it's a codeword used to make a sale. It was a big market protection gimmick (not exactly, but that's pretty much what a lot of it was) the OSF wasn't the cheapest or easiest organization to get involved with and a lot of their technology wasn't so hot but they could force you into using it because you needed the brand to sell your product.
It's probably just the stupidity of some suit wearing chump who doesn't understand technology who thinks that having the source code makes it wildly easier to break through security or something.
Neither Alpha nor PowerPC is in any position to take over the market but they could at least make it look like they're trying. If I could buy an alpha motherboard or powerpc motherboard (and I own an alpha, and it's not nearly as much bang for the buck when it's all said and done) for close to the same price as an intel board I'd buy 10.
That motorolla board looks like it is all standard comodity parts, PCI, IDE, SCSI, ethernet, nothing custom or special, why does it cost so much?
As long as competent hobbiest programmers and engineers can copy ROMs and build emulators that work well it's going to happen. The only way I could see them avoiding it without changing thier practices would be by pricing games so low that it wasn't worth the effort to do and even then there would be a small segment that would do it just for fun. They would never do that as long as they can get away charging $40+ for games (a lot more than that for good N64 games) Not advocating piracy just saying that it's a financial issue and as long as it is it will happen.
About how much would this cost? I've been kicking around the idea of buying an IBM PC110 lately, I know linux installs on it and they are getting pretty cheap.
If I could build a pentium based PC/104 for a similar price I'd be willing to do that and help come up with docs and what have you. I fugre you need at least a pentium if you're gonna play music on it.
They're fun too, I've got a few hundred apple II games on disk that I love to play and they're probably illegal and I've played some SNES ROMs. It's wonderful, you are playing real video games on linux... but to use the argument that RMS or ESR would use, emulators are just symptonms of the problem with commercialized software. N64 and PSX games cost $40 or even more, you buy a few and you've spent more on software than you have on the hardware. That is a lot of money. Open it up, let people port games to various platforms and then form distribution companies that copy them onto cartridges or CDs for a fee. As it is now, the N64 and PSX are close enough that it's the software that decides which machine most people get not which machine is better. If they really want to sell hardware then why don't they sell PC and Mac products that give them the features they need to program those games while allowing programmers to opensource games?
When you think about it, piracy is more often not because of cost. The people who do the most pirating usually can't buy the software they are stealing. The industry sees this as a loss of money but it's a loss of money that they would never get in the first place because these people can't afford their software. What do they expect to happen? They market these machines at teenagers and young-adults who can't afford them, then some of them have the technical savvy to figure out how they work and copy it so they can play for free.
I've finally achieved the position in life where I can actually afford to buy that kind of stuff and it doesn't seem worth it to me, that's not to say that I don't think Zelda is an awesome game and I would love to play it through but by the time I buy and N64 and a few games I've spent enough to buy a cheap computer that can do so much more, including emulate those games if I was a pirate, there isn't any decision.
For example, MS Visual C++ has drag-and-drop text. It's a glitzy marketing checkbox feature, in practice is sucks, half the time you end up dragging text when you try to select it. That kind of feature really doesn't but much and it causes more harm than good.
I think that the mac has a simple design and simple interface. There is one mouse button (now everyone is going to start crying about mouse buttons...) a click needs to be the most commonly intended action and most mac programmers understand that. On Windows, you click on button and get a menu, you click the other and hopefully it does what you want it to, who knows though all the windows apps are different..
Then take button bars, until fairly recently, they were all the rage in windows apps. You fire up Word and you had 3 or 4 rows of buttons, probably 50 in all. It looks like the application can do a lot, you see all those buttons and think, 'damn, this thing has a lot of function..' fact of the matter is, most of them have menu entries and the menus are used more often because you can't figure out what the buttons do and you can't pick the right button very accurately any faster than using a menu. MS has realized this and the trend is away from the really complex button bars. Mac never had that, I can't think of a single app that had a UI feature simply because it was cool. As more sophisticated users of computers, we might be able to get some benefit out of those buttons, it's probably impossible to measure because it is so small, weigh that against the confusion it gives new users.
Mac apps typically have one or two routes to a problem's solution. If you want to spell check there is the hot key or the menu item. Windows apps often have many more routes, hot key, menu item, popup menu item, status bar listbox, button bar, maybe more. The programmers of the world think this flexability is great but it confuses users.
There are tons of other things, I could go on. I think the best thing to do would be to get your hands on a mac and do some work with some applications you've never used before and then try the same thing on windows. The mac doesn't have all the wiz-bang goodies and features windows might but its apps are amazing, and I've been a PC user and owner for 20 years. When you really look at it without bias, the mac is still probably 5 years ahead of windows if windows is even moving in the right direction.
Where are they?
most computers come with some sort of serial numbers, often readable to the bios.
Your ethernet card has a unique id.
If you've got a static IP you've got a unique id.
etc.. What sucks is it will probably raise the price of their hardware.
I think we should give up WIMP when there is a compelling reason, we can spend a lot of time thinking about it but until we have some better ideas I don't think we should discount it. STAR is 20 years old?!? Big deal, verbal communication is 50,000 years old, should we switch paradigms?
Come to think of it, writing and language are ancient, it's time to move on...
Voice dictation is a key, it's on the way but it's not a paradigm shift. I think that as long as we are visually displaying information (and being the visual animals that we are this trend will probably last quite a while) be it on a screen or in a holographic form or whatever there is going to be a tendancy to touch it or point at it, to group it visually, to move it around, and that stuff is all WIMP ideology. We may change the way things look or change their names but the ideas are still the same. You can replace the mouse with a trackball or a touchscreen or even something that tracks eye movement but it's still the same paradigm and I don't think it's very bad for the technology we have.
even is startrek they still have screens with data divided up and grouped (windows) and buttons to push to do things (icons).
WPS has a few bugs, die hards will tell you that making WPS crash is different from making OS/2 crash. I would agree with that if there was any way to make your system come back without a reboot. Doing exotic object operations with WPS can cause crashes.
I've caused the whole system to lockup hard programming the serial interface and doing lowlevel serial access in a DOS box. This would be a misbehaving application taking down the whole system.
There are also ways to screw up your system
Other than that, OS/2 is remarkably solid. If you have a job for it and you get it working, it will stay working until you change something. If you put it in to protectedmodeonly, it might not crash ever. Even the problems above aren't that bad, IBM could have fixed them (may have, but I doubt it with OS/2's funding) if they wanted to and had the money. OS/2 life and death (or near death if that idea offends you) can be summed up with only a few problems:
A lot of it was stupidity. IBM paid Borland to port Borland C++ to OS/2, this was good because Borland dominated the market at that time but IBM never secured any kind of future development so Borland produced a product and ran with the money instead of upgrading it. It also jaded the competition because now they think that IBM is partners with Borland and so they will have a disadvantage or worse yet, they feel entitled to a pay check from IBM to port their product because IBM is paying other people to do it.
I the sad thing is that there are a lot of devlopers who put in long hours and long weeks building OS/2 and fighting to get code added and OS/2 does have a loyal core set of users and the lessons never seem to be learned by IBM. OS/2 was really a labor of love for a lot of people and IBM just throws it away. It's only a matter of time before IBM dives into that market again, it is inevitable. Hopefully they will learn from those mistakes.