I don't think they're coming around per se. I actually think this is basically the same thing as they were doing backing off on the XP licensing thing -- after the appeal essentially failed someone at MS finally managed to break up Bill'n'Steve's excellent adventure just long enough to convince them that the party might actually be over.
In essence, this is essentially the same thing as the Apple deal; MS probably is doing no more than knuckling under in the face of the fact that if they don't they're fucked. I imagine Microsoft will find a particularly slimy way of getting around this down the road and screwing Ximian over, but in the meantime they're putting up probably exactly the front they feel they need to.
Translation: Don't get too excited about this, folks. It's something, but there's almost certain to be an ulterior motive, even if it's just MS playing CYA.
Is OpenOffice GTK+ based? I seem to think it is, in which case the big problem here would be to get GTK+ or a reasonable facsimile ported over to OS X. Question is, can that be done easily?
But my point being that many of them couldn't if they wanted to.
*slap*
Microsoft doesn't have the *right* to compel preloads, but damn straight they have the clout to. You're apparently just not listening to me -- since most consumer outfits can't sell them, most people *don't* *even* *know* they can't buy them.
As I've said somewhere else, this is precisely the reason consumer PCs seem to be almost universally ATX-based.
For what it's worth, it seems as though the market has already rejected such devices -- they're rather difficult to buy (RadioShack aside) and the world in general does seem sold on Big Boxen. The iMac seems to have been the only system of that sort that was really accepted; the rest just don't seem to fly.
Crusoe was meant for people like me who consider getting basic work done adequately a higher priority than blowing the doors off the guy down the street or rendering so sharp you can see Lara Croft's pantyline and erect nipples.
It's a good chip for what it does (and I had this idea the other day that I'd love to see it do a PDP-11 just so I could run the copy of Unix V6 I downloaded a year or so ago). But it just doesn't fit into this company.
Okay, first off I'm not up on Fry's and my characterization of California geography was, shall we say, nonstandard. I apologize... to others.
But *you* are missing the point completely. The issue here has nothing to do with convenience; it's all about clout. *Yes*, I can fdisk Windows out of existence when I first get the computer -- nobody is disputing that. And no, it's not all that difficult. (And yes, I can find bare PCs in Massachusetts; it's not especially easy, but I happen to know one or two places that will do it happily).
The issue is that if I buy a name-brand PC I have no choice but Windows. That's just the way it is, because Microsoft Said So. That's the problem here.
I'd love to see a PC case designed like an Apple case. Granted, the whole idea of being able to open it up and swing out the motherboard while the system is live strikes me as being pretty useless without a hot-pluggable PCI bus, but geez, on cool points alone...
I don't think the situation is as bad as it looks. I agree that for a lot of people "desktop laptops" are probably the wave of the future -- the simple fact is that big boxes are a waste of space to most people and upgradability is not a major concern. (I never quite understood the popularity of the minitower anyway. Is it a standard-parts thing? You can stick an ATX into a fairly small desktop case, can't you? Or is it just big == racing stripes cool?)
I don't think that necessarily bodes ill for DIY systems, but I do think they might eventually become more expensive as the minitower idea becomes obsolete (again?). Reason: there will still be significant demand, from both systems integrators (commodity shops like Dell and Gateway especially) and customers. If you don't believe me, try something like I did a couple of weeks ago:
Go down to your local CircuitBuyUSA and try and take a look at the back of the systems they have on sale. To most of you it will probably come as no surprise that these systems are all ATX-based; it came as something of a shock for me because all the PCs I've owned are recycled business machines with nonstandard mobo designs. They are as they are for good reason: it's probably vastly cheaper to base consumer hardware with no special requirements on parts that can be easily second-sourced if you run low. If HP runs out of Vectra motherboards that require risers for PCI slots, they have a problem because they themselves are the only source for their motherboards.
The flipside: if they run short of motherboards for Pavilion boxes, that's not as big a problem, as they need merely place a call to Asus or whoever and get, say, 50K AMD760 motherboards shipped over by next Wednesday; from there, all they have to do is quietly slip the new motherboards out in those pretty grey HP-labeled cases and no one is any the wiser.
I think DIY computers will continue to be available to anyone who wants one. The fear that the world is headed in the iMac direction as a general rule is slightly justified, but not really so much of an issue as things like CPRM and SDMI that could create lockin issues on the OS level while taking hardware questions completely out of the loop.
/Brian
A postscript on customizability: I decided once when walking through a local Best Buy to actually see what their "build-your-own-computer" station did. Suffice to say that it made a mockery of the whole concept of designing your own system -- it didn't so much place an order for you as give you a very small choice of "requirements" and tell you what they had in stock already that matched it.
No. I was actually young enough to watch reading rainbow yet old enough to watch TNG -- he picked up TNG well into his time on RR. In fact, he even did a Trek-themed episode during the early second season of TNG.
...and if there was anyplace else in the country that would have one other than central Cali it would probably be here.
The fact is that you can't buy a bare system at Best Buy or Circuit City. Gateway Country can't, and I get the sense they get their fair share of requests for it. It's only the mom-and-pop operations that slip through the cracks and the places with a heavily geek audience (like Fry's) that will cater to that need. Everyone else is being kept in the corral.
Office 2K has a feature that MS tossed into Office98/MacOS that replaces any part of it that gets damaged. If they want IE there it's damn well going to stay there -- it's designed that way. I think that in principle that's actually not a bad feature (a bit misguided if you have a small hard drive), but with MS it's a little scary...
I don't see a proper trademark there -- the *Draw name was around long ago. MacDraw, for example.
There's actually two basic types of graphics programs, y'see. Paint programs (like Photoshop, as it happens) deal with graphics at the pixel level. Draw programs (like Illustrator, Freehand, etc.) deal with vectors and bezier curves.
Who knows, maybe we'll see KPublish soon? (But please at least call it something vaguely cool like Kpage...)
I sort of find the name KIllustrator a bit weak anyway. I mean, let's be realistic -- the only K-program out there with a truly creative name is Konqueror.
KDraw is good. Karikature (better spelling) is a bit silly, but I like it. KVektor, anyone?
I've had both. The truth is that Erector sets are a great idea, but at the end of the day you feel more like a mechanic than an artist when you're done with an Erector piece. Also, keep in mind that Erector/Meccano seems to be primarily an engineering thing, whereas probably a majority of Lego geeks probably go in more for architecture than mechanics. They really do occupy separate (though overlapping) problem spaces -- and a Lego castle just looks better, dammit:-)
What I was always a fan of was Pipeworks. You can get Quadro now, which is essentially the same thign -- I used to build gokarts with them and race them down driveways.
/Brian
/Brian
Re:This has been mentioned before, but...
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 2
This isn't strictly true. English and Latin sort of have a cousins relationship -- a lot of the structure of English relates to Latin because English's ancestral languages came from the same roots as Latin did.
In fact the similarity is responsible for "rules" like "it's a bad idea to ever split an infinitive"; people got the idea that English had to conform to Latin as much as possible and tried to impose grammatical rules that simply made no sense.
iTunes (on 9.1, not X) doesn't seem to see my Yamaha SCSI burner, which is fine with me because the way my system is configured I can't seem to do MP3->Audio CD burns anyway (not enough memory). So I stick with Toast -- takes longer, but it does the job.
Laptops make crappy game machines. There is no nice way to say it; especially on an old laptop like mine (PowerBook 5300) you're subject to a keyboard layout that just isn't all that conducive to keyboard control of a game, but the ability to take my Inform programming with me to have an iced tea and a cookie while hacking is indispensable.
On the other hand, desktop machines usually have the speed, and make great jukeboxes, but forget LAN parties unless you've got a big trunk and a lot of spare cables.
Slashdot Mirror
One might assume that it applies to shareware, though, at least from a Certain Point of View...
The fact is that it's an incredible gouge, and a clear demonstration of why business method patents are bullshit...
/Brian
I don't think they're coming around per se. I actually think this is basically the same thing as they were doing backing off on the XP licensing thing -- after the appeal essentially failed someone at MS finally managed to break up Bill'n'Steve's excellent adventure just long enough to convince them that the party might actually be over.
In essence, this is essentially the same thing as the Apple deal; MS probably is doing no more than knuckling under in the face of the fact that if they don't they're fucked. I imagine Microsoft will find a particularly slimy way of getting around this down the road and screwing Ximian over, but in the meantime they're putting up probably exactly the front they feel they need to.
Translation: Don't get too excited about this, folks. It's something, but there's almost certain to be an ulterior motive, even if it's just MS playing CYA.
/Brian
Is OpenOffice GTK+ based? I seem to think it is, in which case the big problem here would be to get GTK+ or a reasonable facsimile ported over to OS X. Question is, can that be done easily?
/Brian
But my point being that many of them couldn't if they wanted to.
*slap*
Microsoft doesn't have the *right* to compel preloads, but damn straight they have the clout to. You're apparently just not listening to me -- since most consumer outfits can't sell them, most people *don't* *even* *know* they can't buy them.
Oh, well. IHBT. IHL. HAND.
/Brian
As I've said somewhere else, this is precisely the reason consumer PCs seem to be almost universally ATX-based.
For what it's worth, it seems as though the market has already rejected such devices -- they're rather difficult to buy (RadioShack aside) and the world in general does seem sold on Big Boxen. The iMac seems to have been the only system of that sort that was really accepted; the rest just don't seem to fly.
/Brian
I think the precise concept you want is "pound of flesh".
/Brian
Crusoe was meant for people like me who consider getting basic work done adequately a higher priority than blowing the doors off the guy down the street or rendering so sharp you can see Lara Croft's pantyline and erect nipples.
It's a good chip for what it does (and I had this idea the other day that I'd love to see it do a PDP-11 just so I could run the copy of Unix V6 I downloaded a year or so ago). But it just doesn't fit into this company.
/Brian
Okay, first off I'm not up on Fry's and my characterization of California geography was, shall we say, nonstandard. I apologize... to others.
But *you* are missing the point completely. The issue here has nothing to do with convenience; it's all about clout. *Yes*, I can fdisk Windows out of existence when I first get the computer -- nobody is disputing that. And no, it's not all that difficult. (And yes, I can find bare PCs in Massachusetts; it's not especially easy, but I happen to know one or two places that will do it happily).
The issue is that if I buy a name-brand PC I have no choice but Windows. That's just the way it is, because Microsoft Said So. That's the problem here.
/Brian
I'd love to see a PC case designed like an Apple case. Granted, the whole idea of being able to open it up and swing out the motherboard while the system is live strikes me as being pretty useless without a hot-pluggable PCI bus, but geez, on cool points alone...
/Brian
I don't think the situation is as bad as it looks. I agree that for a lot of people "desktop laptops" are probably the wave of the future -- the simple fact is that big boxes are a waste of space to most people and upgradability is not a major concern. (I never quite understood the popularity of the minitower anyway. Is it a standard-parts thing? You can stick an ATX into a fairly small desktop case, can't you? Or is it just big == racing stripes cool?)
I don't think that necessarily bodes ill for DIY systems, but I do think they might eventually become more expensive as the minitower idea becomes obsolete (again?). Reason: there will still be significant demand, from both systems integrators (commodity shops like Dell and Gateway especially) and customers. If you don't believe me, try something like I did a couple of weeks ago:
Go down to your local CircuitBuyUSA and try and take a look at the back of the systems they have on sale. To most of you it will probably come as no surprise that these systems are all ATX-based; it came as something of a shock for me because all the PCs I've owned are recycled business machines with nonstandard mobo designs. They are as they are for good reason: it's probably vastly cheaper to base consumer hardware with no special requirements on parts that can be easily second-sourced if you run low. If HP runs out of Vectra motherboards that require risers for PCI slots, they have a problem because they themselves are the only source for their motherboards.
The flipside: if they run short of motherboards for Pavilion boxes, that's not as big a problem, as they need merely place a call to Asus or whoever and get, say, 50K AMD760 motherboards shipped over by next Wednesday; from there, all they have to do is quietly slip the new motherboards out in those pretty grey HP-labeled cases and no one is any the wiser.
I think DIY computers will continue to be available to anyone who wants one. The fear that the world is headed in the iMac direction as a general rule is slightly justified, but not really so much of an issue as things like CPRM and SDMI that could create lockin issues on the OS level while taking hardware questions completely out of the loop.
/Brian
A postscript on customizability: I decided once when walking through a local Best Buy to actually see what their "build-your-own-computer" station did. Suffice to say that it made a mockery of the whole concept of designing your own system -- it didn't so much place an order for you as give you a very small choice of "requirements" and tell you what they had in stock already that matched it.
Truth in advertising? Not here...
They may have to. Continuity on TOS was dreadful -- I think Starfleet had at least four different names in the first season.
/Brian
No. I was actually young enough to watch reading rainbow yet old enough to watch TNG -- he picked up TNG well into his time on RR. In fact, he even did a Trek-themed episode during the early second season of TNG.
/Brian
Hmmm... early Trek history, no Federation, underexplored galaxy... why do I suspect we'll see a lot of...
Red red shirts
Don't let it be you
'Cause what they go through
Ain't no fun at all
Red red shirts...
Shot to the head
The first to be dead
As we all know
That we all know
I'd have thought that in time
They'd get too smart to wear red
For that yeoman feeling bold
Time to make the switch to gold
(etc... either the Neil Diamond or UB40 versions will do)
/Brian
...and if there was anyplace else in the country that would have one other than central Cali it would probably be here.
The fact is that you can't buy a bare system at Best Buy or Circuit City. Gateway Country can't, and I get the sense they get their fair share of requests for it. It's only the mom-and-pop operations that slip through the cracks and the places with a heavily geek audience (like Fry's) that will cater to that need. Everyone else is being kept in the corral.
/Brian
Office 2K has a feature that MS tossed into Office98/MacOS that replaces any part of it that gets damaged. If they want IE there it's damn well going to stay there -- it's designed that way. I think that in principle that's actually not a bad feature (a bit misguided if you have a small hard drive), but with MS it's a little scary...
/Brian
That's got to be difficult, though. Keep in mind that to make something that in any way resembled the TOS Enterprise would look quite cheezy.
/Brian
The PowerMac 7100. They actually changed it to BHA and Sagan flipped out again when he found out what it stood for.
I think the same thing happened with the Dylan programming language and someone by the name of Robert Zimmerman who took exception...
/Brian
I don't see a proper trademark there -- the *Draw name was around long ago. MacDraw, for example.
There's actually two basic types of graphics programs, y'see. Paint programs (like Photoshop, as it happens) deal with graphics at the pixel level. Draw programs (like Illustrator, Freehand, etc.) deal with vectors and bezier curves.
/Brian
Who knows, maybe we'll see KPublish soon? (But please at least call it something vaguely cool like Kpage...)
I sort of find the name KIllustrator a bit weak anyway. I mean, let's be realistic -- the only K-program out there with a truly creative name is Konqueror.
KDraw is good. Karikature (better spelling) is a bit silly, but I like it. KVektor, anyone?
/Brian
The US has junk fax laws. I was under the vague impression that spam comes under those, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
/Brian
True, all true... but who's got room for a USB Thrustmaster in their laptop bag?
/Brian
I've had both. The truth is that Erector sets are a great idea, but at the end of the day you feel more like a mechanic than an artist when you're done with an Erector piece. Also, keep in mind that Erector/Meccano seems to be primarily an engineering thing, whereas probably a majority of Lego geeks probably go in more for architecture than mechanics. They really do occupy separate (though overlapping) problem spaces -- and a Lego castle just looks better, dammit :-)
What I was always a fan of was Pipeworks. You can get Quadro now, which is essentially the same thign -- I used to build gokarts with them and race them down driveways.
/Brian
/Brian
This isn't strictly true. English and Latin sort of have a cousins relationship -- a lot of the structure of English relates to Latin because English's ancestral languages came from the same roots as Latin did.
In fact the similarity is responsible for "rules" like "it's a bad idea to ever split an infinitive"; people got the idea that English had to conform to Latin as much as possible and tried to impose grammatical rules that simply made no sense.
/brian
iTunes (on 9.1, not X) doesn't seem to see my Yamaha SCSI burner, which is fine with me because the way my system is configured I can't seem to do MP3->Audio CD burns anyway (not enough memory). So I stick with Toast -- takes longer, but it does the job.
/Brian
I have both, use both regularly...
Laptops make crappy game machines. There is no nice way to say it; especially on an old laptop like mine (PowerBook 5300) you're subject to a keyboard layout that just isn't all that conducive to keyboard control of a game, but the ability to take my Inform programming with me to have an iced tea and a cookie while hacking is indispensable.
On the other hand, desktop machines usually have the speed, and make great jukeboxes, but forget LAN parties unless you've got a big trunk and a lot of spare cables.
/Brian