The points you miss are that a) there were, once upon a time, as many different measuring systems as there were civilizations (could you imagine scientific exchange in the Roman Empire?) and b) the "human factors" involved come down to familiarity.
Human factors? How 'bout these factors:
-The English volume system was originally base 2, and vestiges of it still exist: gal = 128 oz, qt = 64 oz, pt = 16 oz, c = 8 oz. Most of the other measurements in the series (drams, etc.) have been forgotten. (While you're at it, consider imperial volumes and dry volumes, both of which break the system as well...)
-Distances: inches, feet, yards, furlongs, fathoms, rods, miles, nautical miles (?!), etc, etc, etc. Or you can do everything in meters and kilometers and no one will get too confused.
-Weights: Three words: troy and avoirdupois. Why?
-Temperature: This is a particular embarassment -- I have heard (or at least Cecil Adams claims) that Fahrenheit calibrated the bottom end of his scale for the convenience of a weather-tracking friend (I want to say Ole Roemer) so that his logbooks would never have to deal with negative numbers (at least as long as he stayed in Denmark).
You tell me. The benefit of the metric system is that it makes consistent understanding of measurements possible. A kilo is a kilo, no matter what you're weighing. The only reason people in the US have not converted is because the government tried to split the difference back in the seventies and only wound up confusing people. But it's a lot easier than what we have.
-But the Duo has the advantage of being... small. The Ti Powerbook is nice, but it's a freakin' diving board.
-But 533 is the *only* standard MP configuration. Chip supply problems are a logical explanation, though.
-I was acknowledging the extra slots, not asking for them.
Point being that (as I mention in another post) MacOS is not a one-button interface, but Apple keeps designing their mice as if it is. Ctrl-Click is a pain. Right-click -- I do it on my system without even thinking about it.
Actually, I can't speak much for OS X, but since OS 8 the Mac has been a de facto 2-button system. You can still get by with one button, and most apps don't really take advantage of it, but one of the first things I did when I got OS 8 was to toss my Apple mouse and buy a MacAlly 2-button (still in use two CPUs later). I am in no great rush to get a USB card so I can use one of the new Apple mice; they're one of the nicest and most incredibly stylish mice I've ever seen (and I have a soft spot for the early "bar-of-soap" ADB mice -- still use one on my SE/30), but they're simply flat-out wrong for the post-7.x MacOS.
When I do get a new Mac, it will be with great regret that I toss the optical mouse ($60 down the drain if you buy it new, y'know:-( ) and replace it with another MacAlly (no Intellimouse for me; too damn big on top of being an M$ product), but the MacOS is not a one-button system and hasn't been for something like four years now.
First off, Titanium. You gotta love the Titanium -- it's probably going to look more dated more quickly than any other laptop design ever, but it's thoroughly sweet. That said, I'd still like to see a subnotebook one of these days, as PowerBook Duos are not always easy to find (and none of them can run OS X). But it is too slick for words.
Second, more slots in the G4. I have a PowerMac 6500. It's a great computer, but you do wind up feeling the limitation of 2 slots (!) pretty quickly. They say three isn't enough either; the multimedia people that have always been the primary power users on the Mac platform are loving it already, I'm sure. I am, however, a bit ambivalent about returning to single-processordom -- Apple was setting a very useful precedent with the MP systems and it's a bit disheartening to see them going back on it. Yes, the door is open, but it doesn't make much sense to make a standard feature like that optional.
As for being able to create your own DVDs... hot DAMN! An open-source way of doing it would be nice, but just to have the power at all is a thing of great beauty. iTunes is pretty sweet as well, and I applaud Apple for including it.
So I like what I see -- now if they'd just loosen the strings a little...
Of course, you might get away with it if she was polite about it, but what eBay seems to be doing is the equivalent of groping you after you slapped it...
NT 5 was Cairo, actually. Or supposed to be -- it was Microsoft's big object-based symphony. Of course it vanished rather quietly to be replaced by yet another release of good old NT.
And you're correct in saying parts of copland have continued to improve more recent releases -- I think it would be more accurate, though, to simply call it stripping the carcass for parts. However, calling MacOS 8.x (i.e. Tempo) almost-Copland is way off the mark -- 8 in particular was not much more than 7 with a new coat of paint. The real architectural changes only started with 8.1 and HFS+.
I think calling.NET "released" is a stretch, though. I'd call it vaporware if it's unavailable to the public at large.
This is the difference between vaporware and *betaware (asterisk because it isn't a real word yet:-) ): take Apple and two possible doomsday scenarios. Say the company had gone down for the count instead of making the NeXT acquisition in 1997. The big OS on the table was Copland, which never made it as far as a public beta because of what by all indications was a particularly virulent case of second-system effect. THAT is vaporware: if Apple had caved in under Michael Spindler (Amelio didn't manage to save the company, but he did keep it circling the drain), Copland would never have made it out to anyone other than a few selected early testers such as Metrowerks.
Compare that to the OS X saga. This whole thing started out as Rhapsody (i.e. NextStep 5 with the MacOS interface); somewhere in midstream Apple made a massive shift in direction, but instead of making the same stupid mistakes they made with Copland they managed to put out a sort of milestone release in MacOS X Server. We Mac fans finally could say that we had a production server OS that could compete with WinNT/2K, and the Nexties that had been dragged kicking and screaming into our camp saw their prize technology (some of the best in the business) brought back from obscurity. That's point one.
After that, the BSD core -- Darwin -- was open-sourced. Not quite the same as having the GUI and all, but still enough for the power user. So Apple had covered itself that way -- the core technology is out there and evolving, and has managed to bring a lot of much-needed attention into the BSD world. That's point two.
Finally, the public beta. After four beta releases, Apple finally said, "Look. You want it, you got it for $30. You're on your own, but we won't hold out on you any more than we have to." I haven't run it (none of my Macs can handle it) but those who have say it's rock stable and works more or less as advertised.
Fully supported, release quality software? No. Out there, available to all comers, and no one is ever going to say "Shame we never got a chance to play with it"? Yes.
This is not vaporware.
The same thing applies to the Linux 2.4 kernel. It is running late, yes, and it's shaky in places, but if you want it you can have it. There is such a thing as open-source vaporware, but that requires a project to be all talk, no action. If it's out there, it's not vaporware.
Not being totally up on what's available regarding.NET, I'd put it in the same vaporous category as Copland -- it's out there, but the simple fact is that not enough people have it. If Apple (or Linus, for that matter) died tomorrow, we'd have MacOS X and Linux 2.4. If Microsoft went, would we have a functioning.NET in the public's hands?
Like I said, Wired's definition of vaporware is a little hazy...
-What was your first computer and what did you do to it:-)
-I had a rough time of it being a geek in school, as I'm sure many of us did. What is your experience as a high schooler at the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially at a time when people your age are under more pressure both academically and socially than even those of my generation (and I've only got about ten years on you)?
dBASE is still out there, managed by dBASE, Inc. (and also as Visual FoxPro, boo hiss) as a live product; VisiCalc is also still out there as a free download for the PC at www.bricklin.com (still runs on NT, or so I hear). As for what qualifies as dead technology, I don't think either of those applies -- VisiCalc's legacy lives on in its many descendants (such as Excel, Excel 4.0, Excel 95, Excel 97, Excel 2000, and Lotus 123:-) ), while dBASE is somewhat obsolete due to its lack of client-server capability (isn't that why we're all using SQL these days?).
-Electrical trolleys -- where it says they're still in use, are they referring to the trolleys themselves or the buses that replaced them? Both are still in wide use in Boston -- the electric buses are everywhere (there's an intersection on Commonwealth Avenue that is covered with a spiderweb of catenary lines to prove it) and a large part of the T (the Green Line) runs above ground, even on streets. It's not a dead technology at all.
-Pneumatic tubes: I can't see why a citywide system of these things would be practical when you could hire a bike courier to do the same thing, but I can see especially why hospitals would still use them.
-The Amiga: All I'm saying is that I wish I could slap Agnes, Denise, and Paula (the three chips that constituted the Amiga's multimedia subsystems) onto a PCI card in my Mac. Not having ever had any real Amiga experience, I can't say much either way about the OS. I will, however, agree wholeheartedly that the Amiga was the first (and probably best in terms of bang for the buck at the time) multimedia computer.
-Ribbon mike: Not an audio guy, can't comment.
-WordStar: Two words: Open Source. But someone already mentioned joe.
-Wax Cylinder recording: Again, not an audio guy, but I don't see the sense in having them around today unless you're looking for a specific effect. These babies are obsolete for very good reasons.
-Slide Rules: It still amazes me that these things are no longer manufactured. They don't run out of batteries, right? They're good for teaching math concepts, right? You would think there'd at least be a couple of educational manufacturers cranking out a couple of thousands of these things a year if only for things like science museum souvenirs. I'd buy one...
-Reel mowers. Good idea.
-Automatic Watch: Hmmm... nice toy, I suppose, but you'd think they'd be a bit reliability-challenged compared to a modern watch.
-Zeppelins (be specific, dammit!) -- The case was made rather easily -- big balloon, big schlep. Go for it...
The Tetris experience, to me, should be never-ending, increasingly frenetic block dropping and positioning, line after line, as the music slowly drives you nuts. For all I know, Alexei Pazhitnov may have originally designed the game like this, but as far as game play is concerned Atari's Tetris bears almost no relation to the Tetris I know and love (whatever version I may be playing).
Spectre by Velocity. As far as I know the company simply doesn't exist any more, but the great thing about Spectre was that it had a sort of stark purity that set it apart from other Battlezone/MechWarrior-type games. Even when wireframe graphics gave way to (primitive) texture mapping, Spectre was easily one of the most distinctive first-person shooters of all time.
For those unfamiliar, Spectre was heavily inspired by Battlezone, but with an added capture-the-flag element and a sparsely populated abstract environment. It went through three iterations; the first two were Mac-only, while the third, Spectre VR, was also available for Windows. A fair amount of cyberpunk garbage was grafted onto it, but it was still a cool game, and I rather wish someone had written an Open Source equivalent...
You better be posting as an AC. I almost accuse you of trolling.
To say NetBSD is dead strictly on numbers is meaningless (thus the suspicion that you live under a bridge and eat billygoats). The three systems have vastly different missions, especially what with NetBSD essentially being an OS of last resort, ported to hell and back even more thoroughly than Linux.
Fact remains -- you have a hacked platform you will have Linux on it. From there it doesn't take a great leap of faith to realize that contracts and IP don't mean jack when you have a clean room to play in.
If this is all for real Sega I think will very shortly be stuck with the same problem Digital Convergence has -- obscene demand for the hardware and negative profit margins eating them alive. The Dreamcast will go from second-stringer to being the coolest game platform on the planet and Sega will be having fits because they aren't getting a cut of any of it.
MacOS still has this. Apple has waffled over whether or not to support it, but as of MacOS 9 it's part of the package.
And the Mac has always been able to speak (even out of the box, at least on the original and eveything since about 1992) -- I don't know if it's alone in this regard.
First off, this is off-topic, as is any other windows pissing that's showing up here.
Second, Win2K seat licenses (so does Solaris, but only if you're using it commercially). MacOS X Server doesn't -- US$500/server, no matter how many users (and with Darwin being open source, there'd be no point anyway -- just hack the Netinfo source to ignore any license managers in the way). Linux... can't, nor would it want to.
I could agree on this point except for one small question: AOL doesn't need the money. Be that as it may, I say if it bugs you round up a few people and fork Mozilla. Even better, start downloading Galeon or something similar and contribute.
Even the Mac does it better, I should think; if you feel stuck behind the GUI on the Mac, you have AppleScript on MacOS Classic, and if you're using OS X, you also get Perl, tcsh, awk, etc. People bitch about the Mac being dumbed down and all, but the way it's evolved over the years that's a brutally unfair way of looking at it.
The Mac, being event-driven, does everything with message-passing. Unix seems to be based more on a plumbing metaphor. But what is Windows, anyway? VB != AppleScript. Not even close.
Yeah, like it *cough* says at the bottom of the page.
I'll give the Slashdot folks the benefit of the doubt as far as posting it with a straight face and still nominate them for a dopeslap for having the chutzpah to do it that way anyway.
Though! Though, though, though. There is more to this than simply uninspired satire. I think it's a great thing for any open source developer to read because it gives great insight to the mindset of the closed source community -- They (the Open Source developers, i.e. we) can't make a difference because They can only put a drop in the bucket. This is what we're up against, my fellow Slashdotters. What's being written here in Uncle Bill's name is not merely wishful thinking but a mindset that needs to change before Open Source becomes completely accepted. IBM (who you'd think would be mentioned prominently in this document if it was authentic) is the big example -- Open Source is the future of their consulting business. Apple and Sun sort of get it, leveraging peer review as much as possible. Microsoft is the prime example of a company that sees it but is trying to fight it because they can't really get it -- this sort of denial permeates the Halloween documents (VinodV has a few choice comments about the power trip inherent in the Open Source debugging process if I remember correctly).
So this isn't a canonical Halloween document, and its cluelessness is a bit on the contrived side (not to mention it being a bit too glib and sarcastic -- I can't picture Billy Boy being that coherent when it comes to something that threatens his baby's fundamental business model). The numbers were probably pulled out of thin air. But make no mistake -- this is something everyone who believes in Open Source should read, just to get an idea of what we're still up against.
PowerPC died at 4.0 and never actually made it to Apple hardware. Alpha is server-side only for the most part (though I'm sure NTW exists) and is basically circling the drain. Can't comment on MIPS or Clipper.
Slashdot Mirror
The points you miss are that a) there were, once upon a time, as many different measuring systems as there were civilizations (could you imagine scientific exchange in the Roman Empire?) and b) the "human factors" involved come down to familiarity.
Human factors? How 'bout these factors:
-The English volume system was originally base 2, and vestiges of it still exist: gal = 128 oz, qt = 64 oz, pt = 16 oz, c = 8 oz. Most of the other measurements in the series (drams, etc.) have been forgotten. (While you're at it, consider imperial volumes and dry volumes, both of which break the system as well...)
-Distances: inches, feet, yards, furlongs, fathoms, rods, miles, nautical miles (?!), etc, etc, etc. Or you can do everything in meters and kilometers and no one will get too confused.
-Weights: Three words: troy and avoirdupois. Why?
-Temperature: This is a particular embarassment -- I have heard (or at least Cecil Adams claims) that Fahrenheit calibrated the bottom end of his scale for the convenience of a weather-tracking friend (I want to say Ole Roemer) so that his logbooks would never have to deal with negative numbers (at least as long as he stayed in Denmark).
You tell me. The benefit of the metric system is that it makes consistent understanding of measurements possible. A kilo is a kilo, no matter what you're weighing. The only reason people in the US have not converted is because the government tried to split the difference back in the seventies and only wound up confusing people. But it's a lot easier than what we have.
/Brian
-But the Duo has the advantage of being... small. The Ti Powerbook is nice, but it's a freakin' diving board.
-But 533 is the *only* standard MP configuration. Chip supply problems are a logical explanation, though.
-I was acknowledging the extra slots, not asking for them.
/Brian
Point being that (as I mention in another post) MacOS is not a one-button interface, but Apple keeps designing their mice as if it is. Ctrl-Click is a pain. Right-click -- I do it on my system without even thinking about it.
/Brian
Actually, I can't speak much for OS X, but since OS 8 the Mac has been a de facto 2-button system. You can still get by with one button, and most apps don't really take advantage of it, but one of the first things I did when I got OS 8 was to toss my Apple mouse and buy a MacAlly 2-button (still in use two CPUs later). I am in no great rush to get a USB card so I can use one of the new Apple mice; they're one of the nicest and most incredibly stylish mice I've ever seen (and I have a soft spot for the early "bar-of-soap" ADB mice -- still use one on my SE/30), but they're simply flat-out wrong for the post-7.x MacOS.
:-( ) and replace it with another MacAlly (no Intellimouse for me; too damn big on top of being an M$ product), but the MacOS is not a one-button system and hasn't been for something like four years now.
When I do get a new Mac, it will be with great regret that I toss the optical mouse ($60 down the drain if you buy it new, y'know
/Brian
First off, Titanium. You gotta love the Titanium -- it's probably going to look more dated more quickly than any other laptop design ever, but it's thoroughly sweet. That said, I'd still like to see a subnotebook one of these days, as PowerBook Duos are not always easy to find (and none of them can run OS X). But it is too slick for words.
Second, more slots in the G4. I have a PowerMac 6500. It's a great computer, but you do wind up feeling the limitation of 2 slots (!) pretty quickly. They say three isn't enough either; the multimedia people that have always been the primary power users on the Mac platform are loving it already, I'm sure. I am, however, a bit ambivalent about returning to single-processordom -- Apple was setting a very useful precedent with the MP systems and it's a bit disheartening to see them going back on it. Yes, the door is open, but it doesn't make much sense to make a standard feature like that optional.
As for being able to create your own DVDs... hot DAMN! An open-source way of doing it would be nice, but just to have the power at all is a thing of great beauty. iTunes is pretty sweet as well, and I applaud Apple for including it.
So I like what I see -- now if they'd just loosen the strings a little...
/Brian
Of course, you might get away with it if she was polite about it, but what eBay seems to be doing is the equivalent of groping you after you slapped it...
/Brian
NT 5 was Cairo, actually. Or supposed to be -- it was Microsoft's big object-based symphony. Of course it vanished rather quietly to be replaced by yet another release of good old NT.
And you're correct in saying parts of copland have continued to improve more recent releases -- I think it would be more accurate, though, to simply call it stripping the carcass for parts. However, calling MacOS 8.x (i.e. Tempo) almost-Copland is way off the mark -- 8 in particular was not much more than 7 with a new coat of paint. The real architectural changes only started with 8.1 and HFS+.
/Brian
Uhh... shell prompt? uptime command? Just a wild guess...
/Brian
I think calling .NET "released" is a stretch, though. I'd call it vaporware if it's unavailable to the public at large.
:-) ): take Apple and two possible doomsday scenarios. Say the company had gone down for the count instead of making the NeXT acquisition in 1997. The big OS on the table was Copland, which never made it as far as a public beta because of what by all indications was a particularly virulent case of second-system effect. THAT is vaporware: if Apple had caved in under Michael Spindler (Amelio didn't manage to save the company, but he did keep it circling the drain), Copland would never have made it out to anyone other than a few selected early testers such as Metrowerks.
.NET, I'd put it in the same vaporous category as Copland -- it's out there, but the simple fact is that not enough people have it. If Apple (or Linus, for that matter) died tomorrow, we'd have MacOS X and Linux 2.4. If Microsoft went, would we have a functioning .NET in the public's hands?
This is the difference between vaporware and *betaware (asterisk because it isn't a real word yet
Compare that to the OS X saga. This whole thing started out as Rhapsody (i.e. NextStep 5 with the MacOS interface); somewhere in midstream Apple made a massive shift in direction, but instead of making the same stupid mistakes they made with Copland they managed to put out a sort of milestone release in MacOS X Server. We Mac fans finally could say that we had a production server OS that could compete with WinNT/2K, and the Nexties that had been dragged kicking and screaming into our camp saw their prize technology (some of the best in the business) brought back from obscurity. That's point one.
After that, the BSD core -- Darwin -- was open-sourced. Not quite the same as having the GUI and all, but still enough for the power user. So Apple had covered itself that way -- the core technology is out there and evolving, and has managed to bring a lot of much-needed attention into the BSD world. That's point two.
Finally, the public beta. After four beta releases, Apple finally said, "Look. You want it, you got it for $30. You're on your own, but we won't hold out on you any more than we have to." I haven't run it (none of my Macs can handle it) but those who have say it's rock stable and works more or less as advertised.
Fully supported, release quality software? No. Out there, available to all comers, and no one is ever going to say "Shame we never got a chance to play with it"? Yes.
This is not vaporware.
The same thing applies to the Linux 2.4 kernel. It is running late, yes, and it's shaky in places, but if you want it you can have it. There is such a thing as open-source vaporware, but that requires a project to be all talk, no action. If it's out there, it's not vaporware.
Not being totally up on what's available regarding
Like I said, Wired's definition of vaporware is a little hazy...
/Brian
Actually, a couple of them.
:-)
-What was your first computer and what did you do to it
-I had a rough time of it being a geek in school, as I'm sure many of us did. What is your experience as a high schooler at the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially at a time when people your age are under more pressure both academically and socially than even those of my generation (and I've only got about ten years on you)?
/Brian
dBASE is still out there, managed by dBASE, Inc. (and also as Visual FoxPro, boo hiss) as a live product; VisiCalc is also still out there as a free download for the PC at www.bricklin.com (still runs on NT, or so I hear). As for what qualifies as dead technology, I don't think either of those applies -- VisiCalc's legacy lives on in its many descendants (such as Excel, Excel 4.0, Excel 95, Excel 97, Excel 2000, and Lotus 123 :-) ), while dBASE is somewhat obsolete due to its lack of client-server capability (isn't that why we're all using SQL these days?).
Okay, looking at the list...
-Electrical trolleys -- where it says they're still in use, are they referring to the trolleys themselves or the buses that replaced them? Both are still in wide use in Boston -- the electric buses are everywhere (there's an intersection on Commonwealth Avenue that is covered with a spiderweb of catenary lines to prove it) and a large part of the T (the Green Line) runs above ground, even on streets. It's not a dead technology at all.
-Pneumatic tubes: I can't see why a citywide system of these things would be practical when you could hire a bike courier to do the same thing, but I can see especially why hospitals would still use them.
-The Amiga: All I'm saying is that I wish I could slap Agnes, Denise, and Paula (the three chips that constituted the Amiga's multimedia subsystems) onto a PCI card in my Mac. Not having ever had any real Amiga experience, I can't say much either way about the OS. I will, however, agree wholeheartedly that the Amiga was the first (and probably best in terms of bang for the buck at the time) multimedia computer.
-Ribbon mike: Not an audio guy, can't comment.
-WordStar: Two words: Open Source. But someone already mentioned joe.
-Wax Cylinder recording: Again, not an audio guy, but I don't see the sense in having them around today unless you're looking for a specific effect. These babies are obsolete for very good reasons.
-Slide Rules: It still amazes me that these things are no longer manufactured. They don't run out of batteries, right? They're good for teaching math concepts, right? You would think there'd at least be a couple of educational manufacturers cranking out a couple of thousands of these things a year if only for things like science museum souvenirs. I'd buy one...
-Reel mowers. Good idea.
-Automatic Watch: Hmmm... nice toy, I suppose, but you'd think they'd be a bit reliability-challenged compared to a modern watch.
-Zeppelins (be specific, dammit!) -- The case was made rather easily -- big balloon, big schlep. Go for it...
/Brian
For what NetBSD is trying to do, though, it's all that's required. If you don't like it, well, go fork yourself.
/Brian
Arcade Tetris? Blech.
The Tetris experience, to me, should be never-ending, increasingly frenetic block dropping and positioning, line after line, as the music slowly drives you nuts. For all I know, Alexei Pazhitnov may have originally designed the game like this, but as far as game play is concerned Atari's Tetris bears almost no relation to the Tetris I know and love (whatever version I may be playing).
/Brian
Spectre by Velocity. As far as I know the company simply doesn't exist any more, but the great thing about Spectre was that it had a sort of stark purity that set it apart from other Battlezone/MechWarrior-type games. Even when wireframe graphics gave way to (primitive) texture mapping, Spectre was easily one of the most distinctive first-person shooters of all time.
For those unfamiliar, Spectre was heavily inspired by Battlezone, but with an added capture-the-flag element and a sparsely populated abstract environment. It went through three iterations; the first two were Mac-only, while the third, Spectre VR, was also available for Windows. A fair amount of cyberpunk garbage was grafted onto it, but it was still a cool game, and I rather wish someone had written an Open Source equivalent...
/Brian
You better be posting as an AC. I almost accuse you of trolling.
To say NetBSD is dead strictly on numbers is meaningless (thus the suspicion that you live under a bridge and eat billygoats). The three systems have vastly different missions, especially what with NetBSD essentially being an OS of last resort, ported to hell and back even more thoroughly than Linux.
Get a life.
/Brian
Fact remains -- you have a hacked platform you will have Linux on it. From there it doesn't take a great leap of faith to realize that contracts and IP don't mean jack when you have a clean room to play in.
If this is all for real Sega I think will very shortly be stuck with the same problem Digital Convergence has -- obscene demand for the hardware and negative profit margins eating them alive. The Dreamcast will go from second-stringer to being the coolest game platform on the planet and Sega will be having fits because they aren't getting a cut of any of it.
Copyright is truly dead...
/Brian
MacOS still has this. Apple has waffled over whether or not to support it, but as of MacOS 9 it's part of the package.
And the Mac has always been able to speak (even out of the box, at least on the original and eveything since about 1992) -- I don't know if it's alone in this regard.
/Brian
First off, this is off-topic, as is any other windows pissing that's showing up here.
Second, Win2K seat licenses (so does Solaris, but only if you're using it commercially). MacOS X Server doesn't -- US$500/server, no matter how many users (and with Darwin being open source, there'd be no point anyway -- just hack the Netinfo source to ignore any license managers in the way). Linux... can't, nor would it want to.
/Brian
You sure we haven't assimilated you yet ;-)
I could agree on this point except for one small question: AOL doesn't need the money. Be that as it may, I say if it bugs you round up a few people and fork Mozilla. Even better, start downloading Galeon or something similar and contribute.
/Brian
Even the Mac does it better, I should think; if you feel stuck behind the GUI on the Mac, you have AppleScript on MacOS Classic, and if you're using OS X, you also get Perl, tcsh, awk, etc. People bitch about the Mac being dumbed down and all, but the way it's evolved over the years that's a brutally unfair way of looking at it.
The Mac, being event-driven, does everything with message-passing. Unix seems to be based more on a plumbing metaphor. But what is Windows, anyway? VB != AppleScript. Not even close.
/Brian
This post makes me want moderator access...
layin' the smackdown on flamebait,
/Brian
Yeah, like it *cough* says at the bottom of the page.
I'll give the Slashdot folks the benefit of the doubt as far as posting it with a straight face and still nominate them for a dopeslap for having the chutzpah to do it that way anyway.
Though! Though, though, though. There is more to this than simply uninspired satire. I think it's a great thing for any open source developer to read because it gives great insight to the mindset of the closed source community -- They (the Open Source developers, i.e. we) can't make a difference because They can only put a drop in the bucket. This is what we're up against, my fellow Slashdotters. What's being written here in Uncle Bill's name is not merely wishful thinking but a mindset that needs to change before Open Source becomes completely accepted. IBM (who you'd think would be mentioned prominently in this document if it was authentic) is the big example -- Open Source is the future of their consulting business. Apple and Sun sort of get it, leveraging peer review as much as possible. Microsoft is the prime example of a company that sees it but is trying to fight it because they can't really get it -- this sort of denial permeates the Halloween documents (VinodV has a few choice comments about the power trip inherent in the Open Source debugging process if I remember correctly).
So this isn't a canonical Halloween document, and its cluelessness is a bit on the contrived side (not to mention it being a bit too glib and sarcastic -- I can't picture Billy Boy being that coherent when it comes to something that threatens his baby's fundamental business model). The numbers were probably pulled out of thin air. But make no mistake -- this is something everyone who believes in Open Source should read, just to get an idea of what we're still up against.
PowerPC died at 4.0 and never actually made it to Apple hardware. Alpha is server-side only for the most part (though I'm sure NTW exists) and is basically circling the drain. Can't comment on MIPS or Clipper.
/Brian
Oprah Winfrey vs. Texas Cattle Ranchers. Enough said.
/Brian