A: XP Starter Edition already exists. Vista Starter is just a continuation of that, and you won't be able to get it in the USA.
B: There are already two home versions: Home and Media Center. If you're a user, you buy your OS with your PC and, bizarrely "OEM-only" doesn't really mean much. Home Basic = Home, Home Premium = Media Center.
C: Enterprise is only available to volume licence customers with software assurance. This is a con to get people to sigh up to SA on Windows Client. If they actually stick to their guns on MUI, then some multi-nats are going to get seriously pissed off with Microsoft. But that's not going to confuse the consumer space.
So as a consumer buying a PC, your choices are Home Basic, Home Premium, Pro, SB and Ultimate. Realistically, your retailer won't offer SB and probably won't offer Pro, giving you three choices instead of your current three. Oooh, lots of extra confusion there.
Windows Server? Ah, there it gets interesting:
Standard, Ent, D/C, Web and SBS all survive. They are definitely adding Quattro Home Server and Midsize Business Server to those. MBS is aimed at the IT department of one, as opposed to SBS, which is the IT department of zero.
That's just 64bit Windows. Microsoft haven't been aggressively getting hardware manufacturers to write drivers for Win64, and they won't do reverse-engineered drivers in the way that Linux can.
Fuck this -- we have always gone with the best chip out there, starting with the 6502, and we always will.
If that were the case they'd be using AMD chips. There is clearly something more to this deal...an agreement on margins, help with platform development, etc. We'll know over the next year what else is driving this.
How about AMD having (from Apple's perspective) the same heat problem as IBM?
even Joe Sixpack will be reading his email, doing some form of IM, listening to a bit of music and burning a DVD at the same time, all the while having to share CPU time with the antivirus and the firewall.
But CPU performance isn't a great way of addressing multi-threading. SMP is a much better solution to the problem.
Of course, Pentium-D and the dual-core Pentium-M will do that much better than the single-core PPC. So Apple needs the sort of multi-core PPCs that Sony are getting for PS3, and if that's where the Apple-IBM falling out lies, then there is some kind fo sense in here.
Activation: just buy five copies of Windows XP and you don't need to worry about activation. Well, OK, technically, it's a five-license MOLP agreement, but...
That may not be the fault of GIMP, but it's a problem with GIMP from the user perspective.
If I want to do something that's patented, then I have two options: use a commercial product that pays a patent license (or is produced by the patent-holder, which comes to the same thing in cost/commercial terms) or find an illegal OSS solution.
Guess which I'm more likely to do?
Is OSS responsible for this situation? No.
Can OSS do anything about it? Yes, campaign against software patents.
But from the users' perspective, they're going to choose to use the commercial software, not the OSS, until software patents are abolished (plus time for OSS to catch and surpass the commercial functionality, natch).
But if you're a salesman, then a political point is not worth the air that it vibrates in.
So how easy is it to print to a shared Mac printer from a Windows machine? Impossible AFAIK.
Well, if the Mac has Samba, as easy as printing to Windows except for having to install the driver (instead of pulling a copy of the driver from the server).
If the Mac doesn't have samba, then you need to install "Print Services for Unix" (an optional Windows component that supports lpr) and you setup a local queue pointing to the IP address or DNS name of the Mac. Not tremendously easy, but not that hard either. And, of course, you can do that on a server and share the resulting queue to all your other Windows machines.
Just a comment on the differences between the US and European political systems:
# Speak Out # Vote # Write to Your Elected Representatives
These three are good general advice to anyone living in a democracy. For those of you unfortunate not to do so, I have no idea how politics works in non-democratic systems. Coups d'etat are an option, though.
# Donate Money to Political Campaigns
Not in general effective here in Europe. We don't have separate political campaigns that you can fund, so your money just drops into a big pool in a political party.
Much better option: Join a political party. You can vote in the internal elections then; if you influence even a small number of people then you can often shift the party's policy - especially on an issue that is (from the politicians' perspective) essentially peripheral like software patents. Ten or twenty thousand party members can win the vote in even a major party like the SPD or Labour; a few hundred well-organised articulate people can shift the policy.
# Support Campaign Finance Reform
Well, maybe. Take a look at party financing in your country and decide what reforms it needs.
# Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation # Practice Civil Disobedience
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so another person that has read the spin.
A: XP Starter Edition already exists. Vista Starter is just a continuation of that, and you won't be able to get it in the USA.
B: There are already two home versions: Home and Media Center. If you're a user, you buy your OS with your PC and, bizarrely "OEM-only" doesn't really mean much. Home Basic = Home, Home Premium = Media Center.
C: Enterprise is only available to volume licence customers with software assurance. This is a con to get people to sigh up to SA on Windows Client. If they actually stick to their guns on MUI, then some multi-nats are going to get seriously pissed off with Microsoft. But that's not going to confuse the consumer space.
So as a consumer buying a PC, your choices are Home Basic, Home Premium, Pro, SB and Ultimate. Realistically, your retailer won't offer SB and probably won't offer Pro, giving you three choices instead of your current three. Oooh, lots of extra confusion there.
Windows Server? Ah, there it gets interesting:
Standard, Ent, D/C, Web and SBS all survive. They are definitely adding Quattro Home Server and Midsize Business Server to those. MBS is aimed at the IT department of one, as opposed to SBS, which is the IT department of zero.
That's just 64bit Windows. Microsoft haven't been aggressively getting hardware manufacturers to write drivers for Win64, and they won't do reverse-engineered drivers in the way that Linux can.
1. Free news Web sites -- no payback ever emerged
BBC will still be there, which should drag a few others.
3. Blogging -- turned out to be a fad
Pointless personal homepages turned into pointless personal blogs. Am I the only one who fails to see what's revolutionary in that?
6. DVDs -- everything went online
I think we'll still want some way of storing what we've downloaded; we might end up with just DVD-R and no prepublished DVDs.
Microsoft and Bill Gates is a similar story.
Magic word is EM64T. Do your own googling.
So how do you launch apps?
Win-R and type a command line, usually. Certainly cmd, winword, excel, msaccess, notepad, explorer, firefox are all done that way.
Fuck this -- we have always gone with the best chip out there, starting with the 6502, and we always will.
If that were the case they'd be using AMD chips. There is clearly something more to this deal...an agreement on margins, help with platform development, etc. We'll know over the next year what else is driving this.
How about AMD having (from Apple's perspective) the same heat problem as IBM?
Yes, that's the killer app for me as well. Windows and Mac apps on one machine for - pretty much - the first time ever.
And who's to say VMWare won't be interested?
But CPU performance isn't a great way of addressing multi-threading. SMP is a much better solution to the problem.
Of course, Pentium-D and the dual-core Pentium-M will do that much better than the single-core PPC. So Apple needs the sort of multi-core PPCs that Sony are getting for PS3, and if that's where the Apple-IBM falling out lies, then there is some kind fo sense in here.
Activation: just buy five copies of Windows XP and you don't need to worry about activation. Well, OK, technically, it's a five-license MOLP agreement, but...
That may not be the fault of GIMP, but it's a problem with GIMP from the user perspective.
If I want to do something that's patented, then I have two options: use a commercial product that pays a patent license (or is produced by the patent-holder, which comes to the same thing in cost/commercial terms) or find an illegal OSS solution.
Guess which I'm more likely to do?
Is OSS responsible for this situation? No.
Can OSS do anything about it? Yes, campaign against software patents.
But from the users' perspective, they're going to choose to use the commercial software, not the OSS, until software patents are abolished (plus time for OSS to catch and surpass the commercial functionality, natch).
But if you're a salesman, then a political point is not worth the air that it vibrates in.
So how easy is it to print to a shared Mac printer from a Windows machine? Impossible AFAIK.
Well, if the Mac has Samba, as easy as printing to Windows except for having to install the driver (instead of pulling a copy of the driver from the server).
If the Mac doesn't have samba, then you need to install "Print Services for Unix" (an optional Windows component that supports lpr) and you setup a local queue pointing to the IP address or DNS name of the Mac. Not tremendously easy, but not that hard either. And, of course, you can do that on a server and share the resulting queue to all your other Windows machines.
Just a comment on the differences between the US and European political systems:
# Speak Out
# Vote
# Write to Your Elected Representatives
These three are good general advice to anyone living in a democracy. For those of you unfortunate not to do so, I have no idea how politics works in non-democratic systems. Coups d'etat are an option, though.
# Donate Money to Political Campaigns
Not in general effective here in Europe. We don't have separate political campaigns that you can fund, so your money just drops into a big pool in a political party.
Much better option: Join a political party. You can vote in the internal elections then; if you influence even a small number of people then you can often shift the party's policy - especially on an issue that is (from the politicians' perspective) essentially peripheral like software patents. Ten or twenty thousand party members can win the vote in even a major party like the SPD or Labour; a few hundred well-organised articulate people can shift the policy.
# Support Campaign Finance Reform
Well, maybe. Take a look at party financing in your country and decide what reforms it needs.
# Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
# Practice Civil Disobedience
Both good options.