How true this is. The real problem here is that when Palm made their first splash on the scene, they actively encouraged developers of all stripes and created a cult brand. Apple is not doing the same thing -- it's the same Steveishness (a tradition John Sculley carried on) that left the Mac a gaming backwater in the mid-80s, a situation it never really recovered from despite game developers chomping at the bit to get at PowerPC hardware.
Put it this way -- I know Palm's best days are behind them, but my next MP3 player will almost certainly be a Palm Tungsten. The iPhone/iPod Touch isn't all hat and no cattle, but given how restrictive Apple is being with the platform it may as well be.
Well, a good point, but not exactly a deal-killer, especially when there are off-the-shelf open source packages out there. There is a fair amount of POS Linux experience out there -- I was reading about it in Linux Journal a decade ago. There should be some way to just turnkey it.
Honestly, calling something you're talking about "taboo" or "politically incorrect" usually indicates that you're about to say something distinctly disrespectful; in the political arena it's usually something racist or classist, while coming from Enderle it's just astroturf.
I've heard of people saying "But I don't want version 5! I want you guys to make version 3 work the way it's supposed to!"
I really think a lot of nontechnical users couldn't care less about new features or redesigned interfaces -- what they've got works, and they don't want it messed with. So every time a software company adds a bunch of features or redesigns the interface, there's a good number of the user base that is going to be seriously ticked off because they have to retrain on all the new stuff.
Microsoft is one company that doesn't even come close to getting that. I've seen some of their smart house ideas for example -- their designs solve problems that people don't have to begin with. (Is anyone really in such a state that having the fridge track the RFID chips in your food packaging will improve things? Well, handicapped people and shut-ins, maybe, but for the vast majority of people it's overkill at best.)
That's actually a very good point -- end users like integration because it implies there's less bookkeeping to do. The typical computer user would probably consider dealing with Unix filters somewhat akin to DLL hell and want to avoid it -- the model makes perfect sense to a techie but looks jury-rigged to a nontechnical end user. I mean, someone could have written a decent facsimile of nroff on the Commodore 64 in 1983, but who would actually have used it? (My word processor of choice back in the day was Speedscript -- not WYSIWIG, but faster than geoWrite, which I loved otherwise. But not everyone would have the same opinion.)
They did create a user interface guide when Windows 95 came out. I presume it's still available in some form or another for XP and possibly Vista, but I wouldn't know where to get it. Probably a download from somewhere in the MSDN website.
You misread me. For technical purposes, yes -- *roff, TeX, DocBook, etc. are great, and widely used. I'm talking about something like a cookbook, an art book, or even just a novel. If I were to go get a job at, say, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich or Workman Publishing, they would probably want to know what I know about Quark or InDesign. I don't see them asking me how proficient I am in LaTeX or troff.
Uh, how many mainstream publishers openly use TeX (or *roff for that matter) for anything but technical books and papers? Most of them don't even talk about what they use for typesetting to begin with, and if they do they might mention the fonts they use.
Was that Cairo? I think the problem they had with that was the same one that any organization has with a reimplementation of a complex system -- if they can finish at all, the bloat problems will render the system unusable. That's why Multics became a single-vendor proprietary system -- OS/360 and its sequels were too entrenched on the high end, and Unix diversified insanely on the low end. Multics was too bloated to keep up.
Total rewrites never work. Apple learned that with Copland, which is why all us Mac weenies are using thinly disguised Unix boxen now. Microsoft should have learned that with Cairo but obviously didn't, and Windows users are paying the price for that as Vista recedes into the future.
Personally I think it would have gone just as well for them if they'd ripped off one of the BSDs and built a leaner, meaner Windows, but that would have meant throwing out NTOSKRNL. That and they'd have to do an awful lot of work reinventing WINE for legal reasons.
OpenSSH is really the jewel in the crown there. That's what they should be focusing on, and try some kind of deforking effort with the NetBSD bunch. But that won't happen for a number of reasons, Theo probably being the biggest.
"better and cheaper"... heh, tell that to the subjectivist audiophiles out there...
I consider myself a surround sound skeptic. I think it's a good thing for movies where you have an immersive experience -- action/SF movies, symphonic pieces like Fantasia, that sort of thing. But I don't get SACD/DVD-A -- apart from a very few pieces of classical or prog rock, I don't see any real value to most music. And I don't get surround on broadcast television either -- with the exception of a few documentaries on public television, the impetus just isn't there. (Hell, they even have camcorders with surround these days, and I can't think of a single thing you could do on a camcorder that would benefit from a 5.1 soundtrack.)
And then they come along and throw 6.1 and 7.1 into the mix? Nuh-uh. I think I see the article's point -- just too much complexity for no great gain. (Matter of fact I thought the only thing anyone used 7.1 for was video games... guess I was wrong.)
The funny thing about the 128 was that at boot time, the Z80 was the processor in control.
The source code for CP/M is out there somewhere -- wouldn't it be fun to see it ported to modern hardware? I have no idea what use it would be, but it would be interesting.
That's just it -- registering primarily or solely to participate in an AfD is counterproductive, since there's a strong likelihood you don't know how the system works around Wikipedia. Comments from the newly registered and anonymous are given less weight for precisely that reason. In this particular case, WHT is seen by those who were in on the AfD as being just another wannabe in the podcast world (as most podcasts are), and the arguments to the contrary have mostly taken the form of special pleading rather than a reference to actual numbers. The podcast world is extremely crowded, and since there's such a low barrier to entry there is not likely to be any serious shakeout. Even Adam Curry and Dawn and Drew are little fish in a big pond, and My Pet AudioBlog Podcast doesn't even rise to the level of plankton. WHT is, at best, somewhere in the middle.
I have been following the wehatetech side for some time as well, and the tenacity of WHT.com users is... well, a marvel to behold, in some sense. (I mean, this argument is, what, three weeks old now? Most everyone else would have given up and walked away by now.) The sheer vitriol of it all tends to obscure the fact that Wikipedia is a reference, not a promotional venue, and the fact that to everyone except WHT this is a tempest in a teapot.
Personally I do think the Hitler comparison is partially apt for Bush, but only because of the massive corporate welfare in his tax policies. I do think the man is a scumbag, but apart from his economic policies he's more Nixon than Hitler.
Hussein... well, he's more like Pol Pot or Idi Amin. I don't think anyone has ever done anything quite as systematically evil as Hitler. Stalin probably killed more people, but he was chaotic and arbitrary. Hitler perverted the system and an entire country to accomplish the Holocaust.
I'd be interested to see if there were any still in the wild too. Virtually every major virus threat on the Mac died with System 7.5 or earlier, and apart from MSOffice macro viruses I don't think anyone's tried to do anything nasty to Macs since.
Well, if you're too psycho someone will figure it out. You want someone to be just psycho enough to get results with no ethical considerations, but not so psycho that they run the company into the ground with their own megalomania.
Of course, you could build a company like Costco... they're a great example of how to run things sanely. But Wall Street doesn't reward responsibility for its own sake.
Well, you put it like that, you won't even get a perceptible static shock from one of those. A real ZPE unit would have to be gigantic but incredibly thin -- not exactly defying the laws of physics, but not practical to build with any technology we understand either. Like I said, the density of ZPE is very low -- the space of the Earth has about as much energy as a gallon of gas. You'd need a ZPE device the size of the solar system to get any significant amount of energy.
After a while there's no point in keeping up with the guy -- he'll keep publishing (or whatever he's doing) no matter who tells him he's wrong. It's like dealing with my sister -- she'll do whatever she wants no matter what you say to her, so eventually you just punch her in the mouth and move on.
Oh, they work... it's just that you'd only get a few millionths of an amp out of a ZPE generator the size of a skyscraper. There isn't that much ZPE out there to begin with.
Actually, to the best of my knowledge even A/UX couldn't boot natively, and that was an Apple OS. I think the bootloader (probably in ROM -- Macs never did have a problem with boot block viruses) was hardcoded strictly to MacOS and nothing else. (The Kanga PowerBook can't boot OS/X -- the only G3 that can't -- and the 64/6500 machines work but took a long time and some user ingenuity to get it to run.)
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How true this is. The real problem here is that when Palm made their first splash on the scene, they actively encouraged developers of all stripes and created a cult brand. Apple is not doing the same thing -- it's the same Steveishness (a tradition John Sculley carried on) that left the Mac a gaming backwater in the mid-80s, a situation it never really recovered from despite game developers chomping at the bit to get at PowerPC hardware.
Put it this way -- I know Palm's best days are behind them, but my next MP3 player will almost certainly be a Palm Tungsten. The iPhone/iPod Touch isn't all hat and no cattle, but given how restrictive Apple is being with the platform it may as well be.
Well, a good point, but not exactly a deal-killer, especially when there are off-the-shelf open source packages out there. There is a fair amount of POS Linux experience out there -- I was reading about it in Linux Journal a decade ago. There should be some way to just turnkey it.
Honestly, calling something you're talking about "taboo" or "politically incorrect" usually indicates that you're about to say something distinctly disrespectful; in the political arena it's usually something racist or classist, while coming from Enderle it's just astroturf.
I've heard of people saying "But I don't want version 5! I want you guys to make version 3 work the way it's supposed to!"
I really think a lot of nontechnical users couldn't care less about new features or redesigned interfaces -- what they've got works, and they don't want it messed with. So every time a software company adds a bunch of features or redesigns the interface, there's a good number of the user base that is going to be seriously ticked off because they have to retrain on all the new stuff.
Microsoft is one company that doesn't even come close to getting that. I've seen some of their smart house ideas for example -- their designs solve problems that people don't have to begin with. (Is anyone really in such a state that having the fridge track the RFID chips in your food packaging will improve things? Well, handicapped people and shut-ins, maybe, but for the vast majority of people it's overkill at best.)
That's actually a very good point -- end users like integration because it implies there's less bookkeeping to do. The typical computer user would probably consider dealing with Unix filters somewhat akin to DLL hell and want to avoid it -- the model makes perfect sense to a techie but looks jury-rigged to a nontechnical end user. I mean, someone could have written a decent facsimile of nroff on the Commodore 64 in 1983, but who would actually have used it? (My word processor of choice back in the day was Speedscript -- not WYSIWIG, but faster than geoWrite, which I loved otherwise. But not everyone would have the same opinion.)
They did create a user interface guide when Windows 95 came out. I presume it's still available in some form or another for XP and possibly Vista, but I wouldn't know where to get it. Probably a download from somewhere in the MSDN website.
You misread me. For technical purposes, yes -- *roff, TeX, DocBook, etc. are great, and widely used. I'm talking about something like a cookbook, an art book, or even just a novel. If I were to go get a job at, say, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich or Workman Publishing, they would probably want to know what I know about Quark or InDesign. I don't see them asking me how proficient I am in LaTeX or troff.
Latin is actually pretty closed-source, though some of its derivatives are more open. Italian and Spanish particularly. French, not so much.
Uh, how many mainstream publishers openly use TeX (or *roff for that matter) for anything but technical books and papers? Most of them don't even talk about what they use for typesetting to begin with, and if they do they might mention the fonts they use.
Was that Cairo? I think the problem they had with that was the same one that any organization has with a reimplementation of a complex system -- if they can finish at all, the bloat problems will render the system unusable. That's why Multics became a single-vendor proprietary system -- OS/360 and its sequels were too entrenched on the high end, and Unix diversified insanely on the low end. Multics was too bloated to keep up.
Total rewrites never work. Apple learned that with Copland, which is why all us Mac weenies are using thinly disguised Unix boxen now. Microsoft should have learned that with Cairo but obviously didn't, and Windows users are paying the price for that as Vista recedes into the future.
Personally I think it would have gone just as well for them if they'd ripped off one of the BSDs and built a leaner, meaner Windows, but that would have meant throwing out NTOSKRNL. That and they'd have to do an awful lot of work reinventing WINE for legal reasons.
OpenSSH is really the jewel in the crown there. That's what they should be focusing on, and try some kind of deforking effort with the NetBSD bunch. But that won't happen for a number of reasons, Theo probably being the biggest.
"better and cheaper"... heh, tell that to the subjectivist audiophiles out there...
I consider myself a surround sound skeptic. I think it's a good thing for movies where you have an immersive experience -- action/SF movies, symphonic pieces like Fantasia, that sort of thing. But I don't get SACD/DVD-A -- apart from a very few pieces of classical or prog rock, I don't see any real value to most music. And I don't get surround on broadcast television either -- with the exception of a few documentaries on public television, the impetus just isn't there. (Hell, they even have camcorders with surround these days, and I can't think of a single thing you could do on a camcorder that would benefit from a 5.1 soundtrack.)
And then they come along and throw 6.1 and 7.1 into the mix? Nuh-uh. I think I see the article's point -- just too much complexity for no great gain. (Matter of fact I thought the only thing anyone used 7.1 for was video games... guess I was wrong.)
The funny thing about the 128 was that at boot time, the Z80 was the processor in control.
The source code for CP/M is out there somewhere -- wouldn't it be fun to see it ported to modern hardware? I have no idea what use it would be, but it would be interesting.
Shyeah. Radioactive gold.
That's just it -- registering primarily or solely to participate in an AfD is counterproductive, since there's a strong likelihood you don't know how the system works around Wikipedia. Comments from the newly registered and anonymous are given less weight for precisely that reason. In this particular case, WHT is seen by those who were in on the AfD as being just another wannabe in the podcast world (as most podcasts are), and the arguments to the contrary have mostly taken the form of special pleading rather than a reference to actual numbers. The podcast world is extremely crowded, and since there's such a low barrier to entry there is not likely to be any serious shakeout. Even Adam Curry and Dawn and Drew are little fish in a big pond, and My Pet AudioBlog Podcast doesn't even rise to the level of plankton. WHT is, at best, somewhere in the middle.
I have been following the wehatetech side for some time as well, and the tenacity of WHT.com users is... well, a marvel to behold, in some sense. (I mean, this argument is, what, three weeks old now? Most everyone else would have given up and walked away by now.) The sheer vitriol of it all tends to obscure the fact that Wikipedia is a reference, not a promotional venue, and the fact that to everyone except WHT this is a tempest in a teapot.
Personally I do think the Hitler comparison is partially apt for Bush, but only because of the massive corporate welfare in his tax policies. I do think the man is a scumbag, but apart from his economic policies he's more Nixon than Hitler.
Hussein... well, he's more like Pol Pot or Idi Amin. I don't think anyone has ever done anything quite as systematically evil as Hitler. Stalin probably killed more people, but he was chaotic and arbitrary. Hitler perverted the system and an entire country to accomplish the Holocaust.
I'd be interested to see if there were any still in the wild too. Virtually every major virus threat on the Mac died with System 7.5 or earlier, and apart from MSOffice macro viruses I don't think anyone's tried to do anything nasty to Macs since.
Get an iMic and rerip to MP3. There are ways around DRM.
Well, if you're too psycho someone will figure it out. You want someone to be just psycho enough to get results with no ethical considerations, but not so psycho that they run the company into the ground with their own megalomania.
Of course, you could build a company like Costco... they're a great example of how to run things sanely. But Wall Street doesn't reward responsibility for its own sake.
Spite for the sake of profit -- what do you expect from a business culture that rewards borderline sociopaths?
Well, you put it like that, you won't even get a perceptible static shock from one of those. A real ZPE unit would have to be gigantic but incredibly thin -- not exactly defying the laws of physics, but not practical to build with any technology we understand either. Like I said, the density of ZPE is very low -- the space of the Earth has about as much energy as a gallon of gas. You'd need a ZPE device the size of the solar system to get any significant amount of energy.
After a while there's no point in keeping up with the guy -- he'll keep publishing (or whatever he's doing) no matter who tells him he's wrong. It's like dealing with my sister -- she'll do whatever she wants no matter what you say to her, so eventually you just punch her in the mouth and move on.
Oh, they work... it's just that you'd only get a few millionths of an amp out of a ZPE generator the size of a skyscraper. There isn't that much ZPE out there to begin with.
Actually, to the best of my knowledge even A/UX couldn't boot natively, and that was an Apple OS. I think the bootloader (probably in ROM -- Macs never did have a problem with boot block viruses) was hardcoded strictly to MacOS and nothing else. (The Kanga PowerBook can't boot OS/X -- the only G3 that can't -- and the 64/6500 machines work but took a long time and some user ingenuity to get it to run.)