It's very simple. All they asked for is PCs purchased without any OS. I ordered my PC pre-loaded with Red Hat. Any company that does likewise need not be reported to Microsoft.
Actually, the first-generation PPC (601) could run 68K apps faster than the fastest Quadra. And not even the fastest 601. My 7200/75 with a 1-MB cache posts better benchmarks in 68K mode than the Quadra 840AV.
I suspect that the emergence of inexpensive FPGA kits takes a lot of the appeal out of wirewrapping prototypes. Why spend hours twisting wires to do the same job as a few lines of code on your PC?
I got the impression that aD was having trouble landing good contracts and growing their business because clients wanted aD to be backed be strong venture partners and experienced management, regardless of their immediate profitability.
Also keep in mind that people who are great at starting companies are not always great at running them. And vice-versa. Just something to chew on.
You complain that the ACS source is useless because nobody but aD insiders knows how to use it anyway.
Linux is in exactly the same boat. I bet less than 0.01% of all Slashdot readers have sufficient familiarity to make nontrivial modifications to the Linux kernel, let alone have ever tried. I'll be the first to admit I've never edited more than some basic numeric constants, and added one measly hook to a device driver that a vendor provided.
The point of Open/Free software is not, and never has been, that source availability is useful to all customers. Just that it's there for you if you ever need it. The rest is up to you.
Linux is good, but for maximum enjoyment you really need to run it on a PowerPC, with MacOnLinux (MOL) in a big X window.;-)
I've been using Linux (on a Mac) on and off for about 4+ years. It's okay; I'd happily use it if I didn't have anything better.
I won't say what MacOS can do that Linux desktops can't, but I'll mention some features I haven't seen yet that I'd like to see. If you know what to do in Linux to make it work, please enlighten me.
I already know about TkDesk. Last time I used it, it was pretty good but not good enough.
I want a graphical 'find' frontend.
I want a NeXT-style browser AND a Finder-style iconic file manager.
I want to be able to drag files from one to the other to copy or move.
I want move or copy to be smart enough that if there isn't enough room on the destination partition for the whole move, it won't even start.
I want a Finder-style list view, where clicking on the column headers changes the sort order.
I want filesystem views to update themselves automatically when files are created, moved, renamed, deleted, etc. 'ls' is an abomination.
When I move a file, I want symbolic links to it to update automatically.
I want my window to always inform me of my current working directory. 'pwd' is an abomination.
When I double-click an icon or filename, I want it to open in the correct app automatically.
When I drag a document onto the icon of an app, I want it to open in that app automatically.
I want to be able to rename a file by single-clicking its name and typing.
I want multiple monitor support. The Matrox way is all right, but not great.
I want to be able to add monitors (assuming video cards already installed) without quitting or restarting my apps. Okay, I don't insist on this one, but the Mac supports it.
I want energy-saving modes.
I want plug-and-play support for USB and FireWire peripherals. I don't mind giving a root password to mount a drive, but I want it to be recognized as soon as I plug it in.
I want applications that don't care where they're installed. That can be moved to another location by dragging.
I want never to have to worry about whether something I might need is in my path.
I want all common key commands to be the same across all applications: alt-C is copy, alt-X is cut, alt-V is paste, alt-Z is undo, alt-F is find, alt-G is find again, alt-Q is quit, etc. It doesn't have to be Mac key bindings; EMACS is just as good. vi sux;-) But I want the SAME key bindings to work across ALL APPS.
If you can tell me how to accomplish any of the above, I'd be very grateful. I'm really looking to find a way to do everything I like about MacOS on my Linux machines.
...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.
If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not
Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
For all that people criticize Apple for how "little" (superficially) MacOS seems to have advanced in the last 15 years, no other company has created a UI that's significantly better, or even really all that different.
And, really, MacOS has advanced a lot more than detractors give it credit for. But the improvements are mostly not the kind you can highlight in a screenshot.
However, among all these essentially-the-same computing platforms, the one by Apple is the most pleasant to use. By far.
All X systems are plagued by interface inconsistencies -- rather than learn the platform, you have to learn the interface of every single application separately. As far as I can tell, this is as true today as when I first noticed it 10+ years ago.
Windows is better because, if there is one thing Microsoft is good at, it's learning from success (in this case, Apple's). However, if you use both MacOS and Windows for a few months, it becomes clear that, compared to Apple, Microsoft does not sweat the details. Apple tries hard to get the product just right, and MS stops at "good enough to sell".
I haven't used Windows 2000, but I'll give some examples from NT4.
Open Explorer. Pick a text file and open it. Make a little change and save the file. Go back to Explorer. Where's the file? It's gone! No, it's not gone, it just jumped down to the last row in your window. WTF?
In Windows, create a letter in Word and save it to a file named "Mom 4/16/01". Dang, no good. Okay, try "Mom 4-16-01". Hey! What's this stupid.doc doing on your file name? You didn't put that there. Rename the file the way you wanted it. Oops, broke it. Now it won't open it Word when you double-click it.
Don't even get me started on the stupidness of drive letters. Those things are a major abomination.
Here's one that is broke in NT4, but fixed in 2000: Change the TCP/IP address of your computer. Reboot time! No Mac would make you do that.
Applications that make you reboot before you can use them? What's up with that? This has become a serious problem on the Mac as well, but it never happened until after Win95 popularized this disgusting practice. Most Mac apps can still be installed and uninstalled by dragging a folder -- no registry or Start menu needed! The system immediately knows where it is.
Multiple monitor support - Windows(98) got it 10 years after Mac. Maybe in another 10 years, it'll get color calibration. Speaking of colors, open up the color picker tool on a Mac. There's the familiar RGB pie (also present in Windows), a CMYK color picker, a box of crayons, and a couple of others. Cool!
Apple sweats the details. MacOS just plain works. That's why I keep buying Macs. (And they make great Linux machines, too. Linux+MOL is extremely cool.)
This is a lesson I have learned, painfully, over the course of 20 years that I have been buying personal computers. Learn this lesson, and learn it well.
HARDWARE IS NOTHING. SOFTWARE IS EVERYTHING.
Say this 1000 times. Understand it. Grok it. Then it will all make sense.
If you could buy computers tomorrow for $12 that had 16 G4s each, but could only be used if you wrote all the software yourself in assembly language, they still wouldn't attract spit's worth of market share. (Come to think of it, this almost perfectly describes the state of the personal computer market around 1980.)
I like Macs. A lot. There are 4 of them with me in this room right now. The reason I like Macs is because of their software. I know full well that a $1000 Athlon will give generally better performance than a $1500 G4, but I use the Mac anyway. But I'm different. Most people will never even consider a Mac at any price, just because they can't take home CDs from work and install the software on them.
Ohhh.... that sounds like a troll, but I just can't resist biting...
Okay, maybe it was a troll. Sometimes I can't resist. Thanks for humoring me!
My MacOS 7, 8, or 9 machine has a much more responsive interface on a 75-MHz machine than
Gnome on a 500-MHz Linux box
Uhh.. and thats with WHAT apps running concurrently?
Any collection of apps you care to name. Even when a process does hog the CPU on the Mac (such as when Sherlock decides to index the drive), the Mac's interface at all times remains more responsive than Gnome. Believe me, I'd love for Gnome to be snappy and responsive - but on my 500-MHz PC with 128MB of RAM, it isn't. Not even if it's the only thing running.
RE: CPU hogging on a PMT system - At least you have the option of changing priorities
Not if I don't own the process. It's good to be da root!
But I guess you're happy using MacOS 7-9 instead of MacOS X, or Win3.1 instead of Win9x.
Win9x barely qualifies as a pre-emptive OS tho, most of the kernel is single-threaded, so apps tend
to block each other too much - try NT4/W2k.
Instead?:-) For a company touting their OS as being multithreaded, Microsoft sure didn't put much effort into threading anything that runs on it. Explorer, Word, Excel - they all lock me out when doing the least little task. Drives me crazy. The MacOS Finder has much better multithreading than Explorer, at least on NT4. As the Amigoids used to boast, it lets me execute two copies at the same time. I can't say as much for NT.
I'll run MacOS X when I believe it's stable. In the meantime, MacOS 9.1 is doing very well for me, and Red Hat on my PC.
Steve Jobs boasted about how the latest G4 Macs can encode a DVD in "only" twice as long as it takes to play back. My response: "GACK!" I'm not willing to wait more than 20 seconds for a PC to do *anything*.
So hardware makers are safe at least until a typical PC can encode a 30-minute DVD in under 20 seconds, which is at least 4 months from now.
On the other hand, suppose we actually do get PCs so fast that nobody wants a faster one. Look on the bright side -- nobody will want to build a Beowulf cluster out of them!
Apple's been selling OS X Server for quite a while. (Is it one year or two?) IIRC, the Apple Lisa had preemptive multitasking in 1982. Both Apple and Microsoft sold versions of Unix (A/UX and Xenix, respectively) in the late '80s. Apple was well known to be developing a preemptive multitasking system from about 1989 onward, and we all know how well that worked out. Pink became Taligent, which went bust. (Rumor has it, Pink was actually in pretty good shape before IBM fscked it all up.) Then came Copland, which was good enough to release as a developer beta before it was deep-sixed for reasons I don't understand. Only after they barfed on all of these did they buy NeXT and start all over again.
But of course, all this is beside the point. You know as well as I do that preemptive multitasking is totally overrated. It's worth 100 times as much as a checkbox feature than as a practical device. Here's a perfect case in point: My MacOS 7, 8, or 9 machine has a much more responsive interface on a 75-MHz machine than Gnome on a 500-MHz Linux box. I am not making this up. Cooperative multitasking can work very well. On the Mac, it almost always does. Multithreaded, even. Another case in point: a batch process started up on my UltraSPARC today that rendered the box unusable by me until it completed. Preemptive multitasking is obviously not a panacea. Why don't you pick a useful feature, like protected memory.
"Here's some little words for you: kernel space, user space."
Thanks!
That's about what I figured. So it is a Ford vs. Chevy argument. The user space solution, presumably, offers minor benefits in the form of memory protection at the cost of a little performance, and the kernel space solution makes the opposite tradeoff. In either case, if your device driver is buggy, your system horked. Is that about the size of it?
While I'm lauding renehollan's article, permit me to highlight this one sentence: Created wealth does not have to be concentrated to be
beneficial. From Skapare, consider this fillip: Open Source creates as much wealth as proprietary products do.
What is wealth?
Is wealth having money? I certainly think that's part of the answer, but not all.
Most of the "wealth" in stocks is vapor, not money. It's potential money. Imagine a public company that has an IPO where they print up 10 million shares, and sell 1 million on the open market. Its valuation is 10% real (based on the shares people purchased) and 90% virtual (for unreleased shares valued at the going market rate of the public 10%). If its shareholders try to cash out all at once, or if it tries to sell that other 90% all at once, or if buyers decide they're not going to fight over 10% of a company, its value will deflate pretty fast.
Stock market wealth is like a balloon full of air. If you poke a tiny little hole, you can take out a significant amount at a measured rate withou popping the whole thing. If air is still being added while you do this, it won't even deflate.
Enough about such flimsy measures of wealth as potential "air" money. I'd say real wealth is measured in human terms: Easier and/or better living. If you aquire something that makes your life better, you have gained wealth. Consumer electronics, cars, good medical care, leisure time, hobbies... these are all contributors to wealth. The important idea here is not that they can be bought with money, but that you are wealthy if you have them at all.
So how do you create a lot of wealth? Or, put another way, how do you make a whole lot of people wealthy? One way, certainly, is to give everyone tons of money. But another, equally valid approach, is to reduce the cost of the benefits of wealth. If everyone in the world had $100 million, would everyone be rich? Possibly. If everyone in the world had a nice house, nice toys, plenty to eat, good family and friends, intellectual stimulation, and lots of time to enjoy it all, would everyone be rich? I think so.
This dovetails beautifully with Skapare's hypothesis. By enabling all people to aquire high-quality software, Free Software creates wealth! Lots of it. It creates wealth in the sense that they have tools that make their life easier or better. It also has secondary effects (as renehollan points out) of freeing up more of your resources to pursue traditional methods of wealth-building such as hoarding real or virtual "air" money. (I suppose if you want to take this argument to a ridiculous extreme, you could say that software piracy creates wealth, too. I'm not even going to go there.)
I never meant for this to be a "me too" article, but these other writers have made their points so eloquently, there's not much left for me to say, apart from encouraging us all to broaden our perspective when we think about what is wealth, and how is it created. The definition that corporate society tries to drill into us is pretty narrow.
Mammals, while they've been around for less raw time, have
demonstrated greater adaptibility - noteably, surviving a few ice
ages.
Ice ages happen every few thousand years. I'm sure that in their 60 million years, Dinosaurs faced their fair share of ice ages. They were also terrifically adaptable. Some might even argue that, by their relation to modern-day birds, dinosaurs are not completely extinct.
Humanoid apes have only existed for a handful of million years, and human civilization is only a couple tens of thousands of years old. Let's wait and see another 10 million years or so (and/or survive the impact of a mile-wide asteroid into shallow water) before we get too haughty about the dinosaurs.
The problem with domain squatters is that 100% of the value of the domain they hold is due to the value created by the rightful holder of the trademark. (If that isn't the case, then it's not squatting, QED.) For one person to attempt to make money by leveraging the value of another person's property is fraudulent, and illegal. Domain squatting is theft in the same way that grabbing an unlocked bicycle off a rack is theft. Just because you were there and nobody was looking doesn't mean it's yours to take.
It's an entirely different story if you have a legitimate use for a domain name that might also be claimable by somebody else. For example, hypothetically, it would have been entirely legit for somebody to register "ford.com" to make a web site about crossing rivers at shallow points (as far as I know, nobody did).
A web site that takes fair use about as far as it can possibly go without infringing a trademark is barbienews.com. Note how they are explicitly not domain squatting.
And who ever said domain brokers are good? I presume that a domain broker does not hold onto domain names that belong to trademark holders with hopes of selling them, but rather works with businesses to think of and register new ones. Either way, they're snake-oil salesmen, only one grade of bottom-feeder above domain squatters. Yuck. Let 'em all find honest jobs.
I owned an Atari ST. I owned a copy of Zoomracks. I used and liked Zoomracks. I thought it was great. I snorted with derision at Hypercard, and cheered when I read that Apple settled out of court and paid royalties to the author of Zoomracks (incidentally, they were the only defendant out of several that ever did, IIRC).
Then I bought a Mac and started using Hypercard. And let me tell you... Zoomracks is no Hypercard! That lawsuit had no merit whatsoever. As someone who used and liked both products at around the same time, I can claim with some authority that they were about as similar as a wagon wheel and a block of cheddar.
Yes, both products were based upon a card metaphor. The similarity ends there. In the world of index card-based database-like applications, Zoomracks took the technology from the hay wagon stage and advanced it to the level of the first horseless carriage. Hypercard, by comparison, was a 1999 Mercedes-Benz factory. The things Hypercard could do that Zoomracks never even aspired to... I'd go crazy even trying to enumerate them all.
Zoomracks was an ASCII-based interface for an ASCII-based database app. Pure and simple. The rack concept was a cute gimmick. Hypercard was a multimedia authoring application that happened to have some ability to deal with ASCII. Think of Visual Basic as it exists today. Hypercard was all of that, and more. Zoomracks is a text database. Hypercard is an earth-shakingly excellent integrated programming/execution environment with full multimedia, scripting, and hyperlinking down to its very core. Umm, how many ways can I say that? To compare Zoomracks with Hypercard is an insult to Hypercard.
And I say this with all (and I do mean all) due respect to Zoomracks, of which I probably still own a copy.
... because they're saying the same thing you are.
It's all about values and responsibility.
I know, if you're a (liberal|conservative), it's really easy to say that it's all the fault of the (($1 eq "conservative")? liberals : conservatives). After all, they're the 'them' in "'us' vs. 'them'". But when you look at what people have to say, it seems to me that both sides are in agreement. People need to take responsibility.
There are at least two alarming trends at work here. The first is peoples' unwillingness to take responsibility for anything. The second is the increasing trend to prosecute children as adults. If you prefer, you can say that the second is the criminalization of medical or psychological problems. Either way, the second grows out of the first.
It's time for a change. It's time to stop letting grown adults abdicate their responsibility and accountability for every little thing to the legislature and courts. The government has a responsibility to prevent unscrupulous businesses and individuals from screwing you. It does not have a responsibility to raise your children for you, or catch your bottle every time you drop it. Some countries have "common sense" statutes -- if ever there was one that needed them, it's the US.
Part of accepting your responsibility as an adult is guardianship of those who lack the ability to take care of themselves; namely, children. (You may, at your discretion, substitute "drug addicts" or "mentally disabled".) Call me callous, but children are animals. Their behavior is only as good as the training they receive from parents (or, in cases of neglect, parental surrogates like teachers, church members, or gang leaders).
It's very easy to say that a 13-year-old should know that you're not supposed to kill people. Sure, but who's teaching them that, television? The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree. If your kid doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, you know where I'm going to be looking for negligence. John Carmack, right? WWF Wrestling? Not hardly. My finger's pointed straight at your nose.
I'm sure no politician will EVER support this, because it directly threatens their best power base, the upper-middle-class, suburban, white, self-righteous hypocrites of America, but...
The only way to keep kids from becoming killers is for their parents to raise them properly. And the only way that's ever going to happen is if we hold parents accountable for their actions. As in, if you stick that thing in there, you're in it for the next 25+ years. As in, if a child kills someone, the child goes in for psychiatric care, and the PARENT GOES TO PRISON.
There's a couple in San Francisco right now who are facing 2nd degree murder charges for the actions of their dogs. Right on! Let's keep this ball rolling.
Sarcasm really does not translate at all well in plain text. If you want to say something straightforward, just say it. Only include special notice if you are being sarcastic. You're pretty much always safe to assume a general audience will not perceive sarcasm unless you tell them where it is, and write accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very simple. All they asked for is PCs purchased without any OS. I ordered my PC pre-loaded with Red Hat. Any company that does likewise need not be reported to Microsoft.
Actually, the first-generation PPC (601) could run 68K apps faster than the fastest Quadra. And not even the fastest 601. My 7200/75 with a 1-MB cache posts better benchmarks in 68K mode than the Quadra 840AV.
I suspect that the emergence of inexpensive FPGA kits takes a lot of the appeal out of wirewrapping prototypes. Why spend hours twisting wires to do the same job as a few lines of code on your PC?
I got the impression that aD was having trouble landing good contracts and growing their business because clients wanted aD to be backed be strong venture partners and experienced management, regardless of their immediate profitability.
Also keep in mind that people who are great at starting companies are not always great at running them. And vice-versa. Just something to chew on.
Apple Computer
You complain that the ACS source is useless because nobody but aD insiders knows how to use it anyway.
Linux is in exactly the same boat. I bet less than 0.01% of all Slashdot readers have sufficient familiarity to make nontrivial modifications to the Linux kernel, let alone have ever tried. I'll be the first to admit I've never edited more than some basic numeric constants, and added one measly hook to a device driver that a vendor provided.
The point of Open/Free software is not, and never has been, that source availability is useful to all customers. Just that it's there for you if you ever need it. The rest is up to you.
Linux is good, but for maximum enjoyment you really need to run it on a PowerPC, with MacOnLinux (MOL) in a big X window. ;-)
I've been using Linux (on a Mac) on and off for about 4+ years. It's okay; I'd happily use it if I didn't have anything better.
I won't say what MacOS can do that Linux desktops can't, but I'll mention some features I haven't seen yet that I'd like to see. If you know what to do in Linux to make it work, please enlighten me.
I already know about TkDesk. Last time I used it, it was pretty good but not good enough.
If you can tell me how to accomplish any of the above, I'd be very grateful. I'm really looking to find a way to do everything I like about MacOS on my Linux machines.
...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.
If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not
- Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
- Support Page, which contains a link to the
- New To Linux page, where you can begin to educate yourself by reading their
- Introduction to Linux, as well as many other useful and informative documents.
Try it -- it's really easy, and fun too!For all that people criticize Apple for how "little" (superficially) MacOS seems to have advanced in the last 15 years, no other company has created a UI that's significantly better, or even really all that different.
.doc doing on your file name? You didn't put that there. Rename the file the way you wanted it. Oops, broke it. Now it won't open it Word when you double-click it.
And, really, MacOS has advanced a lot more than detractors give it credit for. But the improvements are mostly not the kind you can highlight in a screenshot.
However, among all these essentially-the-same computing platforms, the one by Apple is the most pleasant to use. By far.
All X systems are plagued by interface inconsistencies -- rather than learn the platform, you have to learn the interface of every single application separately. As far as I can tell, this is as true today as when I first noticed it 10+ years ago.
Windows is better because, if there is one thing Microsoft is good at, it's learning from success (in this case, Apple's). However, if you use both MacOS and Windows for a few months, it becomes clear that, compared to Apple, Microsoft does not sweat the details. Apple tries hard to get the product just right, and MS stops at "good enough to sell".
I haven't used Windows 2000, but I'll give some examples from NT4.
Open Explorer. Pick a text file and open it. Make a little change and save the file. Go back to Explorer. Where's the file? It's gone! No, it's not gone, it just jumped down to the last row in your window. WTF?
In Windows, create a letter in Word and save it to a file named "Mom 4/16/01". Dang, no good. Okay, try "Mom 4-16-01". Hey! What's this stupid
Don't even get me started on the stupidness of drive letters. Those things are a major abomination.
Here's one that is broke in NT4, but fixed in 2000: Change the TCP/IP address of your computer. Reboot time! No Mac would make you do that.
Applications that make you reboot before you can use them? What's up with that? This has become a serious problem on the Mac as well, but it never happened until after Win95 popularized this disgusting practice. Most Mac apps can still be installed and uninstalled by dragging a folder -- no registry or Start menu needed! The system immediately knows where it is.
Multiple monitor support - Windows(98) got it 10 years after Mac. Maybe in another 10 years, it'll get color calibration. Speaking of colors, open up the color picker tool on a Mac. There's the familiar RGB pie (also present in Windows), a CMYK color picker, a box of crayons, and a couple of others. Cool!
Apple sweats the details. MacOS just plain works. That's why I keep buying Macs. (And they make great Linux machines, too. Linux+MOL is extremely cool.)
This is a lesson I have learned, painfully, over the course of 20 years that I have been buying personal computers. Learn this lesson, and learn it well.
HARDWARE IS NOTHING. SOFTWARE IS EVERYTHING.
Say this 1000 times. Understand it. Grok it. Then it will all make sense.
If you could buy computers tomorrow for $12 that had 16 G4s each, but could only be used if you wrote all the software yourself in assembly language, they still wouldn't attract spit's worth of market share. (Come to think of it, this almost perfectly describes the state of the personal computer market around 1980.)
I like Macs. A lot. There are 4 of them with me in this room right now. The reason I like Macs is because of their software. I know full well that a $1000 Athlon will give generally better performance than a $1500 G4, but I use the Mac anyway. But I'm different. Most people will never even consider a Mac at any price, just because they can't take home CDs from work and install the software on them.
Software is everything.
Ohhh.... that sounds like a troll, but I just can't resist biting...
Okay, maybe it was a troll. Sometimes I can't resist. Thanks for humoring me!
My MacOS 7, 8, or 9 machine has a much more responsive interface on a 75-MHz machine than Gnome on a 500-MHz Linux box
Uhh.. and thats with WHAT apps running concurrently?
Any collection of apps you care to name. Even when a process does hog the CPU on the Mac (such as when Sherlock decides to index the drive), the Mac's interface at all times remains more responsive than Gnome. Believe me, I'd love for Gnome to be snappy and responsive - but on my 500-MHz PC with 128MB of RAM, it isn't. Not even if it's the only thing running.
RE: CPU hogging on a PMT system - At least you have the option of changing priorities
Not if I don't own the process. It's good to be da root!
But I guess you're happy using MacOS 7-9 instead of MacOS X, or Win3.1 instead of Win9x. Win9x barely qualifies as a pre-emptive OS tho, most of the kernel is single-threaded, so apps tend to block each other too much - try NT4/W2k.
Instead? :-) For a company touting their OS as being multithreaded, Microsoft sure didn't put much effort into threading anything that runs on it. Explorer, Word, Excel - they all lock me out when doing the least little task. Drives me crazy. The MacOS Finder has much better multithreading than Explorer, at least on NT4. As the Amigoids used to boast, it lets me execute two copies at the same time. I can't say as much for NT.
I'll run MacOS X when I believe it's stable. In the meantime, MacOS 9.1 is doing very well for me, and Red Hat on my PC.
Steve Jobs boasted about how the latest G4 Macs can encode a DVD in "only" twice as long as it takes to play back. My response: "GACK!" I'm not willing to wait more than 20 seconds for a PC to do *anything*.
So hardware makers are safe at least until a typical PC can encode a 30-minute DVD in under 20 seconds, which is at least 4 months from now.
On the other hand, suppose we actually do get PCs so fast that nobody wants a faster one. Look on the bright side -- nobody will want to build a Beowulf cluster out of them!
Apple's been selling OS X Server for quite a while. (Is it one year or two?) IIRC, the Apple Lisa had preemptive multitasking in 1982. Both Apple and Microsoft sold versions of Unix (A/UX and Xenix, respectively) in the late '80s. Apple was well known to be developing a preemptive multitasking system from about 1989 onward, and we all know how well that worked out. Pink became Taligent, which went bust. (Rumor has it, Pink was actually in pretty good shape before IBM fscked it all up.) Then came Copland, which was good enough to release as a developer beta before it was deep-sixed for reasons I don't understand. Only after they barfed on all of these did they buy NeXT and start all over again.
But of course, all this is beside the point. You know as well as I do that preemptive multitasking is totally overrated. It's worth 100 times as much as a checkbox feature than as a practical device. Here's a perfect case in point: My MacOS 7, 8, or 9 machine has a much more responsive interface on a 75-MHz machine than Gnome on a 500-MHz Linux box. I am not making this up. Cooperative multitasking can work very well. On the Mac, it almost always does. Multithreaded, even. Another case in point: a batch process started up on my UltraSPARC today that rendered the box unusable by me until it completed. Preemptive multitasking is obviously not a panacea. Why don't you pick a useful feature, like protected memory.
Chalk up one more neat idea that Apple had 10 years before MS thought to copy it. Like the bunny says, good things come to those who wait.
"Here's some little words for you: kernel space, user space."
Thanks!
That's about what I figured. So it is a Ford vs. Chevy argument. The user space solution, presumably, offers minor benefits in the form of memory protection at the cost of a little performance, and the kernel space solution makes the opposite tradeoff. In either case, if your device driver is buggy, your system horked. Is that about the size of it?
... how Linux loadable kernel modules are conceptually different from low-level Mach services. They seem pretty similar to me.
Is this essentially a "Ford vs. Chevy" argument?
Several previous posters have had excellent comments about wealth creation. See this very insightful article by Skapare, orthis one, by Gordan1, or this one, by j-beda, or this other very insightful article by renehollan. (In fact, I think renehollan's article is the best of the bunch. Please do read it.)
While I'm lauding renehollan's article, permit me to highlight this one sentence: Created wealth does not have to be concentrated to be beneficial. From Skapare, consider this fillip: Open Source creates as much wealth as proprietary products do.
What is wealth?
Is wealth having money? I certainly think that's part of the answer, but not all.
Most of the "wealth" in stocks is vapor, not money. It's potential money. Imagine a public company that has an IPO where they print up 10 million shares, and sell 1 million on the open market. Its valuation is 10% real (based on the shares people purchased) and 90% virtual (for unreleased shares valued at the going market rate of the public 10%). If its shareholders try to cash out all at once, or if it tries to sell that other 90% all at once, or if buyers decide they're not going to fight over 10% of a company, its value will deflate pretty fast.
Stock market wealth is like a balloon full of air. If you poke a tiny little hole, you can take out a significant amount at a measured rate withou popping the whole thing. If air is still being added while you do this, it won't even deflate.
Enough about such flimsy measures of wealth as potential "air" money. I'd say real wealth is measured in human terms: Easier and/or better living. If you aquire something that makes your life better, you have gained wealth. Consumer electronics, cars, good medical care, leisure time, hobbies... these are all contributors to wealth. The important idea here is not that they can be bought with money, but that you are wealthy if you have them at all.
So how do you create a lot of wealth? Or, put another way, how do you make a whole lot of people wealthy? One way, certainly, is to give everyone tons of money. But another, equally valid approach, is to reduce the cost of the benefits of wealth. If everyone in the world had $100 million, would everyone be rich? Possibly. If everyone in the world had a nice house, nice toys, plenty to eat, good family and friends, intellectual stimulation, and lots of time to enjoy it all, would everyone be rich? I think so.
This dovetails beautifully with Skapare's hypothesis. By enabling all people to aquire high-quality software, Free Software creates wealth! Lots of it. It creates wealth in the sense that they have tools that make their life easier or better. It also has secondary effects (as renehollan points out) of freeing up more of your resources to pursue traditional methods of wealth-building such as hoarding real or virtual "air" money. (I suppose if you want to take this argument to a ridiculous extreme, you could say that software piracy creates wealth, too. I'm not even going to go there.)
I never meant for this to be a "me too" article, but these other writers have made their points so eloquently, there's not much left for me to say, apart from encouraging us all to broaden our perspective when we think about what is wealth, and how is it created. The definition that corporate society tries to drill into us is pretty narrow.
Mammals, while they've been around for less raw time, have demonstrated greater adaptibility - noteably, surviving a few ice ages.
Ice ages happen every few thousand years. I'm sure that in their 60 million years, Dinosaurs faced their fair share of ice ages. They were also terrifically adaptable. Some might even argue that, by their relation to modern-day birds, dinosaurs are not completely extinct.
Humanoid apes have only existed for a handful of million years, and human civilization is only a couple tens of thousands of years old. Let's wait and see another 10 million years or so (and/or survive the impact of a mile-wide asteroid into shallow water) before we get too haughty about the dinosaurs.
The problem with domain squatters is that 100% of the value of the domain they hold is due to the value created by the rightful holder of the trademark. (If that isn't the case, then it's not squatting, QED.) For one person to attempt to make money by leveraging the value of another person's property is fraudulent, and illegal. Domain squatting is theft in the same way that grabbing an unlocked bicycle off a rack is theft. Just because you were there and nobody was looking doesn't mean it's yours to take.
It's an entirely different story if you have a legitimate use for a domain name that might also be claimable by somebody else. For example, hypothetically, it would have been entirely legit for somebody to register "ford.com" to make a web site about crossing rivers at shallow points (as far as I know, nobody did).
A web site that takes fair use about as far as it can possibly go without infringing a trademark is barbienews.com. Note how they are explicitly not domain squatting.
And who ever said domain brokers are good? I presume that a domain broker does not hold onto domain names that belong to trademark holders with hopes of selling them, but rather works with businesses to think of and register new ones. Either way, they're snake-oil salesmen, only one grade of bottom-feeder above domain squatters. Yuck. Let 'em all find honest jobs.
I owned an Atari ST. I owned a copy of Zoomracks. I used and liked Zoomracks. I thought it was great. I snorted with derision at Hypercard, and cheered when I read that Apple settled out of court and paid royalties to the author of Zoomracks (incidentally, they were the only defendant out of several that ever did, IIRC).
Then I bought a Mac and started using Hypercard. And let me tell you... Zoomracks is no Hypercard! That lawsuit had no merit whatsoever. As someone who used and liked both products at around the same time, I can claim with some authority that they were about as similar as a wagon wheel and a block of cheddar.
Yes, both products were based upon a card metaphor. The similarity ends there. In the world of index card-based database-like applications, Zoomracks took the technology from the hay wagon stage and advanced it to the level of the first horseless carriage. Hypercard, by comparison, was a 1999 Mercedes-Benz factory. The things Hypercard could do that Zoomracks never even aspired to... I'd go crazy even trying to enumerate them all.
Zoomracks was an ASCII-based interface for an ASCII-based database app. Pure and simple. The rack concept was a cute gimmick. Hypercard was a multimedia authoring application that happened to have some ability to deal with ASCII. Think of Visual Basic as it exists today. Hypercard was all of that, and more. Zoomracks is a text database. Hypercard is an earth-shakingly excellent integrated programming/execution environment with full multimedia, scripting, and hyperlinking down to its very core. Umm, how many ways can I say that? To compare Zoomracks with Hypercard is an insult to Hypercard.
And I say this with all (and I do mean all) due respect to Zoomracks, of which I probably still own a copy.
... because they're saying the same thing you are.
It's all about values and responsibility.
I know, if you're a (liberal|conservative), it's really easy to say that it's all the fault of the (($1 eq "conservative")? liberals : conservatives). After all, they're the 'them' in "'us' vs. 'them'". But when you look at what people have to say, it seems to me that both sides are in agreement. People need to take responsibility.
So lighten up on liberals. They're not the enemy.
There are at least two alarming trends at work here. The first is peoples' unwillingness to take responsibility for anything. The second is the increasing trend to prosecute children as adults. If you prefer, you can say that the second is the criminalization of medical or psychological problems. Either way, the second grows out of the first.
It's time for a change. It's time to stop letting grown adults abdicate their responsibility and accountability for every little thing to the legislature and courts. The government has a responsibility to prevent unscrupulous businesses and individuals from screwing you. It does not have a responsibility to raise your children for you, or catch your bottle every time you drop it. Some countries have "common sense" statutes -- if ever there was one that needed them, it's the US.
Part of accepting your responsibility as an adult is guardianship of those who lack the ability to take care of themselves; namely, children. (You may, at your discretion, substitute "drug addicts" or "mentally disabled".) Call me callous, but children are animals. Their behavior is only as good as the training they receive from parents (or, in cases of neglect, parental surrogates like teachers, church members, or gang leaders).
It's very easy to say that a 13-year-old should know that you're not supposed to kill people. Sure, but who's teaching them that, television? The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree. If your kid doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, you know where I'm going to be looking for negligence. John Carmack, right? WWF Wrestling? Not hardly. My finger's pointed straight at your nose.
I'm sure no politician will EVER support this, because it directly threatens their best power base, the upper-middle-class, suburban, white, self-righteous hypocrites of America, but...
The only way to keep kids from becoming killers is for their parents to raise them properly. And the only way that's ever going to happen is if we hold parents accountable for their actions. As in, if you stick that thing in there, you're in it for the next 25+ years. As in, if a child kills someone, the child goes in for psychiatric care, and the PARENT GOES TO PRISON.
There's a couple in San Francisco right now who are facing 2nd degree murder charges for the actions of their dogs. Right on! Let's keep this ball rolling.
http://www.openppc.org/vendors.html
Hear, as in listen, attend, or pay heed.
http://work.ucsd.edu:5141/cgi-bin/http_webster?isi ndex=hear&method=exact
Sarcasm really does not translate at all well in plain text. If you want to say something straightforward, just say it. Only include special notice if you are being sarcastic. You're pretty much always safe to assume a general audience will not perceive sarcasm unless you tell them where it is, and write accordingly.