I suppose you're right. SunView and NeWS obviously predate the battle with Windows. They were part of the desktop wars though, during the pre-Microsoft period.
So, if long-term is important to you, I suggest jumping ship. As one example, they fired the accessibility guru, Willie Walker. As a result, SunOS will no longer be accessible as it use to be
Walker didn't work on SunOS accessibility. He worked on GNOME accessibility. Sun contributed to GNOME because their version of it (Java Desktop) was Sun's final stab at making Solaris a serious alternative to Windows for desktop users.
Sun lost the desktop wars years ago, but never admitted defeat. It challenged Windows with SunView, NeWS, OpenWindows, CDE, JavaOS, and finally Java Desktop, and failed each time. At the end, even Sun people had mostly given up on desktop Solaris.
Once Sun's cronyistic and politicized upper management got their golden parachutes, a lot of windmill-tilting projects were toast. Java Desktop (and Sun's participation in GNOME, which is really the same thing) was one such project. That's what this was about — it had nothing to do with how much programmers were paid.
Solaris's future, if it has one, is as a server OS. Expect to see the money that was being wasted developing a desktop nobody wanted poured into thing Solaris badly needs, like better drivers.
That last response was a little impatient. Here's a real argument:
You're basically saying that we're at war with Microsoft. And when you're fighting a war, you can't risk underestimating your enemy, so it's never wrong to err on the side of overestimating them.
First of all, this isn't a war. This is you and me disagreeing about why Internet Explorer is an unholy mess.
Second, even if we were fighting a war, we would not want to make baseless assumptions about what the enemy's capacity. On the contrary, a general who consistently assumes the enemy is stronger than they really our loses opportunities to defeat them. A prime example is Civil War George B. McClellan, who repeatedly allowed potential victories to slip away because of inflated estimates of Confederate troop strength.
I've heard all these Microsoft conspiracy theories before. And they all center around one simple fallacy: Microsoft is evil, therefore we are entitled to believe anything evil about them we choose to believe. Not logical.
Aren't those popups enough? They're a real pain. They also spam you a lot, until you tell them to stop. The only other thing I had in mind is that they make it easy to misunderstand what's free and what costs extra.
As I said, their sales gimmicks were not a deal-breaker for me, once they'd already conned me into signing up. It was the sluggishness of their servers, combined with really dumb support people, that drove me away.
Were Xterminals ever cheaper than PCs? I seem to recall that they were about the same price. Which had a lot to do with them not catching on.
My problem with calling graphics terminals "thin clients" is not the "thin" part, it's the "client" part. A client is something that's part of a client-server model, and passively acting as a network KVM is nothing like that.
Then again, Xterminals aren't clients either. As you perhaps know, they respond to requests from the application, which makes them the server in a client-server model.
Strictly speaking, only network computer ever qualified as "thin clients." But conceptually, Xterminals are close. And the fact that "thin client" now mostly refers to a remote KVM device is too well-established to argue with.
I probably know the backstory better than you. I even played an itsy-bitsy role in the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit.
You're arguing with something that I'm not saying, namely, "Microsoft has never acted illegally or unethically towards its competition." Not even close to what I'm trying to say. I'm simply trying to shoot down the usual assumption that everything Microsoft does is part of some grand anti-competitive scheme. They're not that smart.
I'm not sure ActiveX was created for the purpose of generating lock-in. Perhaps they had something else in mind originally.
But I *am* reasonably sure that after it was created, Microsoft liked the fact that it created lock-in.
I agree with both statements. Neither of which resembles your original statement that all those weird technologies in IE were designed to create lockin.
Oops. When I read "thin client" I assumed they were talking about those graphics terminals that currently misuse the term. If I'd RTFA, I would have noticed that this project was about X-Terminal software, which is a real thin client. One reason it rates as a true thin client: it doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. As you pointed out.
1Gbs may be "standard" but there's still lots of slower connections around. If your building was cabled more than 5 years ago, it's probably only rated at 100 Mbs. Much older than that, it's 10Mbs.
It was 11 years ago that I encountered my first terminal server — and it was a painful experience. My recent experiences have been more positive, but of course these were all on much more modern networks.
Can you even buy hubs any more? In any case, you're forgetting the fact that all the systems connected to the switch still share the upstream connection to the server.
I gotta tell you dude, you have some very strange priorities.
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
That's not my experience. And in any case, choosing a host with such a minor issue as your prime criteria... jeez.
I just bailed on JustHost, which is a Linux only company. They pulled all kinds of sales gimmicks on me. I would have tolerated them if they provided better service.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
Are you under the impression you have to get domain registration and hosting from the same company? Because you don't.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
They have these things. Installing them is not rocket science. It's more important to know what version they have. It's a royal pain to have your scripts break on you because your provider hasn't gotten around to upgrading.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
As I mentioned before, you don't have to keep hosting and registration at the same company. All you have to do is tell your registrar to use the DNS servers belonging to whatever host you use.. I'm pretty sure they all make that pretty easy — if you don't you shouldn't use them.
I abandoned Dreamhost a long time ago because of their regular outages. (What sucks is that Dreamhost is the best by every other measure. But if the system is down when you need it to be up, nothing else matters.) I still keep my domain there because it's only $10 a year, and their web GUI for managing it is first rate. One reason I switched to justhost was their promise of free domain registration. Then I discovered that justhost charges $10/year just to anonymize my WHOSIS record! Fortunately, they also botched my domain transfer....
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Once again, you don't have get certificates from your provider, though it is handy to get them that way. But what's really important is that the provider understand certificates. Typically, they'll mess up the certificate you need to access your email server over SSL, which can be a pain to deal with.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
It's also helpful if the web apps you need are supported....
Terminal servers can work quite well — if you have the bandwidth. Nothing more frustrating than watching a graphics terminal update over a slow connection.
It's not a secret that lock-in was why IIS and IE were designed to complement each other. The objective was to kill Netscape and Java by any means necessary. Active-X was a tool to this end.
Dude, have you ever heard of Hanlon's law? If ActiveX was designed to create lock-in, why did Microsoft abandon it?
Imputing collective motives to a company as disorganized and political as MS is like imputing malice to a cockroach infestation. Yes, they often use underhanded methods to screw over their competition. But that's marketing, not engineering. The engineering side of MS has this bit-twiddler's love of doing things its own way. People mostly notice this when they introduce some incompatible technology that screws over the rest of the computing industry. But in fact, this BS often has one group in MS screwing over the rest of the company.
Have you ever worked on a poorly managed engineering team where one or more engineers keeps insisting on doing things a certain way, even if it screws over the project as a whole? It's always been obvious to me that most of the people who work at Microsoft are like that. IE is a mess because the company that produced it is a mess — too much of a mess to carry out the complicated conspiracies everyone likes to believe in.
Hovering can be helpful for providing a little supplemental information. But if your UI relies on it for basic functionality, there's probably a better way to do things. Designers love to use hovering when clicking would actually make more sense. Coolness factor, I guess
What drives me crazy is drop-down menus that are triggered by hovering. I have some neurological issues that mess with my hand-eye coordination, so I'm always triggering them by accident.
If you have a video card which supports DXVA, CPU load is about 5 percent on the slowest Pentium Dualcore you can buy.
But that's just the problem. Such a GPU isn't in most portable computers. So if I want to watch something that's HD, I have to leave my armchair and go sit at my desk.
They're a pain in the ass. Most of us don't have screens that can make them look any better (especially if those screens are on a netbook!) and don't care if we did. I prefer to convert my HD videos to a lower bitrate so they can display on a generic video adapter without any fancy software. Not always convenient, of course.
But this post is really an excuse to make a cute observation about netbooks: they seem to be marketed as less powerful than they are! This is mainly in the way netbooks are described to consumers ("if you want to watch videos, you probably want a more powerful machine"), but there are two technical features that seem to be designed to identify netbooks as underpowered.
The first feature is that the default config typically underclocks the CPU. OK, this makes the battery last longer, but not a lot longer. By accident or by design (I suspect it's by design) most users are going to attempt to play a Netflix stream on their netbooks, watch the video stutter hopelessly and say, "Oh well, they did tell me that the netbook is not a multimedia machine." Little knowing that a few power mode setting changes will fix the problem.
Maybe your dubious about this first feature being anything but a power-saving thing, but explain this: why do netbooks have really cruddy speakers? Even cheapo zero-legacy computers meant for office workers have decent speakers. Not great, but at least you can make out what somebody in a video is saying, which you can't on a typical netbook speaker. Those are tiny and have the volume of a cracked teaspoon.
My theory is that the manufacturers deliberately sabotage netbooks' video and audio so they won't be perceived as a cheaper alternative to laptops — those being what a lot of college students have instead of a TV set.
This really makes me feel old: I seem to be the only one here who remembers that Ethernet was originally coax-only.
OK, that's not quite the same as the coax cabling used for TV signals. But you can still run Ethernet over TV coax. There are two gotchas: maximum speed is 200Mbs (which is probably not a deal breaker for most users) and you have to spend about $100 a node for new transceivers (which probably is a deal breaker).
Yeah, but if you read the article he was trying to clean it with a power drill or grinder. I mean, I'm no expert, but that's surely asking for trouble.
You're kind of missing the point. With decaying explosives, burping is asking for trouble. The man's mistake wasn't using a power drill, it was failing to call the bomb squad. Or at least somebody with enough expertise to certify the thing safe. Instead, he just assumed that a 140-year-old shell couldn't possibly explode.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you're right. SunView and NeWS obviously predate the battle with Windows. They were part of the desktop wars though, during the pre-Microsoft period.
It's nice to hear an informed opinion on slashdot. I'm also glad to hear the rumors about Willie being fired over pay aren't true.
It doesn't even rate as a rumor. More like a collective ill-informed opinion.
I guess SunOS accessibility, and it's entire bid for the desktop is toast, but it might make a decent non-accessible server OS
What exactly about a server makes it "accessible"? The user never interacts with it directly — that for the client software.
So, if long-term is important to you, I suggest jumping ship. As one example, they fired the accessibility guru, Willie Walker. As a result, SunOS will no longer be accessible as it use to be
Walker didn't work on SunOS accessibility. He worked on GNOME accessibility. Sun contributed to GNOME because their version of it (Java Desktop) was Sun's final stab at making Solaris a serious alternative to Windows for desktop users.
Sun lost the desktop wars years ago, but never admitted defeat. It challenged Windows with SunView, NeWS, OpenWindows, CDE, JavaOS, and finally Java Desktop, and failed each time. At the end, even Sun people had mostly given up on desktop Solaris.
Once Sun's cronyistic and politicized upper management got their golden parachutes, a lot of windmill-tilting projects were toast. Java Desktop (and Sun's participation in GNOME, which is really the same thing) was one such project. That's what this was about — it had nothing to do with how much programmers were paid.
Solaris's future, if it has one, is as a server OS. Expect to see the money that was being wasted developing a desktop nobody wanted poured into thing Solaris badly needs, like better drivers.
What? You mean somebody's still making them? I know NCD's gone out of business. Anybody else?
Lately?
Yes, you were right. But that doesn't make you any less of a troll.
This is not a troll bridge. It's a fee bridge.
Without reading anything...this sounds like trolling.
Accusing somebody of trolling without taking 5 seconds to check their assertions — that's definitely trolling.
That last response was a little impatient. Here's a real argument:
You're basically saying that we're at war with Microsoft. And when you're fighting a war, you can't risk underestimating your enemy, so it's never wrong to err on the side of overestimating them.
First of all, this isn't a war. This is you and me disagreeing about why Internet Explorer is an unholy mess.
Second, even if we were fighting a war, we would not want to make baseless assumptions about what the enemy's capacity. On the contrary, a general who consistently assumes the enemy is stronger than they really our loses opportunities to defeat them. A prime example is Civil War George B. McClellan, who repeatedly allowed potential victories to slip away because of inflated estimates of Confederate troop strength.
I've heard all these Microsoft conspiracy theories before. And they all center around one simple fallacy: Microsoft is evil, therefore we are entitled to believe anything evil about them we choose to believe. Not logical.
Spare me the fortune cookie logic.
Aren't those popups enough? They're a real pain. They also spam you a lot, until you tell them to stop. The only other thing I had in mind is that they make it easy to misunderstand what's free and what costs extra.
As I said, their sales gimmicks were not a deal-breaker for me, once they'd already conned me into signing up. It was the sluggishness of their servers, combined with really dumb support people, that drove me away.
Were Xterminals ever cheaper than PCs? I seem to recall that they were about the same price. Which had a lot to do with them not catching on.
My problem with calling graphics terminals "thin clients" is not the "thin" part, it's the "client" part. A client is something that's part of a client-server model, and passively acting as a network KVM is nothing like that.
Then again, Xterminals aren't clients either. As you perhaps know, they respond to requests from the application, which makes them the server in a client-server model.
Strictly speaking, only network computer ever qualified as "thin clients." But conceptually, Xterminals are close. And the fact that "thin client" now mostly refers to a remote KVM device is too well-established to argue with.
I probably know the backstory better than you. I even played an itsy-bitsy role in the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit.
You're arguing with something that I'm not saying, namely, "Microsoft has never acted illegally or unethically towards its competition." Not even close to what I'm trying to say. I'm simply trying to shoot down the usual assumption that everything Microsoft does is part of some grand anti-competitive scheme. They're not that smart.
I'm not sure ActiveX was created for the purpose of generating lock-in. Perhaps they had something else in mind originally.
But I *am* reasonably sure that after it was created, Microsoft liked the fact that it created lock-in.
I agree with both statements. Neither of which resembles your original statement that all those weird technologies in IE were designed to create lockin.
Oops. When I read "thin client" I assumed they were talking about those graphics terminals that currently misuse the term. If I'd RTFA, I would have noticed that this project was about X-Terminal software, which is a real thin client. One reason it rates as a true thin client: it doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. As you pointed out.
My bad.
1Gbs may be "standard" but there's still lots of slower connections around. If your building was cabled more than 5 years ago, it's probably only rated at 100 Mbs. Much older than that, it's 10Mbs.
It was 11 years ago that I encountered my first terminal server — and it was a painful experience. My recent experiences have been more positive, but of course these were all on much more modern networks.
Can you even buy hubs any more? In any case, you're forgetting the fact that all the systems connected to the switch still share the upstream connection to the server.
I gotta tell you dude, you have some very strange priorities.
Do they use Linux only? I only want Linux hosting, and mixed providers are always trying to push you over into Windows hosting because they're being incentivized to do so. I've been around and don't need to hear that pitch again.
That's not my experience. And in any case, choosing a host with such a minor issue as your prime criteria... jeez.
I just bailed on JustHost, which is a Linux only company. They pulled all kinds of sales gimmicks on me. I would have tolerated them if they provided better service.
Cheap domains - under $15 a year. As many as you want on one hosting account, because I collect them as a hobby.
Are you under the impression you have to get domain registration and hosting from the same company? Because you don't.
PHP, Perl and Python of course.
They have these things. Installing them is not rocket science. It's more important to know what version they have. It's a royal pain to have your scripts break on you because your provider hasn't gotten around to upgrading.
Ease of migration away. I figure if there's a button on their interface to release my domains to another registrar they'll try and keep me with good service rather than difficult migration.
As I mentioned before, you don't have to keep hosting and registration at the same company. All you have to do is tell your registrar to use the DNS servers belonging to whatever host you use.. I'm pretty sure they all make that pretty easy — if you don't you shouldn't use them.
I abandoned Dreamhost a long time ago because of their regular outages. (What sucks is that Dreamhost is the best by every other measure. But if the system is down when you need it to be up, nothing else matters.) I still keep my domain there because it's only $10 a year, and their web GUI for managing it is first rate. One reason I switched to justhost was their promise of free domain registration. Then I discovered that justhost charges $10/year just to anonymize my WHOSIS record! Fortunately, they also botched my domain transfer....
Reasonable policies about certificates and dedicated IP addresses. Because I might want to open a store.
Once again, you don't have get certificates from your provider, though it is handy to get them that way. But what's really important is that the provider understand certificates. Typically, they'll mess up the certificate you need to access your email server over SSL, which can be a pain to deal with.
Reasonably easy and flexible setup of web apps, because I might want to run a package. Self-help configuration because I'm always fiddling with things after business hours.
It's also helpful if the web apps you need are supported....
Terminal servers can work quite well — if you have the bandwidth. Nothing more frustrating than watching a graphics terminal update over a slow connection.
Dude, have you ever heard of Hanlon's law? If ActiveX was designed to create lock-in, why did Microsoft abandon it?
Imputing collective motives to a company as disorganized and political as MS is like imputing malice to a cockroach infestation. Yes, they often use underhanded methods to screw over their competition. But that's marketing, not engineering. The engineering side of MS has this bit-twiddler's love of doing things its own way. People mostly notice this when they introduce some incompatible technology that screws over the rest of the computing industry. But in fact, this BS often has one group in MS screwing over the rest of the company.
Have you ever worked on a poorly managed engineering team where one or more engineers keeps insisting on doing things a certain way, even if it screws over the project as a whole? It's always been obvious to me that most of the people who work at Microsoft are like that. IE is a mess because the company that produced it is a mess — too much of a mess to carry out the complicated conspiracies everyone likes to believe in.
Hovering can be helpful for providing a little supplemental information. But if your UI relies on it for basic functionality, there's probably a better way to do things. Designers love to use hovering when clicking would actually make more sense. Coolness factor, I guess
What drives me crazy is drop-down menus that are triggered by hovering. I have some neurological issues that mess with my hand-eye coordination, so I'm always triggering them by accident.
But that's just the problem. Such a GPU isn't in most portable computers. So if I want to watch something that's HD, I have to leave my armchair and go sit at my desk.
They're a pain in the ass. Most of us don't have screens that can make them look any better (especially if those screens are on a netbook!) and don't care if we did. I prefer to convert my HD videos to a lower bitrate so they can display on a generic video adapter without any fancy software. Not always convenient, of course.
But this post is really an excuse to make a cute observation about netbooks: they seem to be marketed as less powerful than they are! This is mainly in the way netbooks are described to consumers ("if you want to watch videos, you probably want a more powerful machine"), but there are two technical features that seem to be designed to identify netbooks as underpowered.
The first feature is that the default config typically underclocks the CPU. OK, this makes the battery last longer, but not a lot longer. By accident or by design (I suspect it's by design) most users are going to attempt to play a Netflix stream on their netbooks, watch the video stutter hopelessly and say, "Oh well, they did tell me that the netbook is not a multimedia machine." Little knowing that a few power mode setting changes will fix the problem.
Maybe your dubious about this first feature being anything but a power-saving thing, but explain this: why do netbooks have really cruddy speakers? Even cheapo zero-legacy computers meant for office workers have decent speakers. Not great, but at least you can make out what somebody in a video is saying, which you can't on a typical netbook speaker. Those are tiny and have the volume of a cracked teaspoon.
My theory is that the manufacturers deliberately sabotage netbooks' video and audio so they won't be perceived as a cheaper alternative to laptops — those being what a lot of college students have instead of a TV set.
This really makes me feel old: I seem to be the only one here who remembers that Ethernet was originally coax-only.
OK, that's not quite the same as the coax cabling used for TV signals. But you can still run Ethernet over TV coax. There are two gotchas: maximum speed is 200Mbs (which is probably not a deal breaker for most users) and you have to spend about $100 a node for new transceivers (which probably is a deal breaker).
Yeah, but if you read the article he was trying to clean it with a power drill or grinder. I mean, I'm no expert, but that's surely asking for trouble.
You're kind of missing the point. With decaying explosives, burping is asking for trouble. The man's mistake wasn't using a power drill, it was failing to call the bomb squad. Or at least somebody with enough expertise to certify the thing safe. Instead, he just assumed that a 140-year-old shell couldn't possibly explode.