Yes, but MS products have spawned a huge amount of 'HOWTO' and 'for Dummies' type books, so the so-called ease-of-use seems to be a fallacy for a lot of people. I find MS Office far too complicated and intrusive but unfortunately, I don't get a chance to use anything else at work and I don't really know how the competition compare in that regard.
I find the Solaris DVD player info hard to believe - have you got a URL. As for the other options, an iMac would cost about £1000 and a decent DVD player would cost about £300. I'm not poor, but I HAVE a DVD player already, why should I have to buy another one just to satisfy the inertia of the DVDCCA, and if the Mac has enough market share (5-6%) to justify a DVD player, then so does Linux (3-4%). It's all about restrictions and nothing to do with piracy. I don't mind paying for DVDs, I just resent being told that I have to waste 2-3 GB of my hard drive in order to do so.
Not quite true though, as Linux has a market share of about 3-4% and the Mac has a market share of about 5-6%, and yet the Mac has DVD playing software for it. Just laziness and indifference on the part of the various actors in this little tragi-comedy
You mean like Netscape, Quake3, VMware, Corel Office, JBuilder, Unreal Tournament etc etc. What crud. The reason why there's no closed source option available is due to industry inertia and the huge licensing fees required by the DVDCCA. Incidentally, InterVideo, producers of WinDVD announced back in March that they were porting their player to Linux, although I'm not sure if this was just to provide ammo in the court case or not. Binary-compatibility is not really an option at the moment, seeing as Win32 is extremely complex and not completely documented. the WINE project provides answers for older apps, but DVD players use all the DirectX 7 stuff which WINE hasn't reached yet, although I think DirectX 6 is partially supported. I won't buy DVDs because a bunch of American corporations have decreed that I must own Windows in order to view them, and must pay more than in the US for the privilege.
Yawn. Not being able to use a computer does not make you stupid. My parents are both highly intelligent individuals, and I still have to sort out their problems with 'easy-to-use' Windows. My father is an accountant, but he doesn't consider me an idiot merely because I can't fill in my over-complicated tax return. Inability to use a computer is not an indication of stupidity, anymore than being unable to fly a 747. Imagine how bad it would be if TVs were like computers, 'You have changed the channel. Your television will need to be rebooted for this to take effect', or some CLI gibberish like sed/MTV/Cartoon Network.
Unlike with Windows and Mac, I don't think that many people are sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for 2.4.
I'd dispute that to a certain degree, I think 2.4 is eagerly awaited, as the first really scalable kernel, and also for the consumer-type stuff such as USB and FireWire. Let's not start saying 'delay the kernel' now, we don't want to get into NT5/2000 territory, let's go with what we have, which is, by all accounts, pretty damn good already and getting better as the bugs and performance issues are dealt with.
Last I heard, the UK and the US were both democracies, with more than 2 parties to vote for. If you're not happy with your elected 'representative', vote for someone else. The poll turnout in both the UK and the US are below 50%, meaning that a relatively small number of people can turn a vote. So what are we waiting and whinging for?
Don't forget Galeon and Konqueror. The choice is quite good now, Win32 you have IE, Opera, Mozilla and Kmeleon, and for Linux you have Netscape, Mozilla, Opera Alpha, Galeon and Lynx. Opera on Win32 is my fave, it's quick, small and standards-compliant, and it's finished, unlike all the others above (IE is NOT finished until it doesn't crash without dragging down the rest of Win98)
This isn't about crap employers, it's about manufacturing a labour shortage, with the intent of driving down IT salaries. Managers are appalled at the cost of IT staff and don't want to pay us what we're worth in many cases. This requires a response of some kind.
Three people from my year at school went to Oxford, even though the school was just a standard state school and their parents were merely ordinary middle-class types. Don't talk about cluelessness and then make a statement like that. Many, many people from ordinary backgrounds get to go to Oxford and Cambridge based on their academic brilliance, and not how much money their parents have - can you say the same for Harvard or Princeton.
Before Chancellor Kohl very kindly went and screwed up the economy of West Germany by 'reunifying' it with East Germany, American corps needed all the help they could get. The only reason the US is doing so well at the moment is that the only 2 countries big enough and technologically advanced enough to compete effectively, West Germany and Japan, made a hash of their economies at the beginning of the 90s. See how well the US does when they come out of their present recessions.
So how did you find this out? Was it handed to you on a plate or did you have to dig into the internals, did you have to read manuals, did you have to ask questions of other users? Or was it all delivered via telepathic transfer from Redmond? What's your argument? A server OS is complicated to a new user? And to answer the 'bible-thumpers' jibe, do Microsoft never mention the benefits of their product to the detriment of competitors at every given opportunity. Just because the MS-zealots wear expensive suits and throw buzzwords around, doesn't mean they are any less committed to their cause than the fuzziest-bearded, rabidest-dog Linux zealot. I happen to find Linux better than any flavour of Windows because it's quiet. It doesn't crash, it never requires a reboot and it doesn't pop up stupid and uninformative messages at unnecessary intervals, it just works, and I know how to admin it because I took the time to find out, just like you did with NT.
Just for the record, I was raised on the Amiga, earn a living supporting monstrous mainframe legacy systems, and started using Linux last year when Win95 crashed and burned for what seemed like the millionth time (irrelevant but just so you know)
I am a mainframe programmer with 10 years experience (yes a dinosaur), and, to me, leaving show-stopper bugs in several consecutive releases of a system shows that something is fundamentally wrong there. The emphasis with 4.0 seemed to be more about writing a DirectX competitor rather than cleaning up previous messes. My problem with X was when I upgraded to 2.2.16 with the USB backport. On 2.2.14 the mouse worked fine, on 2.2.16 it didn't and X crashed locking up the whole machine, not even allowing me to switch screens and kill it. Are you seriously telling me that it is hard to write a piece of code that recognises a problem with the mouse, spits out a message 'no mouse detected' and drops back to the console. Please. That sounds more like an MS excuse to me.
Pay attention. MS has a per-CPU license with the OEMs, meaning that even if you can buy a PC without Windows on it (not so easy), you're still forking out whatever to MS. Does this harm consumers, paying for something they haven't even installed and don't even want - think about it.
Perhaps in a large company, but most of them use NT on the desktop anyway, it's the small ones that have an NT server and Win95/98 desktops, probably adminned by someone who has bought Network Admin for Dummies or some such. Win9x is a very bad product and consumers should be compensated for not having a choice in that area of the market and no Apple were not in that market until the release of the iMac, they were mainly in the DTP and graphic designer market.
All MS software that matters still runs fine on Win95 gold.
The upcoming Office 10 won't, so I won't be buying it (not that I would have anyway), and there are quite a few device drivers (HP comes to mind) that will only run on Win98. Still, no-one forces me to buy these, but the cost of an MSOS has been factored into each of the PCs (per CPU license) that I've bought, whether I wanted it or not. Why should I have to build my own PC just to avoid this.
The Amiga gave you a lot of the things that the PC has now for a fraction of the cost - games, a word processor, a file manager, a paint package, dos shell, web browser, email, yadayadayada, but because Commodore made a hash of things in the PC market, and Doom would only run on PCs, and the MS-vapour factory said that they would port Office (thus slowing sales of WordPerfect), the Amiga died an ignominious death. Doom was the major factor, and had Commodore made it easier to upgrade the CPU on the Amiga, perhaps things would have been different. Just an old hack who misses his favourite toy:-)
Imagine if you came across someone who belived that he was superior to everyone else by divine right, and tried to assert that superiority over everyone he came in contact with. You would avoid him like the plague.
But you would still have to buy software from him when you bought your PC.
Do we need Norton Utilities as such? The info required is already there, albeit it not presented in a window, and the tools are there for monitoring. All that's really required is crash-protection for XFree86 - sorry guys DRI is cool and all, but fixing the 'screwed up config file black screen of death' problem should have had some time devoted to it. How hard can it be to detect an error in the config and drop back to the console - IANACP (I am not a C programmer) however, so any justified flames will be noted.
But then Apple don't have large articles on their website saying - Windows 2000, an enterprise class operating system which is much better than any free OS and Solaris (or words to that effect). Microsoft claim that Windows can run anything big iron Unix can, but have yet to back this up even in their own companies.
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Name me one example of Palm abusing their monopoly and I'll agree with you.
Yes, but MS products have spawned a huge amount of 'HOWTO' and 'for Dummies' type books, so the so-called ease-of-use seems to be a fallacy for a lot of people. I find MS Office far too complicated and intrusive but unfortunately, I don't get a chance to use anything else at work and I don't really know how the competition compare in that regard.
I find the Solaris DVD player info hard to believe - have you got a URL. As for the other options, an iMac would cost about £1000 and a decent DVD player would cost about £300. I'm not poor, but I HAVE a DVD player already, why should I have to buy another one just to satisfy the inertia of the DVDCCA, and if the Mac has enough market share (5-6%) to justify a DVD player, then so does Linux (3-4%). It's all about restrictions and nothing to do with piracy. I don't mind paying for DVDs, I just resent being told that I have to waste 2-3 GB of my hard drive in order to do so.
Not quite true though, as Linux has a market share of about 3-4% and the Mac has a market share of about 5-6%, and yet the Mac has DVD playing software for it. Just laziness and indifference on the part of the various actors in this little tragi-comedy
You mean like Netscape, Quake3, VMware, Corel Office, JBuilder, Unreal Tournament etc etc. What crud. The reason why there's no closed source option available is due to industry inertia and the huge licensing fees required by the DVDCCA. Incidentally, InterVideo, producers of WinDVD announced back in March that they were porting their player to Linux, although I'm not sure if this was just to provide ammo in the court case or not. Binary-compatibility is not really an option at the moment, seeing as Win32 is extremely complex and not completely documented. the WINE project provides answers for older apps, but DVD players use all the DirectX 7 stuff which WINE hasn't reached yet, although I think DirectX 6 is partially supported. I won't buy DVDs because a bunch of American corporations have decreed that I must own Windows in order to view them, and must pay more than in the US for the privilege.
Yawn. Not being able to use a computer does not make you stupid. My parents are both highly intelligent individuals, and I still have to sort out their problems with 'easy-to-use' Windows. My father is an accountant, but he doesn't consider me an idiot merely because I can't fill in my over-complicated tax return. Inability to use a computer is not an indication of stupidity, anymore than being unable to fly a 747. Imagine how bad it would be if TVs were like computers, 'You have changed the channel. Your television will need to be rebooted for this to take effect', or some CLI gibberish like sed /MTV/Cartoon Network.
But there's no danger that an Australian would be mistaken for intelligent life :)
Unlike with Windows and Mac, I don't think that many people are sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for 2.4.
I'd dispute that to a certain degree, I think 2.4 is eagerly awaited, as the first really scalable kernel, and also for the consumer-type stuff such as USB and FireWire. Let's not start saying 'delay the kernel' now, we don't want to get into NT5/2000 territory, let's go with what we have, which is, by all accounts, pretty damn good already and getting better as the bugs and performance issues are dealt with.
Last I heard, the UK and the US were both democracies, with more than 2 parties to vote for. If you're not happy with your elected 'representative', vote for someone else. The poll turnout in both the UK and the US are below 50%, meaning that a relatively small number of people can turn a vote. So what are we waiting and whinging for?
Don't forget Galeon and Konqueror. The choice is quite good now, Win32 you have IE, Opera, Mozilla and Kmeleon, and for Linux you have Netscape, Mozilla, Opera Alpha, Galeon and Lynx. Opera on Win32 is my fave, it's quick, small and standards-compliant, and it's finished, unlike all the others above (IE is NOT finished until it doesn't crash without dragging down the rest of Win98)
This isn't about crap employers, it's about manufacturing a labour shortage, with the intent of driving down IT salaries. Managers are appalled at the cost of IT staff and don't want to pay us what we're worth in many cases. This requires a response of some kind.
Three people from my year at school went to Oxford, even though the school was just a standard state school and their parents were merely ordinary middle-class types. Don't talk about cluelessness and then make a statement like that. Many, many people from ordinary backgrounds get to go to Oxford and Cambridge based on their academic brilliance, and not how much money their parents have - can you say the same for Harvard or Princeton.
Before Chancellor Kohl very kindly went and screwed up the economy of West Germany by 'reunifying' it with East Germany, American corps needed all the help they could get. The only reason the US is doing so well at the moment is that the only 2 countries big enough and technologically advanced enough to compete effectively, West Germany and Japan, made a hash of their economies at the beginning of the 90s. See how well the US does when they come out of their present recessions.
Is that you Eric?
Apologies - I should have said, with the big 5 OEMs that the clueless PHBs buy from.
So how did you find this out? Was it handed to you on a plate or did you have to dig into the internals, did you have to read manuals, did you have to ask questions of other users? Or was it all delivered via telepathic transfer from Redmond? What's your argument? A server OS is complicated to a new user? And to answer the 'bible-thumpers' jibe, do Microsoft never mention the benefits of their product to the detriment of competitors at every given opportunity. Just because the MS-zealots wear expensive suits and throw buzzwords around, doesn't mean they are any less committed to their cause than the fuzziest-bearded, rabidest-dog Linux zealot. I happen to find Linux better than any flavour of Windows because it's quiet. It doesn't crash, it never requires a reboot and it doesn't pop up stupid and uninformative messages at unnecessary intervals, it just works, and I know how to admin it because I took the time to find out, just like you did with NT.
Just for the record, I was raised on the Amiga, earn a living supporting monstrous mainframe legacy systems, and started using Linux last year when Win95 crashed and burned for what seemed like the millionth time (irrelevant but just so you know)
I am a mainframe programmer with 10 years experience (yes a dinosaur), and, to me, leaving show-stopper bugs in several consecutive releases of a system shows that something is fundamentally wrong there. The emphasis with 4.0 seemed to be more about writing a DirectX competitor rather than cleaning up previous messes. My problem with X was when I upgraded to 2.2.16 with the USB backport. On 2.2.14 the mouse worked fine, on 2.2.16 it didn't and X crashed locking up the whole machine, not even allowing me to switch screens and kill it. Are you seriously telling me that it is hard to write a piece of code that recognises a problem with the mouse, spits out a message 'no mouse detected' and drops back to the console. Please. That sounds more like an MS excuse to me.
Pay attention. MS has a per-CPU license with the OEMs, meaning that even if you can buy a PC without Windows on it (not so easy), you're still forking out whatever to MS. Does this harm consumers, paying for something they haven't even installed and don't even want - think about it.
Perhaps in a large company, but most of them use NT on the desktop anyway, it's the small ones that have an NT server and Win95/98 desktops, probably adminned by someone who has bought Network Admin for Dummies or some such. Win9x is a very bad product and consumers should be compensated for not having a choice in that area of the market and no Apple were not in that market until the release of the iMac, they were mainly in the DTP and graphic designer market.
All MS software that matters still runs fine on Win95 gold.
The upcoming Office 10 won't, so I won't be buying it (not that I would have anyway), and there are quite a few device drivers (HP comes to mind) that will only run on Win98. Still, no-one forces me to buy these, but the cost of an MSOS has been factored into each of the PCs (per CPU license) that I've bought, whether I wanted it or not. Why should I have to build my own PC just to avoid this.
The Amiga gave you a lot of the things that the PC has now for a fraction of the cost - games, a word processor, a file manager, a paint package, dos shell, web browser, email, yadayadayada, but because Commodore made a hash of things in the PC market, and Doom would only run on PCs, and the MS-vapour factory said that they would port Office (thus slowing sales of WordPerfect), the Amiga died an ignominious death. Doom was the major factor, and had Commodore made it easier to upgrade the CPU on the Amiga, perhaps things would have been different. Just an old hack who misses his favourite toy :-)
Imagine if you came across someone who belived that he was superior to everyone else by divine right, and tried to assert that superiority over everyone he came in contact with. You would avoid him like the plague.
But you would still have to buy software from him when you bought your PC.
Do we need Norton Utilities as such? The info required is already there, albeit it not presented in a window, and the tools are there for monitoring. All that's really required is crash-protection for XFree86 - sorry guys DRI is cool and all, but fixing the 'screwed up config file black screen of death' problem should have had some time devoted to it. How hard can it be to detect an error in the config and drop back to the console - IANACP (I am not a C programmer) however, so any justified flames will be noted.
Let's see how well Hotmail functions now. Not a flame, I'm just curious to see some real world comparisons between FreeBSD and Win2K.
But then Apple don't have large articles on their website saying - Windows 2000, an enterprise class operating system which is much better than any free OS and Solaris (or words to that effect). Microsoft claim that Windows can run anything big iron Unix can, but have yet to back this up even in their own companies.