Just because some people find they need to upload/download pictures of themselves and others and their dogs doesn't mean they have no right to the bandwidth. If they pay for it then they can do what they want with it. Many people don't need computers but they have them, I would rather have them use AOL and call tech support than have them call me so I can explain TCP/IP to them.
Ths arguments I've seen about browsers and such being "part" of an operation system are completely idiotic. The "operating system" of a computer is the software that acts as a buffer between the machine's hardware and the software that is going to be run on that hardware. A definition of operating system would be the kernel, device drivers, and APIs. Without a kernel every piece of software on your system would need all of its own hardware controls and functions programmed in. This is how things like Furbys are programmed, they don't have a kernel yet run a program through the processor. Everything else that comes on your floppies and CDs is superflous to the actual operation of the computer, it merely gives the silison something to do. This second layer is the environment. Shells, windowing systems, applications, ect. are all part of this second layer. Many people will classify X or shells as part of the operating system but if I choose a hash or c shell on a Linux kernel I'm still using Linux, if I use AccelX rather than FreeX86 I'm still using Linux. The stuff that comes in an environment can be classified as programs, scripts, shells, sources, and files for the most part. Programs are compiled binary instructions that perform a function or more than one function, scripts on the other hand aren't compiled and require and interpreter (or just run on the kernel like a shell script) in order to work. We all should know what sources are and shells provide users with shortcuts to system commands. Files are the output of programs. I personally think that calling Windows 98 and Linux operating systems is a misnomer. Sun gets it right by calling Solaris an operating environment. Win98 and Linux should also be called environments because they contain much more than a kernel and device drivers. The system on which they operate is respective to their kernel but the interface layer is the environment you're using. Thats my take on it.
I think this M$ shit has gone a little too far when people are demanding source code be released. If Coca-cola were deemed a monopoly would they have to give up the recipe to Coke? No they wouldn't, a company is allowed to own as personal property anything it creates or buys. If it were any other company in any other market no one would give a crap but because it's Microsoft in the computer industry they are trying to take things way too far. I might support a breakup of Microsoft if it was done intelligently and didn't require a bending of rules. Microsoft has a two forms of monopolies currently, both vertical and horizontal which gives them tremendous power in the industry and preventing them from revoking OEM price discounts if an OEM wanted to preintall a different operation system would lessen the horizontal monopoly. The vertical monopoly could only be broken if the company was broken into several different parts but because not all software in produced by Microsoft it isn't a complete monopoly and can't be broken legally. Lets just work on the OEM part and the rest will eventually take care of itself. If Microsoft keeps the OEM discount and can't threaten them with it, more will use linux/freebsd/be. If they just get rid of the OEM discount then the OEMs will start using the alternative OSes that cost much less.
In the game of DTV there is one often overlooked contender, our good friend Coax. Coax cable can deliver (currently) 10Mbps but improvements and refinements of the technology has allowed engineers to squeeze 30Mbps out of coax which is plenty of bandwidth fo both HDTV and NTSC signals on the same wire. Not only does it have the capacity for HDTV it also provides a rather high bandwidth return path for high speed internet. I think if cable companies put the effort into getting their coax up to spec with HDTV they could really get their foot into the market. If they made getting HDTV as easy as getting analog cable consumers would jump all over it. Networks are already moving into the multicast area, take Fox for example (please take Fox!); they have their main network, a sports channel, a channel for mostly syndicated shows, and their "family" channel. This is most likely the rubrick that networks will follow, all their different types of shows on a single channel. Then people like HBO and Showtime will take advantage of the 1920x1080 true HDTV format for movies and special events. None of this affects me too much, all I watch anymore is Cartoon Network, although an HDTV anime station might catch my fancy...
IE was released by some third party company not affiliated with M$ how many of you would really have a problem with using it (besides the fact there's no Linux version)? I use IE5 in Win 98 and I use IE 4.5 in MacOS 8.6. Whenever I'm on a linux box I try not to use Netscape, it turned to shit after 3.01 INMO. When I want to browse the internet I want my browser to load up, not a software suite. WHen IE4 first came out it was trudging down the same path Navigator embarked on, it tried to make everything part of the browser and load it all up at once for you. With IE5 that philosophy has been dropped in lieu of giving you all the software but keeping the browser, email, news, ect. all separate binaries. Netscape insists that 'Communicator' come with absofreakinlutely everything you will possibly use. Besides the programming aspect, IE is much more stable than Communicator is and when I do have it crash on me I can kill the process with a tool like Wintop. When Communicator freezes it takes down the entire interface and a reboot is needed, I can usually salvage an IE crash. As soon as Netscape changed Navigator into Communicator they really screwed up their chances of winning the browser war. Netscape no longer resides on my system because it couldn't keep itself running very long. I'm not M$ fan and if I had an adequate replacement for IE5 I wouldn't use it either. I've seen nothing else comparable and I don't use half functional crap that is "a good idea". Opera has an annoying interface and lacks alot of the usability features I rarely use in IE but would miss them at inoppertune times.
But the free BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) all AFAIK use their own file system that works alot better than ext2, although I don't know if it is journaled. The FreeBSD people don't need to worry much about "missing" GPL software, FreeBSD and the like will run most if not all linux binaries and code is simple to port.
the Apple MessagePad? I recall seeing a nice little app for it called Showmate that would let you control all of your favourite entertainment appliances. The drawback is the Newton's IR signal was weak so you needed to be within ten feet of the device and it only worked with five brands of electronics.
has always tried to be a monopoly. "One World, one web, one program"; if that doesn't raise someone's eyebrows I have no idea what will. Microsoft scares me in many ways, I may not have nightmares of waves of Winborg drones chasing me (all the time) but the thought of what M$ represents frightens me at times. Microsoft used to be a software company way back in the day, now Bill G. has his willy in more places than Bill C. does. At some point in time Microsoft became a media communication company where software was just one of its many divisions. Cable companies, news networks, telephony technologies, satillite internet, set-top internet, ad nauseum. That list could go on for a very long time, it is a list of the proverbial cookie jars M$ hs a hand stuck in. It also seems strange to me they all ways of distributing information to people. Shucks Bill it sorta sounds like you want to have your little logo in the corner of everyone's screens. The monopoly on the desktop is just the tip of what seems to be a quickly growing iceberg. I've read a slew of different comments so far, some people defend Microsoft, some people are dancing in the streets because of this case. I'm concerned this is case is important but its scope is a little bit too narrow to keep this kind of thing from happening. Microsoft has a vertical monopoly on many portions of the software market and a nearly complete horizontal monopoly on the OS market. A horizontal monopoly is where a single company owns a vast majority of resources (like if say one company owned all the oil production in the world, all businesses that rely on petroleum would be at the veritable mercy of this company) that everyone in that market needs. Software developers are dependent on the OS to run their software, when Win 95/98 comes pre-loaded on almost every home system sold in America and around the world software developers accept it as the de facto "standard" and are forced to write software on it or not write software at all (Intel has a similar monopoly but thats an entirely different story). Go down to Best Buy and look for a Linux software section, it doesn't exist, you can find a few distros but that's it. Commercial development companies don't usually write programs for Linux because the cost/return ratio has been extremely small in the past. Microsoft's vertical monopoly comes in the form of their software packages and API platforms. Since they have the OS which is on the bottom rung of the ladder they have ALL of the ins and outs of their system and can release their home brew programming suites that are built around the knowlege of their OS. After programming suites come software packages. Through the years M$ has bought up scores of ideas and technologies that they either hadn't the talent to create or just lacked the initiative. These technologies are released in the form of applications and software suites. Office 97 is a perfect example of this, dozens of purchased technologies all incorporated into the programs along with greater streamlining because the suite programmers have more intimate knowlege of the OS than third party developers do. After these suites come communication packages, in the form of Microsoft Networking (SMB, NetBIOS, NetBEUI, Microsoft DLC, ect.) which come packaged as "features" of the OS. On the other side of these protocols are Windows based servers that have all the same advantages as the clients because everything can be integrated at the OS core level rather than third party add-ons and plug-ins. I would describe Microsoft's economic standpoint as an L-monopoly, they have a strong vertical monopoly and a strong horizontal monopoly. The reason I say this case is too narrow is that the case merely serves to separate the horzontal from the vertical without really breaking up either one. If Microsoft was split up into an OS company and an application company, Visual C++ amd Visual Basic would still exist and be the programming suite of choice for many developers. Office would still exist with it's special API calls that make it faster in just the right ways to keep third party suites from being too impressive. More than just cutting off one of the Hydra's heads this still does nothing for the huge portion of communication media that M$ is buying/partnering with. Disney and AOL are also working on building giant megacorp communication blocs. A redefinition of what a monopoly is and what a trust is would be a more effective way to solve these potentially disterous problems, using Microsoft as an example. If Microsoft is broken up but is allowed to continue (with everyone else) to turn inself into a giant media mogul then no one will be safe. "You can have your car in your favourite colour as long as your favourite colour is black." --Henery Ford As a sidenote to my tediously long rant, some of you may have heard of an operating system called Unix. Some crazy fellas at AT&T's Bell labs invented this way back in the 1970's but the US government reminded AT&T that it was a telecommunications company, not a computer company. When AT&T wasn't allowed to commercially distribute this Unix thing it was given away to colleges around the country. See any inverse correlations here?
What payroll are you on dude? If there was EVER an example of a monopoly it's Microsoft. It's a known fact that any OEM that uses x86 processors is leveraged by M$ to use Windows or else. M$ gives major discounts on Windows 98 for OEMs unless they decide to offer alternative OSes on their prebuilt systems as the primary OS. While Compaq and IBM can toy with Linux all they want, there are hundreds of small companies that can't just absorb the undiscounted price on Windows if they want to offer Linux, Be, ad infinitum as the primary OS. That 80$ can make a big difference in the quality of the system offered. Not only does M$ leverage OEMs to use their product but they also transfer the responsibilities of tech support to the OEMs, which means the companies now need to add in the cost of a 24x7 tech support to their overhead. You are an idiot to even claim that use of Microsoft products is voluntary. If I were to buy a pre-built computer from any company and ask for a refund on Win 98 because I installed Linux on the system without ever booting into Windows I would probably never get it. This is because Windows is considered by the OEM as a component of the computer like a modem or video card would be considered. If Windows weren't mandatory on a vast majority of systems it would be seen as an option rather than an integral component. Besides a lack of options on whether the OS should be installed on a system there is a very good display of M$'s tactics as a vertical monopoly. Sometime around 1987 Microsoft and Intel defined a network scheme called Sever Message Block (SMB) which M$ bundled with every version of Windows. Microsoft decided instead of TCP/IP or IPX they would make their trusty SMB protocol the standard for their networks. This is fun when you have an all Windows network environment but is ugly when you have several different OSes on a network. Without Andrew Tridgell and Samba most Linux/FreeBSD users would be left behind in Windows dominated networks, even Solaris 7 comes packaged with Samba. This neat little networking scheme was a nice little tool to convince IT managers to just go 100% Microsoft in offices since SMB was well integrated into Windows already. The "moral right of man" to go after a "free" economy is a misnomer. Since Bill Gates and his megacorporation own a huge vertical monopoly in the computer market that prevents anyone else with a good idea, love of computers, and start-up capital to experience what you think of as a free economy. The business practices M$ has inspired are leading our current economic boom to a steep crash. In the effort to compete with M$ companies now have to market, program, FUD, leverage, and play exactly like M$. You're Joe Computeruser and for years you've been using a great program that helps you create megawidgets in the widget division in your company. The maker of the program decides in the next version they will add a ton of new features but change their EULA to say only so many megawidgets can be created in a month unless you get the professional version of MegaWidget Creator. You need to create at least 20 megawidgets a month but if you upgrade to the standard edition of MegaWidget Creator you can only create 10 per month, professional costs almost a thousand dollars more. Poor megawidget creator dude, he sounds like he's in a similar situation to people who used Windows NT 3.5 and wanted to upgrade to NT 4. Microsoft uses it's muscle power to produce NT Workstation with a limited number of TCP/IP socket connections while NT Server has an unlimited number. Workstation runs about 350$ IIRC, Server costs about 1800 for 10 users. But that doesn't mean much to someone on M$'s payroll, you're getting part of that wasted 1800$.
It's my prediction that mass DVD pirate proliferation won't happen for several years if ever. Think about it, mp3s have gotten popular only in the past year. Before the mp3 boom most people had no idea what they were. What brought about the mp3 proliferation was high bandwidth home connections and portable mp3 players. Diamond's case against the RIAA was probably one of the most important factors in the wide spread use of mp3s. Before the case became a major item on the news most people had never heard of mp3s. What do mp3s have to do with DVD? Well for a long time (until the Rio came out) you could only listen to mp3s on your computer which is by nature pretty stationary and in many cases doesn't have much of a sound system. A CD with a bunch of mp3 files was useless in anything but a computer. Then came the portable mp3 players and now mp3 players as home stereo components. They have made the format popular for distributing music. Copies of DVD movies face similar obstacles. As of now they can only be played on your computer and take up massive amounts of space on them, your set-top DVD player will not play a DVD disk without it being encrypted since it assumes it's a pirated copy, and lastly anyone who builds a machine to play copied DVDs will have several companies breathing down their back (ones with real legal claims as opposed to the RIAA against Diamond). Even though people can copy the hell out of DVDs now it will be a very long time before it becomes as easy and convienient as copying a CD to mp3. High bandwidth is the second limiting factor after convienience. Even with cable and DSL access it would take several hours to download an entire DVD movie. Even after the download it takes up massive amounts of space on your hard drive. Sure you can go down to Best Buy and pick up a 22GB hard drive but even that can only hold so many movies. So to keep your drive empty for all your mp3 albums you need to fork over a few hundred bucks for a DVD writer. You soon find that buying the blank DVD disks costs you as much as it would to just buy the DVDs themselves. This will keep 99% of people from downloading and burning DVD movies for their personal collections. Afterall what good is a disk that won't work in a DVD player at your friend's house, takes 10+ hours of work to make, and costs you 25$ or more. I truely hope that DVD manufacturers pay attention to this kind of argument before they issue a recall on all DVD players and issue firmware updates that keep DVD drives from reading movie disks. For some people their computer is their DVD player. A drive costs under 70$ and a decoder card costs about the same (they can even plug it into their TV). Not being able to play movies would piss off way too many people. Any attempt to replace the encryption on DVD will cost a whole lot more money than they would ever lose from a handful of people pirating their movies. I don't want to hear about Divx either, if it had been popular it would have eventualy got itself cracked. Some people tried and failed because they gave up before they finished. Any encryption can be cracked with enough time and skill. If HDTV people have their way, DVDs and such will be obsolete anyways. Who wants to pay 25$ for a DVD when they can watch a movie with true widescreen resolution of 1920x1080 from a movie on demand service. No disks or hard drive space required, just a HDTV and receiver.
Finally use SuSE users won't be prompted to insert CD-ROM disk #4. DVDs and Linux are a good combonation. Linux distros can more easily package all the components they want to include without a 4 pound box filled with CDs. Especially SuSE, 6.1 had 5 CDs and 6.2 has 6, which means a lot of extra goodies that don't need to be downloaded but that comes at the cost of keeping track of half a dozen CDs.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but NT Server has an unlimited number of TCP connections available where NT Workstation only has like 10. The user licenses aren't for port connection (ftp, http, stmp, ect.) but are for actual users that logon onto the server. Running a website using IIS or some such server wouldn't max out your user limit, unless you were having server logins through http. Remember M$ doesn't really distinguish between your LAN, the net, and your computer.
opening up their hardware will hopefully convince others without open drivers (you know who you are) to open up their source. Big companies opening their source like this shows some appriciated confidence in Linux. Woohoo
I can't say I've ever heard of anyone being turned into a teen sex snake fscking addict by listening to mp3s. Neither have I come across an mp3 site that forced you to visit porn to get the mp3s. It's all choise, you can click the banner ad or leave the site. These kind of FUD reports are sensationalizing something so Joe Automaton thinks mp3s are bad, dispite his small collection of them. I don't really think anyone is paying attention to this crap. No one REALLY cared about the RIAA's case or their insistance that mp3s would ruin musicians. The only people ruining music are the ones protesting distribution of music. It's a lot like Ticketmaster's shiznit they pull whenever someone tries to go against their ticket monopoly. They have the monopoly on distrobution and don't want to see anyone/thing come between them and it. But when it comes down to it, no one gives a rat's pajamas. Mp3s mean Joe Automaton can download a song he likes for little or no money down, and if he doesn't like it he doesn't have a silver disk laying around his desk. I won't say mp3s are necessarily the future but their method of distrobution most likely is. Joe and Mary Automaton want the cheap easy system, not the espensive tedious one, knuckles to the economics and politics.
I am so glad computers will do everything for me in the future. I won't have to pay any attention to my little Suzy or little Jonny, the police can handle them when the computer says so. What is so wrong with people that they would even think of using a computer program to predict troubled teenagers? I've never in my life heard of a teenager that wasn't troubled in some way. Now an administrator can have little Jonny take a standardized psych test to determine if he is proned to violence. What does that mean? If little Jonny is found to be prone to violence what does the school do, call the police? Wow I seem to remember studying about this document we called the Constitution of the United States. Somewhere in that piece of paper was some crap about due process, admonishments about invasions of privacy, and some other useless crap about personal freedoms. I wonder what ever happened to it. I guess when we became facists a while back we got rid of it. A country that believed that there is was a due process of law would never punish someone for a crime that wasn't commited. Maybe some day we can test fetuses in the womb to see if they are prone to violence and abort them. Wow I had an idea, we could test for proneness to alcoholism, adultry, criminal behaviour, immoral thought, and many other problems. Then we can ship those people off somewhere or kill them. Wouldn't the world be so much better. Better living through facism. *smile*
line of processors is arguably one of the most successful computing architectures ever. Many people bitch (especially here) that its dying and that PPC and IA-64 and blah blah blah will overrun it. Coppermines and Athlons both are an example of how strong the x86 architecture is right now. Think about it, look back five years ago and ask yourself what companies were running their mission critical systems on. It wasnt 486es or Pentiums (not until Pentium Pro was released), comapnies ran Sun, SGI, Alpha, but not many Pentiums. Now look anywhere, your favorite flavour Pentium is probably on some server in your office (but then again maybe it isn't). The x86 line in many ways has allowed smaller companies to have fast servers and workstations and gives them a more competitive edge in the marketplace of the web. Not everyone can afford Big Iron but they can put up some cash for a comparitively cheap Pentium based system which suits their needs. Pentium will eventually die out and I'll be ok with that, I don't worship Intel or anyone else but I think they do deserve some credit on what they've done in the past ten years.
be taken a step further to make a totally 3D interface for systems. Now is probably the best time in computing history to attempt such a project. Processors are pushing the gigahertz range and 3D accelerators are spitting out 1600x1200x32 resolutions at 30fps and up. A 3D interface would be a hundred times more intuitive than the desktop environment a majority of users have in front of them. It would be the REAL revolution in computing that's been promised for years by different people. This concept has a good deal of potential.
I would probably go with an iMac for a grandpa type. I haven't yet seen a GUI on linux that was so easy to use that I would give it to a grandparent, although i have used some very customizable ones. The iMac is is amazingly easy to use for someone who'snever turned a computer on before. If you're worried about software it comes with AppleWorks and some other toys that give it pretty good functionality for the price. If you absolutely insist on Linux then go for AfterStep, it is customizible enough where you could probably make it simple to use. A Gateway Profile might not be thebest pick for asystem though, you can probably find a case from an old Mac (the thin ones from the really old models) and stick a Cyrix MII inside it.
While that may be it's on-chip frequency that isn't always its emission frequency. If it were it's emission frequency there would be no way in hell the FCC would let it be sold in the US.
Do you realize how much 8 megs of SRAM would cost? SRAM is the whole reason that many processors (UltraSPARC, Pentium Pro/Xeon, ect.) cost so much damned money. If AMD had an 8 meg Athlon it would cost more than 2 or 3 Xeons.
as some huge screw-up or the end of Apple? Apple makes just a little more than 500mhz G4 computers. This problem only really affects the people who are wanting to buy the 500mhz G4 which is about 20% of all the people buying the G4 line. Because of their price the G4 400 counts for a much larger percentage of G4 sales then the 450 and 500 combined. This will not sink Apple in any way. You can also extrapolate the people buying the 450 and 500 are probably the niche market-graphic designers, digital video/audio authoring, publication-which probably have damn fast G3's already and just wanted the next step up to up their productivity a few hours. For Windows users you ought to be rooting Apple on, without them USB would be Intel's wet dream that never really caught on. The iMac is what really started the USB wildfire going, I bought a system in '97 that had USB ports, no one really gave a sh*t. Then the iMac and it's USB toys came out and everyone was touting their "new" USB ports on systems. Linux/unix users should be thankful that Apple is there to keep people pondering Windows alternatives, Linux would have never become the media frenzy it is now had there not been Mac geeks making a name for the non-M$ world before most of us ever heard of Linux.
like a good idea. That is, if M$ can actually let it be an open protocol and not try to dominate it with anything proprietary. This does sort of remind me of when IE4 came out a while back. They tried to make all interfaces HTML (at least their own brand of HTML) which would have worked if it hand't needed a Pentium IV 1200mhz processor to run correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong but they want to make new components for programs out of XML so they basically make their OS and programs XML readers and interpreters that just talk to each other over HTTP? That to me sounds like a reworked idea of Active X controls, which had they been really open and used a public API might have been cool. I'll withhold judgement until I see an actual product that uses it.
this kind of news is depressing for someone who might some day like to get into the business. The competition is already daunting but this borders on assanine. There's no real point in trying to work for yourself anymore, everything's already been done and done cheaper.
Wearable computers will be the best invention since peanut butter, I would love to be able to fit in because I was part of the collective, then we could make fun of the nonnects (non connected)!!
What is it with Americans that they absolutely venerate all technology before actually thinking about it's social and psychological implications? Everyone seems to believe that technology can by itself solve all of the world's problems without any effort on our part. I'm not a Luddite or some eco-nut tree hugger but I am a living creature made of biological components, a bunch of water, and some sarcarm. I was reading through posts where people want bionic implants as-seen-on-TV where they could pull up web pages displayed in front of them seemingly in thin air and their refridgerator would automatically order them beer, networks that connect your brain in some way to everyone else on the planet, virtual lives existing entirely in a medium made up of microscopic transistors and electrical impulses. What kind of life is that? The whole reason humans didn't end up like giant fungus colonies is because nature figured it was probably better for organisms to exist independantly to be more distributed and therefore more versatile in a non-static environment (this is not to discount the obvious intelligence of giant fungus colonies or their ability to survive and adapt). The world would be totally fucked over if a majority of all humans' grey matter was linked in a giant network. No privacy, no individualism, nothing but a giant collective, sounds Borg-like to me. Do you really want your thoughts broadcast for everyone else to hear along with theirs invading your brain in an endless cacophony? There would be such a complete social disaster if everyone was linked in a giant collective mass mind, all prejudice would be open faced and thoughts could never be hidden from anyone. Some neurohack breaks your brains neat little firewall and downloads some of your thoughts, oh shit you were thinking some naughty thoughts about your new neighbour. What kind of neuroterrorism would exist on that kind of network, a neo-Nazi group decides to launch a mental kraut dog at some Zionists hanging out together in a virtual cafe. Also don't forget the "morally superior" thought police that will pop up everywhere. Besides the problems with people on the network what about people not on it? I'm going to have to cave in to all my moral and philosophical beliefs just to carry on a conversation with someone by logging onto the network? Are robots going to be designed to take care of the humans that sit in giant stadiums filled with neurointerlinks etrophying while they experience their own private universe? More prudent to the conversation of wearable technology, how good of an idea is it really? Do I want Jonny Jerkoff downloading some porn while he drives his SUV down the street behind me or maybe try to carry on a conversation with someone who's totally engrossed in the Real Audio stream they alone are privy to? No I don't. First come clipon computers and then Pentium watches that can do everything but tell time. Eventually it will lead to implants that connect directly to your brain. These kind of technologies aren't going to solve any problems, only create an nth amount more. Even now people are addicted to their pages and cell phones, jumping at the chance to answer them only to expose the side of their head to a nice little batch of microwaves that would love nothing more that fuddle with your cells' DNA. Has no one ever read Fahrenheit 451? The other night I went for a walk around my neighborhood and there was an almost universal glow coming out of the living room windows. No outside lights on any of the houses (save for a few) yet the TV was on. I didn't see one reading lamp. As fast as my neurons work I drew a correlation between my neighborhood and that of the Pedestrian from Ray Bradbury's short story. Technology and innovation do have their places in our life but their place should not be that which we used to devote idols to and burn incense for. Our computers and so forth are supposed to be our tools, why have they become our masters?
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Just because some people find they need to upload/download pictures of themselves and others and their dogs doesn't mean they have no right to the bandwidth. If they pay for it then they can do what they want with it. Many people don't need computers but they have them, I would rather have them use AOL and call tech support than have them call me so I can explain TCP/IP to them.
Ths arguments I've seen about browsers and such being "part" of an operation system are completely idiotic. The "operating system" of a computer is the software that acts as a buffer between the machine's hardware and the software that is going to be run on that hardware. A definition of operating system would be the kernel, device drivers, and APIs. Without a kernel every piece of software on your system would need all of its own hardware controls and functions programmed in. This is how things like Furbys are programmed, they don't have a kernel yet run a program through the processor. Everything else that comes on your floppies and CDs is superflous to the actual operation of the computer, it merely gives the silison something to do. This second layer is the environment. Shells, windowing systems, applications, ect. are all part of this second layer. Many people will classify X or shells as part of the operating system but if I choose a hash or c shell on a Linux kernel I'm still using Linux, if I use AccelX rather than FreeX86 I'm still using Linux. The stuff that comes in an environment can be classified as programs, scripts, shells, sources, and files for the most part. Programs are compiled binary instructions that perform a function or more than one function, scripts on the other hand aren't compiled and require and interpreter (or just run on the kernel like a shell script) in order to work. We all should know what sources are and shells provide users with shortcuts to system commands. Files are the output of programs.
I personally think that calling Windows 98 and Linux operating systems is a misnomer. Sun gets it right by calling Solaris an operating environment. Win98 and Linux should also be called environments because they contain much more than a kernel and device drivers. The system on which they operate is respective to their kernel but the interface layer is the environment you're using. Thats my take on it.
I think this M$ shit has gone a little too far when people are demanding source code be released. If Coca-cola were deemed a monopoly would they have to give up the recipe to Coke? No they wouldn't, a company is allowed to own as personal property anything it creates or buys. If it were any other company in any other market no one would give a crap but because it's Microsoft in the computer industry they are trying to take things way too far. I might support a breakup of Microsoft if it was done intelligently and didn't require a bending of rules. Microsoft has a two forms of monopolies currently, both vertical and horizontal which gives them tremendous power in the industry and preventing them from revoking OEM price discounts if an OEM wanted to preintall a different operation system would lessen the horizontal monopoly. The vertical monopoly could only be broken if the company was broken into several different parts but because not all software in produced by Microsoft it isn't a complete monopoly and can't be broken legally. Lets just work on the OEM part and the rest will eventually take care of itself. If Microsoft keeps the OEM discount and can't threaten them with it, more will use linux/freebsd/be. If they just get rid of the OEM discount then the OEMs will start using the alternative OSes that cost much less.
In the game of DTV there is one often overlooked contender, our good friend Coax. Coax cable can deliver (currently) 10Mbps but improvements and refinements of the technology has allowed engineers to squeeze 30Mbps out of coax which is plenty of bandwidth fo both HDTV and NTSC signals on the same wire. Not only does it have the capacity for HDTV it also provides a rather high bandwidth return path for high speed internet. I think if cable companies put the effort into getting their coax up to spec with HDTV they could really get their foot into the market. If they made getting HDTV as easy as getting analog cable consumers would jump all over it. Networks are already moving into the multicast area, take Fox for example (please take Fox!); they have their main network, a sports channel, a channel for mostly syndicated shows, and their "family" channel. This is most likely the rubrick that networks will follow, all their different types of shows on a single channel. Then people like HBO and Showtime will take advantage of the 1920x1080 true HDTV format for movies and special events. None of this affects me too much, all I watch anymore is Cartoon Network, although an HDTV anime station might catch my fancy...
IE was released by some third party company not affiliated with M$ how many of you would really have a problem with using it (besides the fact there's no Linux version)? I use IE5 in Win 98 and I use IE 4.5 in MacOS 8.6. Whenever I'm on a linux box I try not to use Netscape, it turned to shit after 3.01 INMO. When I want to browse the internet I want my browser to load up, not a software suite. WHen IE4 first came out it was trudging down the same path Navigator embarked on, it tried to make everything part of the browser and load it all up at once for you. With IE5 that philosophy has been dropped in lieu of giving you all the software but keeping the browser, email, news, ect. all separate binaries. Netscape insists that 'Communicator' come with absofreakinlutely everything you will possibly use. Besides the programming aspect, IE is much more stable than Communicator is and when I do have it crash on me I can kill the process with a tool like Wintop. When Communicator freezes it takes down the entire interface and a reboot is needed, I can usually salvage an IE crash. As soon as Netscape changed Navigator into Communicator they really screwed up their chances of winning the browser war. Netscape no longer resides on my system because it couldn't keep itself running very long. I'm not M$ fan and if I had an adequate replacement for IE5 I wouldn't use it either. I've seen nothing else comparable and I don't use half functional crap that is "a good idea". Opera has an annoying interface and lacks alot of the usability features I rarely use in IE but would miss them at inoppertune times.
But the free BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) all AFAIK use their own file system that works alot better than ext2, although I don't know if it is journaled. The FreeBSD people don't need to worry much about "missing" GPL software, FreeBSD and the like will run most if not all linux binaries and code is simple to port.
the Apple MessagePad? I recall seeing a nice little app for it called Showmate that would let you control all of your favourite entertainment appliances. The drawback is the Newton's IR signal was weak so you needed to be within ten feet of the device and it only worked with five brands of electronics.
has always tried to be a monopoly. "One World, one web, one program"; if that doesn't raise someone's eyebrows I have no idea what will. Microsoft scares me in many ways, I may not have nightmares of waves of Winborg drones chasing me (all the time) but the thought of what M$ represents frightens me at times. Microsoft used to be a software company way back in the day, now Bill G. has his willy in more places than Bill C. does. At some point in time Microsoft became a media communication company where software was just one of its many divisions. Cable companies, news networks, telephony technologies, satillite internet, set-top internet, ad nauseum. That list could go on for a very long time, it is a list of the proverbial cookie jars M$ hs a hand stuck in. It also seems strange to me they all ways of distributing information to people. Shucks Bill it sorta sounds like you want to have your little logo in the corner of everyone's screens. The monopoly on the desktop is just the tip of what seems to be a quickly growing iceberg.
I've read a slew of different comments so far, some people defend Microsoft, some people are dancing in the streets because of this case. I'm concerned this is case is important but its scope is a little bit too narrow to keep this kind of thing from happening. Microsoft has a vertical monopoly on many portions of the software market and a nearly complete horizontal monopoly on the OS market.
A horizontal monopoly is where a single company owns a vast majority of resources (like if say one company owned all the oil production in the world, all businesses that rely on petroleum would be at the veritable mercy of this company) that everyone in that market needs. Software developers are dependent on the OS to run their software, when Win 95/98 comes pre-loaded on almost every home system sold in America and around the world software developers accept it as the de facto "standard" and are forced to write software on it or not write software at all (Intel has a similar monopoly but thats an entirely different story). Go down to Best Buy and look for a Linux software section, it doesn't exist, you can find a few distros but that's it. Commercial development companies don't usually write programs for Linux because the cost/return ratio has been extremely small in the past.
Microsoft's vertical monopoly comes in the form of their software packages and API platforms. Since they have the OS which is on the bottom rung of the ladder they have ALL of the ins and outs of their system and can release their home brew programming suites that are built around the knowlege of their OS. After programming suites come software packages. Through the years M$ has bought up scores of ideas and technologies that they either hadn't the talent to create or just lacked the initiative. These technologies are released in the form of applications and software suites. Office 97 is a perfect example of this, dozens of purchased technologies all incorporated into the programs along with greater streamlining because the suite programmers have more intimate knowlege of the OS than third party developers do. After these suites come communication packages, in the form of Microsoft Networking (SMB, NetBIOS, NetBEUI, Microsoft DLC, ect.) which come packaged as "features" of the OS. On the other side of these protocols are Windows based servers that have all the same advantages as the clients because everything can be integrated at the OS core level rather than third party add-ons and plug-ins.
I would describe Microsoft's economic standpoint as an L-monopoly, they have a strong vertical monopoly and a strong horizontal monopoly. The reason I say this case is too narrow is that the case merely serves to separate the horzontal from the vertical without really breaking up either one. If Microsoft was split up into an OS company and an application company, Visual C++ amd Visual Basic would still exist and be the programming suite of choice for many developers. Office would still exist with it's special API calls that make it faster in just the right ways to keep third party suites from being too impressive. More than just cutting off one of the Hydra's heads this still does nothing for the huge portion of communication media that M$ is buying/partnering with. Disney and AOL are also working on building giant megacorp communication blocs. A redefinition of what a monopoly is and what a trust is would be a more effective way to solve these potentially disterous problems, using Microsoft as an example. If Microsoft is broken up but is allowed to continue (with everyone else) to turn inself into a giant media mogul then no one will be safe.
"You can have your car in your favourite colour as long as your favourite colour is black." --Henery Ford
As a sidenote to my tediously long rant, some of you may have heard of an operating system called Unix. Some crazy fellas at AT&T's Bell labs invented this way back in the 1970's but the US government reminded AT&T that it was a telecommunications company, not a computer company. When AT&T wasn't allowed to commercially distribute this Unix thing it was given away to colleges around the country. See any inverse correlations here?
What payroll are you on dude? If there was EVER an example of a monopoly it's Microsoft. It's a known fact that any OEM that uses x86 processors is leveraged by M$ to use Windows or else. M$ gives major discounts on Windows 98 for OEMs unless they decide to offer alternative OSes on their prebuilt systems as the primary OS. While Compaq and IBM can toy with Linux all they want, there are hundreds of small companies that can't just absorb the undiscounted price on Windows if they want to offer Linux, Be, ad infinitum as the primary OS. That 80$ can make a big difference in the quality of the system offered. Not only does M$ leverage OEMs to use their product but they also transfer the responsibilities of tech support to the OEMs, which means the companies now need to add in the cost of a 24x7 tech support to their overhead.
You are an idiot to even claim that use of Microsoft products is voluntary. If I were to buy a pre-built computer from any company and ask for a refund on Win 98 because I installed Linux on the system without ever booting into Windows I would probably never get it. This is because Windows is considered by the OEM as a component of the computer like a modem or video card would be considered. If Windows weren't mandatory on a vast majority of systems it would be seen as an option rather than an integral component.
Besides a lack of options on whether the OS should be installed on a system there is a very good display of M$'s tactics as a vertical monopoly. Sometime around 1987 Microsoft and Intel defined a network scheme called Sever Message Block (SMB) which M$ bundled with every version of Windows. Microsoft decided instead of TCP/IP or IPX they would make their trusty SMB protocol the standard for their networks. This is fun when you have an all Windows network environment but is ugly when you have several different OSes on a network. Without Andrew Tridgell and Samba most Linux/FreeBSD users would be left behind in Windows dominated networks, even Solaris 7 comes packaged with Samba. This neat little networking scheme was a nice little tool to convince IT managers to just go 100% Microsoft in offices since SMB was well integrated into Windows already.
The "moral right of man" to go after a "free" economy is a misnomer. Since Bill Gates and his megacorporation own a huge vertical monopoly in the computer market that prevents anyone else with a good idea, love of computers, and start-up capital to experience what you think of as a free economy. The business practices M$ has inspired are leading our current economic boom to a steep crash. In the effort to compete with M$ companies now have to market, program, FUD, leverage, and play exactly like M$. You're Joe Computeruser and for years you've been using a great program that helps you create megawidgets in the widget division in your company. The maker of the program decides in the next version they will add a ton of new features but change their EULA to say only so many megawidgets can be created in a month unless you get the professional version of MegaWidget Creator. You need to create at least 20 megawidgets a month but if you upgrade to the standard edition of MegaWidget Creator you can only create 10 per month, professional costs almost a thousand dollars more. Poor megawidget creator dude, he sounds like he's in a similar situation to people who used Windows NT 3.5 and wanted to upgrade to NT 4. Microsoft uses it's muscle power to produce NT Workstation with a limited number of TCP/IP socket connections while NT Server has an unlimited number. Workstation runs about 350$ IIRC, Server costs about 1800 for 10 users. But that doesn't mean much to someone on M$'s payroll, you're getting part of that wasted 1800$.
It's my prediction that mass DVD pirate proliferation won't happen for several years if ever. Think about it, mp3s have gotten popular only in the past year. Before the mp3 boom most people had no idea what they were. What brought about the mp3 proliferation was high bandwidth home connections and portable mp3 players.
Diamond's case against the RIAA was probably one of the most important factors in the wide spread use of mp3s. Before the case became a major item on the news most people had never heard of mp3s. What do mp3s have to do with DVD? Well for a long time (until the Rio came out) you could only listen to mp3s on your computer which is by nature pretty stationary and in many cases doesn't have much of a sound system. A CD with a bunch of mp3 files was useless in anything but a computer. Then came the portable mp3 players and now mp3 players as home stereo components. They have made the format popular for distributing music. Copies of DVD movies face similar obstacles. As of now they can only be played on your computer and take up massive amounts of space on them, your set-top DVD player will not play a DVD disk without it being encrypted since it assumes it's a pirated copy, and lastly anyone who builds a machine to play copied DVDs will have several companies breathing down their back (ones with real legal claims as opposed to the RIAA against Diamond). Even though people can copy the hell out of DVDs now it will be a very long time before it becomes as easy and convienient as copying a CD to mp3.
High bandwidth is the second limiting factor after convienience. Even with cable and DSL access it would take several hours to download an entire DVD movie. Even after the download it takes up massive amounts of space on your hard drive. Sure you can go down to Best Buy and pick up a 22GB hard drive but even that can only hold so many movies. So to keep your drive empty for all your mp3 albums you need to fork over a few hundred bucks for a DVD writer. You soon find that buying the blank DVD disks costs you as much as it would to just buy the DVDs themselves. This will keep 99% of people from downloading and burning DVD movies for their personal collections.
Afterall what good is a disk that won't work in a DVD player at your friend's house, takes 10+ hours of work to make, and costs you 25$ or more.
I truely hope that DVD manufacturers pay attention to this kind of argument before they issue a recall on all DVD players and issue firmware updates that keep DVD drives from reading movie disks. For some people their computer is their DVD player. A drive costs under 70$ and a decoder card costs about the same (they can even plug it into their TV). Not being able to play movies would piss off way too many people. Any attempt to replace the encryption on DVD will cost a whole lot more money than they would ever lose from a handful of people pirating their movies. I don't want to hear about Divx either, if it had been popular it would have eventualy got itself cracked. Some people tried and failed because they gave up before they finished. Any encryption can be cracked with enough time and skill. If HDTV people have their way, DVDs and such will be obsolete anyways. Who wants to pay 25$ for a DVD when they can watch a movie with true widescreen resolution of 1920x1080 from a movie on demand service. No disks or hard drive space required, just a HDTV and receiver.
Finally use SuSE users won't be prompted to insert CD-ROM disk #4. DVDs and Linux are a good combonation. Linux distros can more easily package all the components they want to include without a 4 pound box filled with CDs. Especially SuSE, 6.1 had 5 CDs and 6.2 has 6, which means a lot of extra goodies that don't need to be downloaded but that comes at the cost of keeping track of half a dozen CDs.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but NT Server has an unlimited number of TCP connections available where NT Workstation only has like 10. The user licenses aren't for port connection (ftp, http, stmp, ect.) but are for actual users that logon onto the server. Running a website using IIS or some such server wouldn't max out your user limit, unless you were having server logins through http. Remember M$ doesn't really distinguish between your LAN, the net, and your computer.
opening up their hardware will hopefully convince others without open drivers (you know who you are) to open up their source. Big companies opening their source like this shows some appriciated confidence in Linux. Woohoo
I can't say I've ever heard of anyone being turned into a teen sex snake fscking addict by listening to mp3s. Neither have I come across an mp3 site that forced you to visit porn to get the mp3s. It's all choise, you can click the banner ad or leave the site. These kind of FUD reports are sensationalizing something so Joe Automaton thinks mp3s are bad, dispite his small collection of them. I don't really think anyone is paying attention to this crap. No one REALLY cared about the RIAA's case or their insistance that mp3s would ruin musicians. The only people ruining music are the ones protesting distribution of music. It's a lot like Ticketmaster's shiznit they pull whenever someone tries to go against their ticket monopoly. They have the monopoly on distrobution and don't want to see anyone/thing come between them and it. But when it comes down to it, no one gives a rat's pajamas. Mp3s mean Joe Automaton can download a song he likes for little or no money down, and if he doesn't like it he doesn't have a silver disk laying around his desk. I won't say mp3s are necessarily the future but their method of distrobution most likely is. Joe and Mary Automaton want the cheap easy system, not the espensive tedious one, knuckles to the economics and politics.
I am so glad computers will do everything for me in the future. I won't have to pay any attention to my little Suzy or little Jonny, the police can handle them when the computer says so. What is so wrong with people that they would even think of using a computer program to predict troubled teenagers? I've never in my life heard of a teenager that wasn't troubled in some way. Now an administrator can have little Jonny take a standardized psych test to determine if he is proned to violence. What does that mean? If little Jonny is found to be prone to violence what does the school do, call the police? Wow I seem to remember studying about this document we called the Constitution of the United States. Somewhere in that piece of paper was some crap about due process, admonishments about invasions of privacy, and some other useless crap about personal freedoms. I wonder what ever happened to it. I guess when we became facists a while back we got rid of it. A country that believed that there is was a due process of law would never punish someone for a crime that wasn't commited. Maybe some day we can test fetuses in the womb to see if they are prone to violence and abort them. Wow I had an idea, we could test for proneness to alcoholism, adultry, criminal behaviour, immoral thought, and many other problems. Then we can ship those people off somewhere or kill them. Wouldn't the world be so much better. Better living through facism. *smile*
line of processors is arguably one of the most successful computing architectures ever. Many people bitch (especially here) that its dying and that PPC and IA-64 and blah blah blah will overrun it. Coppermines and Athlons both are an example of how strong the x86 architecture is right now. Think about it, look back five years ago and ask yourself what companies were running their mission critical systems on. It wasnt 486es or Pentiums (not until Pentium Pro was released), comapnies ran Sun, SGI, Alpha, but not many Pentiums. Now look anywhere, your favorite flavour Pentium is probably on some server in your office (but then again maybe it isn't). The x86 line in many ways has allowed smaller companies to have fast servers and workstations and gives them a more competitive edge in the marketplace of the web. Not everyone can afford Big Iron but they can put up some cash for a comparitively cheap Pentium based system which suits their needs. Pentium will eventually die out and I'll be ok with that, I don't worship Intel or anyone else but I think they do deserve some credit on what they've done in the past ten years.
be taken a step further to make a totally 3D interface for systems. Now is probably the best time in computing history to attempt such a project. Processors are pushing the gigahertz range and 3D accelerators are spitting out 1600x1200x32 resolutions at 30fps and up. A 3D interface would be a hundred times more intuitive than the desktop environment a majority of users have in front of them. It would be the REAL revolution in computing that's been promised for years by different people. This concept has a good deal of potential.
I would probably go with an iMac for a grandpa type. I haven't yet seen a GUI on linux that was so easy to use that I would give it to a grandparent, although i have used some very customizable ones. The iMac is is amazingly easy to use for someone who'snever turned a computer on before. If you're worried about software it comes with AppleWorks and some other toys that give it pretty good functionality for the price. If you absolutely insist on Linux then go for AfterStep, it is customizible enough where you could probably make it simple to use. A Gateway Profile might not be thebest pick for asystem though, you can probably find a case from an old Mac (the thin ones from the really old models) and stick a Cyrix MII inside it.
While that may be it's on-chip frequency that isn't always its emission frequency. If it were it's emission frequency there would be no way in hell the FCC would let it be sold in the US.
Do you realize how much 8 megs of SRAM would cost? SRAM is the whole reason that many processors (UltraSPARC, Pentium Pro/Xeon, ect.) cost so much damned money. If AMD had an 8 meg Athlon it would cost more than 2 or 3 Xeons.
as some huge screw-up or the end of Apple? Apple makes just a little more than 500mhz G4 computers. This problem only really affects the people who are wanting to buy the 500mhz G4 which is about 20% of all the people buying the G4 line. Because of their price the G4 400 counts for a much larger percentage of G4 sales then the 450 and 500 combined. This will not sink Apple in any way. You can also extrapolate the people buying the 450 and 500 are probably the niche market-graphic designers, digital video/audio authoring, publication-which probably have damn fast G3's already and just wanted the next step up to up their productivity a few hours. For Windows users you ought to be rooting Apple on, without them USB would be Intel's wet dream that never really caught on. The iMac is what really started the USB wildfire going, I bought a system in '97 that had USB ports, no one really gave a sh*t. Then the iMac and it's USB toys came out and everyone was touting their "new" USB ports on systems. Linux/unix users should be thankful that Apple is there to keep people pondering Windows alternatives, Linux would have never become the media frenzy it is now had there not been Mac geeks making a name for the non-M$ world before most of us ever heard of Linux.
like a good idea. That is, if M$ can actually let it be an open protocol and not try to dominate it with anything proprietary. This does sort of remind me of when IE4 came out a while back. They tried to make all interfaces HTML (at least their own brand of HTML) which would have worked if it hand't needed a Pentium IV 1200mhz processor to run correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong but they want to make new components for programs out of XML so they basically make their OS and programs XML readers and interpreters that just talk to each other over HTTP? That to me sounds like a reworked idea of Active X controls, which had they been really open and used a public API might have been cool. I'll withhold judgement until I see an actual product that uses it.
inciderepunctum.com
We'll show those damned Romans who's boss. They won't be able to infringe on Rob.
this kind of news is depressing for someone who might some day like to get into the business. The competition is already daunting but this borders on assanine. There's no real point in trying to work for yourself anymore, everything's already been done and done cheaper.
Wearable computers will be the best invention since peanut butter, I would love to be able to fit in because I was part of the collective, then we could make fun of the nonnects (non connected)!!
What is it with Americans that they absolutely venerate all technology before actually thinking about it's social and psychological implications? Everyone seems to believe that technology can by itself solve all of the world's problems without any effort on our part.
I'm not a Luddite or some eco-nut tree hugger but I am a living creature made of biological components, a bunch of water, and some sarcarm. I was reading through posts where people want bionic implants as-seen-on-TV where they could pull up web pages displayed in front of them seemingly in thin air and their refridgerator would automatically order them beer, networks that connect your brain in some way to everyone else on the planet, virtual lives existing entirely in a medium made up of microscopic transistors and electrical impulses. What kind of life is that? The whole reason humans didn't end up like giant fungus colonies is because nature figured it was probably better for organisms to exist independantly to be more distributed and therefore more versatile in a non-static environment (this is not to discount the obvious intelligence of giant fungus colonies or their ability to survive and adapt). The world would be totally fucked over if a majority of all humans' grey matter was linked in a giant network. No privacy, no individualism, nothing but a giant collective, sounds Borg-like to me. Do you really want your thoughts broadcast for everyone else to hear along with theirs invading your brain in an endless cacophony? There would be such a complete social disaster if everyone was linked in a giant collective mass mind, all prejudice would be open faced and thoughts could never be hidden from anyone. Some neurohack breaks your brains neat little firewall and downloads some of your thoughts, oh shit you were thinking some naughty thoughts about your new neighbour. What kind of neuroterrorism would exist on that kind of network, a neo-Nazi group decides to launch a mental kraut dog at some Zionists hanging out together in a virtual cafe. Also don't forget the "morally superior" thought police that will pop up everywhere. Besides the problems with people on the network what about people not on it? I'm going to have to cave in to all my moral and philosophical beliefs just to carry on a conversation with someone by logging onto the network? Are robots going to be designed to take care of the humans that sit in giant stadiums filled with neurointerlinks etrophying while they experience their own private universe?
More prudent to the conversation of wearable technology, how good of an idea is it really? Do I want Jonny Jerkoff downloading some porn while he drives his SUV down the street behind me or maybe try to carry on a conversation with someone who's totally engrossed in the Real Audio stream they alone are privy to? No I don't. First come clipon computers and then Pentium watches that can do everything but tell time. Eventually it will lead to implants that connect directly to your brain. These kind of technologies aren't going to solve any problems, only create an nth amount more. Even now people are addicted to their pages and cell phones, jumping at the chance to answer them only to expose the side of their head to a nice little batch of microwaves that would love nothing more that fuddle with your cells' DNA. Has no one ever read Fahrenheit 451? The other night I went for a walk around my neighborhood and there was an almost universal glow coming out of the living room windows. No outside lights on any of the houses (save for a few) yet the TV was on. I didn't see one reading lamp. As fast as my neurons work I drew a correlation between my neighborhood and that of the Pedestrian from Ray Bradbury's short story.
Technology and innovation do have their places in our life but their place should not be that which we used to devote idols to and burn incense for. Our computers and so forth are supposed to be our tools, why have they become our masters?