As far as I can tell it is safer and more programmer friendly in every respect. Even assuming you don't use OO, it can still be used as 'a better C'
new and delete intead of malloc() and free()
Those aren't guaranteed to be any more safe. You still have to check the value of a pointer after new, and you still need to make sure you use delete.
cin and cout instead of printf() and scanf()
Different syntax, same old problems. In and of themselves, C++'s stream objects are no safer than printf and scanf.
As for the rest, those have little bearing on writing secure code. In terms of security, C++ is no better than C. Both can be used to write secure code, but you do not get it by default simply because you use C++ over C. It's a design process.
1) Clustering with Windows requires one of the following OS setups: Win2K Server WITH MS Application Center, OR Win2k Advanced Server. (Similarly with the XP platform)
There is no XP platform for this yet, because the clustering you're talking about is for servers. XP is not a server. The "XP solution" will be Windows 2002/Windows.NET (depending on what you feel like calling it), which will be the win2k server counterpart to winxp's win2k pro.
2) OS Licenses therefor will run between $1000-2000 _per-machine_!
Right, but the type of clustering you're talking about won't consist of hundreds of nodes like a beowulf computational cluster. You're referring to a load-balancing cluster. Linux can do this too (btw, KIXO is still under development, the sourceforge page just doesn't look like it. And there are other solutions under linux besides KIXO, but KIXO is being developed with a major goal of working out of the box as a HA clustering solution). This kind of clustering generally involves a small number of nodes.
4) Of course MS is just getting into this so don't expect it to be easy, well documented or stable.
No, MS is just getting into computational clustering, which is different than the load-balancing clustering that has been around in NT4 since 1997 (named "wolfpack"). You appear to be talking about load-balancing, rather than computational, so your argument is a red herring.
PC video, PC o/s (cut-down version of Win$hit), PC Pentium 766Mhz cpu, PC hard disk drive, connectors, etc.
Wrong. The XBox is a console that just happens to use PC components. The XBox is not the first console to do this. The Dreamcast used a PC graphics chipset (from PowerVR -- essentially, the precursor to the current Kyro/KyroII chipsets). The Gamecube uses a PowerPC CPU and PC video (from ArtX, purchased by ATI, technology from which will soon start appearing in ATI's Radeon line, if not already). The XBox isn't even the first console to use an nVidia graphics chipset (that honor would go to the Sega Saturn, which helped bail nVidia out of a dangerous financial situation). Hell, even the old Genesis was a Motorola 68K at its core. PC components do not a PC make. It makes sense to use a video chipset from the PC world in a console, because the most powerful consumer-grade chips are currently made for the PC (well, okay, the XBox's chipset, then NV2a, is more powerful than anything on the PC market yet, including the latest GeForce 4, but that will change in time). As far as operating systems go on consoles, it's a necessary component these days. The XBox uses a modified version of Windows 2000 because, surprise surprise, the XBox is made by Microsoft. (off-topic: using terms like "Win$hit" does not lend any credence to your arguments). And consoles will have hard drives. The PS2 has one in the works, and expect the Gamecube to get one eventually as well. And the next generation of consoles will all have the hard drive built in.
It's being marketed as a game console, because as a gaming PC it would really suck.
No, it's being marketed as a game console because it was designed as a game console. And as a game console, it's very powerful. The fact that the hardware is identical across all XBox units allows developers much more freedom than they have in the PC world to fully leverage the power of the XBox. This first round of XBox games are very impressive (well, most of them, anyway -- as with all platforms, there are a few stinkers). All of those were built using DirectX and various Microsoft-provided APIs. Just wait until the developers start writing their own low-level libraries, like console game developers have always done. The games will be exponentially better. (don't believe me? Have a look at the first generation games for Playstation 1, and compare it to the "last" generation, which would include things like Final Fantasy IX.) You're going to see a lot more done on an XBox than you'd ever be able to see on a comparably spec'ed PC, simply because the XBox is not a PC
Right, which means Be could just as easily use that. Hell, when I had R4.5 installed, I did use the NT Loader (with Win2K RC1) to boot both Windows 2000 and Be. Worked perfectly fine.
There's Win9x, which is DOS-based, and there's NT, which is a completely different operating system.
Not quite correct. More accurate: "There's Win9x, which traditionally used DOS as a boot loader, and has the ability to revert to 16-bit DOS drivers for some hardware if no 32-bit native Windows drivers exist, and there's NT, which is a completely different operating system."
Microsoft's removal of the ability to boot into DOS mode in ME is a deception.
Again, somewhat incorrect. Microsoft's removal of the ability to boot into DOS mode in ME is a side effect of moving to the NT OS Loader for booting Win9x, rather than using DOS to boot Win9x. This was a good move, both because the NT Loader is a much better boot loader than DOS, and it also gets consumers ready for the switch to XP by slowly introducing NT concepts (The non-DOS boot loader, for example).
if you goto the Smart Phone [microsoft.com] site. then click on the Developer [microsoft.com] link. You'll notice that this is a rebranded Pocket PC [microsoft.com].
This is a little wrong. It's not so much a "rebranded Pocket PC" as it is another Windows CE-based platform. This would also explain why it shares the exact same subset of the win32 API -- because it is Windows CE (or a specific platform based on Windows CE, anyway).
But at the cost of high resources, like 32 megs of RAM min, not to mainstreem with cellphones at the moment.
Actually, the price of this will be fairly competitive with other high-end smartphones from other providers. You can't compare this to the $30 Nokia you got the other day from Cingular.
and i'm not sure, but i'm guessing all of the current pocketpc apps [hpc.net] including Quake [pocketquake.com], which is also shown in the SmartPhone Tour [microsoft.com]. Will be available for it, which would be pretty darn cool.
That looks like Doom, to me. Though Quake has been ported to PocketPC. However, the apps will probably need some minor tweaking and changing (mainly in the GUI for the apps, since the form factor is different, as are the input methods) to port over to the phone, and will certainly need a recompile.
You do realize this is the name of the operating system, not a specific model of phone, right? For example, the latest Pocket PC OS is technically called "Windows Powered Pocket PC 2002", but the actual items you buy are named things like "iPaq", "Jornada", and "Cassiopeia".
How is this [microsoft.com] a "familiar Windows environment", other than a vaguely-XP scheme?
It's not. "Familiar Windows environment" is too vague. However, it would be correct to say "familiar Windows-powered device environment", which means Pocket PC and Pocket PC 2002, and Handheld PC 2002 (or whatever the latest release of the clamshell version of Windows CE was. Not that it matters, since only Pocket PC is marketed towards consumers, with the clamshell types only being used in smaller vertical markets these days). If you've used a Pcoket PC, you'll realize that the pic is very similar. This is not a coincidence.
Most cell phones don't have that much data storage... right?
Most current, non-"smartphone" cell phones, right. The thing is, this is not meant for your current phone. You're not going to be able to download this onto your current Samsung or Nokia. Think of this as the operating system for the cell phone version of Pocket PC.
... but what about IE? IE can't be separated from windows so they will have an extra 20M there...;)
This is based on Windows CE, not Windows 9x or Windows NT (embedded or otherwise). Completely different operating system (as in completely different -- CE only shares a subset of the win32 API with other versions of Windows, and was designed from scratch, not from another Windows kernel). CE is extremely modular. As a platform designer, you can choose which modules to use and which not to use. For instance, if you're using CE in a system where a GUI makes no sense, you pull out the GUI module (and thus the pen module, as well). Maybe you only need the kernel and the networking module. Or perhaps you want everything -- it's up to the designer to choose.
Yes, I know this was supposed to be funny, but I don't generally equate ignorance with hilarity.
I'm amazed that RMS can honestly think that unifying themes under GNOME and KDE is a need. Users like diversity although it happens that somebody can think that Linux needs Windows or Mac uniformity (which is just what Microsoft & Apple decided for their users, not the users request). So what's the point in unifying themes?
You're correct, to an extent. Power users (defined as: those that know what they're doing) like diversity. Normal users like consistency. That's not to say they don't like pretty, or that they don't enjoy having something different than their cubicle neighbor. It's simply that, across applications, they prefer things to be consistent. Unifying the GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE themes would allow for that to some extent. How annoying is it to install a really nice looking KDE theme (or GNOME theme), only to pull up a GNOME or GTK app (or KDE or Qt app) and have it not look a thing like the rest of your apps? Good theme developers often will port their themes across engines, but that's a lot of work. If the major widget sets would all use a unified theming engine, it would be much easier to get a consistent look across all applications.
I don't know anything about that. Never played with it, couldn't tell you what it does and doesn't do. What I can say is that Frontpage is actually very nice, so if you could get the professors to develop in that they won't really notice a difference and you'll get much better HTML (FrontPage 98 generated poor HTML. FrontPage 2000 generates much cleaner HTML. Same for Word 97 vs. Word 2000).
And yes, I know you can customize Windows to a large extent, but why? Why pay lots of cash for the add-ons that should be part of the OS? Especially when the OS already sets you back a couple of hundred dollars (I build my own machines and I don't bootleg software).
If you build your own machines, you can easily get OEM versions of Windows for much cheaper than the full retail price. The restriction is that you have to buy it with a motherboard or hard drive, but I'm sure you can swing that. There are many retailers out there that will do this for you, just ask next time.
I am not totally against Microsoft - Office 97 is nice and I like Money 2000 - but why can't I buy those products for Linux? Supposedly they are crack programmers but they can't write software for Linux? It is not like Microsoft can't download and install Mandrake...
You're confusing ability with intention. It's not that Microsoft programmers can't write for Linux, it's that the company won't. Why legitimize Linux by abandoning their own platform? And before you bring up the Macintosh argument, remember that the Office products have been on Macintosh for years (literally over a decade). There's history there, which is why they don't stop making the software. Well, that, and there's a profit to be made. How many RMS-loving Linux zealots would truly pay for Office if Microsoft were to release a Linux version?
But the biggest thing that bothers me is that Microsoft is certainly not a corporate angel. I still resent the fact that they effectively killed OS/2, forcing me to switch from Warp to Windows 98. OS/2 Warp was not perfect, but IBM released 36 fixpacks before I finally had to switch to Windows.
Microsoft didn't so much kill OS/2 as IBM did with their lack of vision and direction. IBM didn't quite know what to do with it, and more importantly, they really didn't care. The only part Microsoft played was by pulling out of the OS/2 project in favor of writing Windows NT themselves. And they didn't do so maliciously -- Microsoft was tired and fed up with IBM's inability to properly position and promote OS/2, and decided they could do better on their own. And did.
So while you see "impressive merits", I see an attempt at "embrace and extend", co-opting standards to their benefit all in the name at trying to keep their desktop monopoly. To bad the Department of Justice has no balls when it comes to corporate criminals like Microsoft...
And no other company has ever "embraced and extended"? I guess Netscape never added <blink> to their HTML implementation. Oh, wait, they're the ones that introduced the blink tag. It's a fact of life that "standards" evolved very slowly. For example, HTML has only evolved as fast as it has because Netscape and Microsoft both took liberties, expanding the capabilities of their browsers with vendor-specific tags. As for "co-opting standards for their benefit", isn't that what standards are for? You implement them for your benefit. Hell, most standards have well-documented extension processes (OpenGL, Kerberos, LDAP). Microsoft has done that, and have been perfectly within their rights to do so. I would argue that the only "standard" that Microsoft has ever extended for worse was Java, but that's not a standard (and it does have extension mechanisms, as well, which Microsoft used, they just made the mistake of calling their implementation "Java", and Sun got upset).
The knife cuts the other way. Where you see conspiracy theories and plots against humanity, I see a successful business doing what it does best -- developing great products and making money. I don't expect you to see that. <sarcasm>Then again, it might just be your foil hat getting in the way</sarcasm>
the Radeon (bought it two weeks before the GeForce3 and the newer Radeons came out)
You must have an awesome mastery of space/time, since there was a several-month time span between the release of the GeForce 3 and the Radeon 8500. If you truly were able to accomplish the same event exactly one time twice so that you did it two weeks before each event, you are truly a god among men.
I should get one thing straight right now. The goal of a business isn't to become a monopoly -- that's a myth perpetuated by monopoly apologists and sympathizers. The goal of a business is to make the owners a living. Corporate agandas perverted this goal into the current "you can't compete unless you're willing to monopolize the industry for the entire nation" garbage. I know the owners of a few small businesses (small businesses are the ones I believe should be protected by the government against corporations, lest we are willing to become nothing more than another civilization kept adrift by feudalism when a few emperors of the dollar decide they their workers don't deserve "rights" anymore, and sign them away on the next contract renewal), and they often do it for two reasons:To make a living (not a killing, just a living), and to be their own bosses.
As far as it goes with small businesses, you're correct. However, writing and marketing an operating system is anything but a small business. When you're talking about LORGs, and even most MORGs, the standard economic models kick in and the goal is market dominance. "Market dominance" equates to "monopoly". As for the fear mongering, I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.
Continuting on, I'm not sure what networking problems exist on Be. You've piqued my interest, have you had any major problems with it? I know it ran well enough for me, but I just use the network to run BeZilla...
A quick search on Google turned up this link, which is not exactly what I was meaning, but the important part is the quote
Be said that whole TCP/IP stack is to be rewritten, and that will fix the problems.
There was a project to move the tcp/ip stack from user space to kernel space, as well, which would improve performance, but I can't remember the name of the project, so I'm not going to be able to provide any pointers.
Ignoring the rest of the post per request. I enjoyed BeOS the few times I played with it, but the lack of applications and hardware support eventually drove me away. I know that's a chicken/egg argument, but it's still valid and there are ways to beat the problem (look at Linux, for example). Be had a number of revolutionary ideas on the UI front, but overall I wouldn't classify it as "the best" recent operating system. You're free to have your own opinion, of course.
And it was DR - Digital Research, not DEC - Digital Equipment
Right, I always get those two confused, probably because of the "Digital" part of the name. My bad, but the rest made sense, I hope.
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Don't bother trying to tell me why all these failed, it's kind of arrogant. Microsoft makes more mistakes than any of these companies did, and they're still around. Thinking that somehow making any mistake is grounds for destruction is foolish. Even in the cutthroat business world, a company with a good product which people are willing to back should be enough to allow a product to survive. In the current climate, if you aren't set to become the next monopoly, your product will die and people will spend their time telling the believers why their OS failed.
Yes, Microsoft has made mistakes. So did IBM. Interestingly, they're both very large companies with large cash reserves, and are agile enough to recover from their mistakes. Smaller companies do not have the same deep pockets, so they have to rely completely on their agility. If they make a large mistake, there is a very good chance they are going to die. That's the way it works. Microsoft, IBM, etc didn't get to be large companies that can afford to absorb mistakes by making mistakes early in their lives, when mistakes are fatal. You're right that "a company with a good product which people are willing to back should be enough to allow a product to survive". The problem comes when people are no longer willing to back your product. And I'm not talking about the die-hard loyalists. Be still has them, Amiga still has them, and so on. When other companies are not willing to support your product (in the operating system case, anyway, since an operating system is nothing without applications), your survival chances are slim, and that's the way it should be -- the market has spoken.
As for your statements on firms trying to become the next monopoly, you apparently don't realize that's what the free market is all about -- all the firms in a market compete to become the monopoly of that market. In most cases, the firms are all evenly matched enough that several are able to exist within the market at the same time and none can gain the monopoly position. However, when one does gain a monopoly position, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's a desired economic position, and if a firm shows that it's capable of getting there, then they deserve it. The problem comes if/when that firm begins acting like a monopoly (basically, they raise prices above the competitive level, in a simplistic economic model). Unless that firm's monopoly is "natural" (protected by limited access to natural resources, or by some other "natural" barrier), or protected by the government, other firms can and will reenter the market offering alternatives at a more competitive price. The monopolist will be forced to lower prices and return to a competitive stance (unless the monopolist is different enough from the new competitors, or has enough brand loyalty, to allow it to remain at its current position even with the introduction of competitors. This is not the monopolist's problem, nor is it illegal. It's a problem for the competitors, and they need to work harder to erode the monopolist's advantages -- completely doable within the framework of the market itself, without any need for litigation or government intervention).
PS. BeOS still had a real focus. a "vision" if you will. Everybody who used it, and everybody who loved it knew it. It was, bar none, the best OS created in the last 5 years, and in a free market, would have become immensely popular.
And yet, it has very rudimentary printing support (not even talking hardware drivers here, just plain support for printing), and it had a number of networking issues. I don't deny that Be had some very interesting and innovative concepts. I simply deny that it was the best OS created in the last 5 years. And obviously, in a free market, it did not become immensely popular (you're confusing the definition of a free market).
P.P.S. Ever wondered why Windows 9x doesn't run with DR-DOS? I don't think integration has ever been for the users benefit at MS.
How was integrating DOS directly into win9x not in the user's interests? DOS was marginalized. It had become essentially nothing more than a boot loader. What's it matter if the win9x kernel is loaded by MS-DOS or DR-DOS, when that kernel basically removes most of DOS from memory anyway? Consumers had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, because it made things simpler. I've not once heard an average win9x user complain that they really would liked to have used DR-DOS or FreeDOS to boot win9x rather than MS-DOS.
I've read some of the letters, and it's sort of sad to be reminded of all the companies which Microsoft has unfairly crushed OS/2, BeOS, DR-Dos and others, have all fallen, regardless of user support or quality, and the festering, rotting corpses of these products and in many cases, the companies which created them, are a macabre reminder of why Microsoft must be stopped.
Hrm, let's see.
OS/2. IBM had absolutely no clue what to do with this operating system. It "died" (even though it's still in use today) because IBM was incompetent.
BeOS. No apps, poor hardware support, and a confused vision killed this OS. It's commonly accepted that one of the main reasons Be started up was to eventually provide Apple the next OS for the Macintosh. This didn't happen, since Apple opted to go with Jobs' NeXT instead. Shortly afterwards, Be was more or less forced into the x86 market, where they had no real vision. Spend millions of dollars researching and developing an OS for a very small niche market (media editing and development, basically) that had no compelling reason(*cough*Adobe products*cough*) to switch operating systems? Not a very viable business plan. Be really should've taken a page out of Microsoft's book, if they wanted to survive. Their whole philosophy was that they would only provide simple or trivial applications with the OS to encourage third-party developers, yet third-party developers won't really flock to an OS unless there are users, and the users won't come without applications. That means that Be needed to write some better applications. At the very least, they should've focused on making a much better browser than Net+.
DR-DOS. It's DOS. DOS is dead. Next. Oh, you're referring to the whole win3.x thing not liking to run on top of DR-DOS. Well, that's been covered by many other comments besides mine, so there's little point in discussing it again. Suffice it to say, the problem was only in a beta of win3.x, and not in the final version. But I guess beta Microsoft software can kill competitors, right? Right?
You paint a pretty picture, but try stepping back into the real world for a moment. Be is gone because it was a one-horse company. They bet it all on their OS, then later on their Internet Appliance stuff. Neither panned out, they're gone. DEC had much more than DR-DOS, and the death of DOS isn't what killed DEC in the end anyway. And Caldera (the current owner of DR-DOS) picked it up too late to make a difference. If anything, the only thing that hurt them in the whole situation was buying DR-DOS in the first place. But IBM is still around. They're huge. OS/2 is still in use, but overall I think IBM is happier being out of the desktop OS market.
Microsoft didn't "crush" any of these. They all lost on their own merits, or because the companies behind the products screwed up on their own. Conspiracy theories can be fun, but sometimes you have to come up for air and live in the real world for a while.
"Given that Microsoft's.Net Passport is the heart of Windows XP, Microsoft's new Operating System that was officially launched on October 25, 2001, Catavault, a software company addressing online identification and authentication, unfortunately finds itself in the cross-hairs of the most powerful software company in the world."
Too bad guys, you're gonna die. Not the first and not the last.
And also not the truth. Only somebody who's never used Windows XP at all could assert that.NET Passport is "the heart of Windows XP". Sure, Windows Messenger uses Passport for authentication. You can however refuse to create a Passport login and XP will still work 100%, minus Messenger. For Passport to be the "heart" of XP, one would expect it to be required simply to log into the OS. That is definitely not the case.
Does Passport compete with Catavault? Sure. Does that mean that Catavault is as good as dead? Not by a long shot. It just means that they have a very fierce competitor now. They might roll over and die just because Microsoft entered their field, but if that's the case there's nobody to blame but Catavault themselves. If they can compete with Microsoft (and yes, that's possible), then they will be able survive, and prosper (well, assuming they have a profitable business plan, anyway).
The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism has a little more credibility than RMS, however. Capitalism and the Free Market has been proven over hundreds of years to be a viable, even a desirable economic system. It works best when the market is allowed to "police" itself. A particularly potent quote from their comment is
Failed businesses must not be allowed to set the rules for the markets in which they failed.
RMS, on the other hand, peddles communism without the stigmatic name attached. We've all seen how well communism works when the theory is applied to the real world (think Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba). The problem with communism is that the theory is fundamentally flawed. It's based on the insane assumption that humans are willing to sacrifice for the common good. That's blatantly false. Human nature is self-preservation. It's about looking out for number one. The survivial instinct can extend past the individual to small groups (children, family, a close-knit community), but when you're talking about a nation-wide or world-wide level, that breaks down. The family unit or close-knit community is tiny enough to be considered the individual. You can't tell me that any person or family would willingly go to half-rations (or worse!) if the other half of their food could be used to feed starving people half a continent away. No, people will donate food and money only after their own needs and wants are provided for.
On the other hand, capitalism and free market economics firmly accepts and embraces this human nature. The core is to do the best you can in your market. It's all about survival, and those that can't survive don't.
Yes, I'm being fairly simplistic here, but at the core of capitalism and communism, my assessment is true.
Well it's been quite awhile since I've had IE 6 installed here, but I remember thinking it was ugly and cartoonish. Certainly all I have seen of it recently was on a friends machine that has MSN Explorer though, so you may be right I was conflating the two in my mind as I can't seem to remember what it actually looked like when I had 6 here, just that I disliked it.
If you remember a cartoony interface, then there's no other option but that you were confusing IE6 with MSN Explorer. As far as not liking IE6 goes, it couldn't be based on looks (it looks no different from IE5.5, on everything but XP), nor functionality (IE6 is very much w3c compliant. It fixes the old annoying CSS width bug. And yet, it's still backwards compatible with earlier broken versions of IE). I don't want to make the assumption that it was just the plain typical slashdot, "Microsoft is evil, I hate everything about them, especially their newest software because it's better than anything I have on linux, but I'll continue to use the old stuff," argument. Hate Microsoft if you must, but please judge their software on its own merits. And IE6 has some very impressive merits indeed.
To answer the first: There is no "latest version". When Microsoft releases a Version N, that's it. If they roll patches into it, it then becomes Version N.1, or.5, or whatever. So, you'll still have to apply the patch.
As for 6 on 98 or ME, no, I've not tried it. I have run it on Win2K, though, and it looked just the same as on XP. XP adds the green circles on the forward/back arrows, and lots of color to the rest of the toolbar. On win2k, those were not there. They shouldn't be there on 98 or ME, either, but since I've not tried it I can't say for sure. Are you sure you didn't download the MSN Explorer? That's a completely different product, and it does have the cartoony, Mozilla-ish look to it. If the top bar has large icons, with things like Hotmail email, that's definitely MSN Explorer. You want Internet Explorer. MSN Explorer is a shell around IE, so if you use that, you have to figure out what version of IE you have installed, and patch against that version.
This patch was mentioned in the recent MSN Messenger "virus" story. Just to recap, the "virus" was no virus at all, but just an exploitation of the old (as in, known since December) document.open bug in MSIE. This was fixed with Monday's patch. Everybody using IE should have installed this already, but those who haven't should do sonow.
Because Trillian is not Messenger. The way this works is IE embeds a Messenger COM object. Since Trillian, if it even defines a COM object that could be embedded by IE, is not Messenger, the GUID that defines the object will be different. Since the object is embedded by GUID, of course Trillian isn't going to work. However, if Trillian exposed the same or similar functionality in a COM object (not likely), and the so-called "virus" was targetted towards Trillian users (also not likely; too small of a target), then Trillian would be "affected".
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Those aren't guaranteed to be any more safe. You still have to check the value of a pointer after new, and you still need to make sure you use delete.
Different syntax, same old problems. In and of themselves, C++'s stream objects are no safer than printf and scanf.
As for the rest, those have little bearing on writing secure code. In terms of security, C++ is no better than C. Both can be used to write secure code, but you do not get it by default simply because you use C++ over C. It's a design process.
There is no XP platform for this yet, because the clustering you're talking about is for servers. XP is not a server. The "XP solution" will be Windows 2002/Windows .NET (depending on what you feel like calling it), which will be the win2k server counterpart to winxp's win2k pro.
Right, but the type of clustering you're talking about won't consist of hundreds of nodes like a beowulf computational cluster. You're referring to a load-balancing cluster. Linux can do this too (btw, KIXO is still under development, the sourceforge page just doesn't look like it. And there are other solutions under linux besides KIXO, but KIXO is being developed with a major goal of working out of the box as a HA clustering solution). This kind of clustering generally involves a small number of nodes.
No, MS is just getting into computational clustering, which is different than the load-balancing clustering that has been around in NT4 since 1997 (named "wolfpack"). You appear to be talking about load-balancing, rather than computational, so your argument is a red herring.
Wrong. The XBox is a console that just happens to use PC components. The XBox is not the first console to do this. The Dreamcast used a PC graphics chipset (from PowerVR -- essentially, the precursor to the current Kyro/KyroII chipsets). The Gamecube uses a PowerPC CPU and PC video (from ArtX, purchased by ATI, technology from which will soon start appearing in ATI's Radeon line, if not already). The XBox isn't even the first console to use an nVidia graphics chipset (that honor would go to the Sega Saturn, which helped bail nVidia out of a dangerous financial situation). Hell, even the old Genesis was a Motorola 68K at its core. PC components do not a PC make. It makes sense to use a video chipset from the PC world in a console, because the most powerful consumer-grade chips are currently made for the PC (well, okay, the XBox's chipset, then NV2a, is more powerful than anything on the PC market yet, including the latest GeForce 4, but that will change in time). As far as operating systems go on consoles, it's a necessary component these days. The XBox uses a modified version of Windows 2000 because, surprise surprise, the XBox is made by Microsoft. (off-topic: using terms like "Win$hit" does not lend any credence to your arguments). And consoles will have hard drives. The PS2 has one in the works, and expect the Gamecube to get one eventually as well. And the next generation of consoles will all have the hard drive built in.
No, it's being marketed as a game console because it was designed as a game console. And as a game console, it's very powerful. The fact that the hardware is identical across all XBox units allows developers much more freedom than they have in the PC world to fully leverage the power of the XBox. This first round of XBox games are very impressive (well, most of them, anyway -- as with all platforms, there are a few stinkers). All of those were built using DirectX and various Microsoft-provided APIs. Just wait until the developers start writing their own low-level libraries, like console game developers have always done. The games will be exponentially better. (don't believe me? Have a look at the first generation games for Playstation 1, and compare it to the "last" generation, which would include things like Final Fantasy IX.) You're going to see a lot more done on an XBox than you'd ever be able to see on a comparably spec'ed PC, simply because the XBox is not a PC
Right, which means Be could just as easily use that. Hell, when I had R4.5 installed, I did use the NT Loader (with Win2K RC1) to boot both Windows 2000 and Be. Worked perfectly fine.
Not quite correct. More accurate: "There's Win9x, which traditionally used DOS as a boot loader, and has the ability to revert to 16-bit DOS drivers for some hardware if no 32-bit native Windows drivers exist, and there's NT, which is a completely different operating system."
Again, somewhat incorrect. Microsoft's removal of the ability to boot into DOS mode in ME is a side effect of moving to the NT OS Loader for booting Win9x, rather than using DOS to boot Win9x. This was a good move, both because the NT Loader is a much better boot loader than DOS, and it also gets consumers ready for the switch to XP by slowly introducing NT concepts (The non-DOS boot loader, for example).
This is a little wrong. It's not so much a "rebranded Pocket PC" as it is another Windows CE-based platform. This would also explain why it shares the exact same subset of the win32 API -- because it is Windows CE (or a specific platform based on Windows CE, anyway).
Actually, the price of this will be fairly competitive with other high-end smartphones from other providers. You can't compare this to the $30 Nokia you got the other day from Cingular.
That looks like Doom, to me. Though Quake has been ported to PocketPC. However, the apps will probably need some minor tweaking and changing (mainly in the GUI for the apps, since the form factor is different, as are the input methods) to port over to the phone, and will certainly need a recompile.
You do realize this is the name of the operating system, not a specific model of phone, right? For example, the latest Pocket PC OS is technically called "Windows Powered Pocket PC 2002", but the actual items you buy are named things like "iPaq", "Jornada", and "Cassiopeia".
It's not. "Familiar Windows environment" is too vague. However, it would be correct to say "familiar Windows-powered device environment", which means Pocket PC and Pocket PC 2002, and Handheld PC 2002 (or whatever the latest release of the clamshell version of Windows CE was. Not that it matters, since only Pocket PC is marketed towards consumers, with the clamshell types only being used in smaller vertical markets these days). If you've used a Pcoket PC, you'll realize that the pic is very similar. This is not a coincidence.
Most current, non-"smartphone" cell phones, right. The thing is, this is not meant for your current phone. You're not going to be able to download this onto your current Samsung or Nokia. Think of this as the operating system for the cell phone version of Pocket PC.
This is based on Windows CE, not Windows 9x or Windows NT (embedded or otherwise). Completely different operating system (as in completely different -- CE only shares a subset of the win32 API with other versions of Windows, and was designed from scratch, not from another Windows kernel). CE is extremely modular. As a platform designer, you can choose which modules to use and which not to use. For instance, if you're using CE in a system where a GUI makes no sense, you pull out the GUI module (and thus the pen module, as well). Maybe you only need the kernel and the networking module. Or perhaps you want everything -- it's up to the designer to choose.
Yes, I know this was supposed to be funny, but I don't generally equate ignorance with hilarity.
You're correct, to an extent. Power users (defined as: those that know what they're doing) like diversity. Normal users like consistency. That's not to say they don't like pretty, or that they don't enjoy having something different than their cubicle neighbor. It's simply that, across applications, they prefer things to be consistent. Unifying the GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE themes would allow for that to some extent. How annoying is it to install a really nice looking KDE theme (or GNOME theme), only to pull up a GNOME or GTK app (or KDE or Qt app) and have it not look a thing like the rest of your apps? Good theme developers often will port their themes across engines, but that's a lot of work. If the major widget sets would all use a unified theming engine, it would be much easier to get a consistent look across all applications.
I don't know anything about that. Never played with it, couldn't tell you what it does and doesn't do. What I can say is that Frontpage is actually very nice, so if you could get the professors to develop in that they won't really notice a difference and you'll get much better HTML (FrontPage 98 generated poor HTML. FrontPage 2000 generates much cleaner HTML. Same for Word 97 vs. Word 2000).
If you build your own machines, you can easily get OEM versions of Windows for much cheaper than the full retail price. The restriction is that you have to buy it with a motherboard or hard drive, but I'm sure you can swing that. There are many retailers out there that will do this for you, just ask next time.
You're confusing ability with intention. It's not that Microsoft programmers can't write for Linux, it's that the company won't. Why legitimize Linux by abandoning their own platform? And before you bring up the Macintosh argument, remember that the Office products have been on Macintosh for years (literally over a decade). There's history there, which is why they don't stop making the software. Well, that, and there's a profit to be made. How many RMS-loving Linux zealots would truly pay for Office if Microsoft were to release a Linux version?
Microsoft didn't so much kill OS/2 as IBM did with their lack of vision and direction. IBM didn't quite know what to do with it, and more importantly, they really didn't care. The only part Microsoft played was by pulling out of the OS/2 project in favor of writing Windows NT themselves. And they didn't do so maliciously -- Microsoft was tired and fed up with IBM's inability to properly position and promote OS/2, and decided they could do better on their own. And did.
And no other company has ever "embraced and extended"? I guess Netscape never added <blink> to their HTML implementation. Oh, wait, they're the ones that introduced the blink tag. It's a fact of life that "standards" evolved very slowly. For example, HTML has only evolved as fast as it has because Netscape and Microsoft both took liberties, expanding the capabilities of their browsers with vendor-specific tags. As for "co-opting standards for their benefit", isn't that what standards are for? You implement them for your benefit. Hell, most standards have well-documented extension processes (OpenGL, Kerberos, LDAP). Microsoft has done that, and have been perfectly within their rights to do so. I would argue that the only "standard" that Microsoft has ever extended for worse was Java, but that's not a standard (and it does have extension mechanisms, as well, which Microsoft used, they just made the mistake of calling their implementation "Java", and Sun got upset).
The knife cuts the other way. Where you see conspiracy theories and plots against humanity, I see a successful business doing what it does best -- developing great products and making money. I don't expect you to see that. <sarcasm>Then again, it might just be your foil hat getting in the way</sarcasm>
Right, but the term "came out" generally implies "released", not "announced". Not that it matters. I was being facetious.
You must have an awesome mastery of space/time, since there was a several-month time span between the release of the GeForce 3 and the Radeon 8500. If you truly were able to accomplish the same event exactly one time twice so that you did it two weeks before each event, you are truly a god among men.
As far as it goes with small businesses, you're correct. However, writing and marketing an operating system is anything but a small business. When you're talking about LORGs, and even most MORGs, the standard economic models kick in and the goal is market dominance. "Market dominance" equates to "monopoly". As for the fear mongering, I'm not even going to dignify it with a response.
A quick search on Google turned up this link, which is not exactly what I was meaning, but the important part is the quote
There was a project to move the tcp/ip stack from user space to kernel space, as well, which would improve performance, but I can't remember the name of the project, so I'm not going to be able to provide any pointers.
Ignoring the rest of the post per request. I enjoyed BeOS the few times I played with it, but the lack of applications and hardware support eventually drove me away. I know that's a chicken/egg argument, but it's still valid and there are ways to beat the problem (look at Linux, for example). Be had a number of revolutionary ideas on the UI front, but overall I wouldn't classify it as "the best" recent operating system. You're free to have your own opinion, of course.
Right, I always get those two confused, probably because of the "Digital" part of the name. My bad, but the rest made sense, I hope.
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Yes, Microsoft has made mistakes. So did IBM. Interestingly, they're both very large companies with large cash reserves, and are agile enough to recover from their mistakes. Smaller companies do not have the same deep pockets, so they have to rely completely on their agility. If they make a large mistake, there is a very good chance they are going to die. That's the way it works. Microsoft, IBM, etc didn't get to be large companies that can afford to absorb mistakes by making mistakes early in their lives, when mistakes are fatal. You're right that "a company with a good product which people are willing to back should be enough to allow a product to survive". The problem comes when people are no longer willing to back your product. And I'm not talking about the die-hard loyalists. Be still has them, Amiga still has them, and so on. When other companies are not willing to support your product (in the operating system case, anyway, since an operating system is nothing without applications), your survival chances are slim, and that's the way it should be -- the market has spoken.
As for your statements on firms trying to become the next monopoly, you apparently don't realize that's what the free market is all about -- all the firms in a market compete to become the monopoly of that market. In most cases, the firms are all evenly matched enough that several are able to exist within the market at the same time and none can gain the monopoly position. However, when one does gain a monopoly position, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's a desired economic position, and if a firm shows that it's capable of getting there, then they deserve it. The problem comes if/when that firm begins acting like a monopoly (basically, they raise prices above the competitive level, in a simplistic economic model). Unless that firm's monopoly is "natural" (protected by limited access to natural resources, or by some other "natural" barrier), or protected by the government, other firms can and will reenter the market offering alternatives at a more competitive price. The monopolist will be forced to lower prices and return to a competitive stance (unless the monopolist is different enough from the new competitors, or has enough brand loyalty, to allow it to remain at its current position even with the introduction of competitors. This is not the monopolist's problem, nor is it illegal. It's a problem for the competitors, and they need to work harder to erode the monopolist's advantages -- completely doable within the framework of the market itself, without any need for litigation or government intervention).
And yet, it has very rudimentary printing support (not even talking hardware drivers here, just plain support for printing), and it had a number of networking issues. I don't deny that Be had some very interesting and innovative concepts. I simply deny that it was the best OS created in the last 5 years. And obviously, in a free market, it did not become immensely popular (you're confusing the definition of a free market).
How was integrating DOS directly into win9x not in the user's interests? DOS was marginalized. It had become essentially nothing more than a boot loader. What's it matter if the win9x kernel is loaded by MS-DOS or DR-DOS, when that kernel basically removes most of DOS from memory anyway? Consumers had nothing to lose, and everything to gain, because it made things simpler. I've not once heard an average win9x user complain that they really would liked to have used DR-DOS or FreeDOS to boot win9x rather than MS-DOS.
Hrm, let's see.
You paint a pretty picture, but try stepping back into the real world for a moment. Be is gone because it was a one-horse company. They bet it all on their OS, then later on their Internet Appliance stuff. Neither panned out, they're gone. DEC had much more than DR-DOS, and the death of DOS isn't what killed DEC in the end anyway. And Caldera (the current owner of DR-DOS) picked it up too late to make a difference. If anything, the only thing that hurt them in the whole situation was buying DR-DOS in the first place. But IBM is still around. They're huge. OS/2 is still in use, but overall I think IBM is happier being out of the desktop OS market.
Microsoft didn't "crush" any of these. They all lost on their own merits, or because the companies behind the products screwed up on their own. Conspiracy theories can be fun, but sometimes you have to come up for air and live in the real world for a while.
And also not the truth. Only somebody who's never used Windows XP at all could assert that .NET Passport is "the heart of Windows XP". Sure, Windows Messenger uses Passport for authentication. You can however refuse to create a Passport login and XP will still work 100%, minus Messenger. For Passport to be the "heart" of XP, one would expect it to be required simply to log into the OS. That is definitely not the case.
Does Passport compete with Catavault? Sure. Does that mean that Catavault is as good as dead? Not by a long shot. It just means that they have a very fierce competitor now. They might roll over and die just because Microsoft entered their field, but if that's the case there's nobody to blame but Catavault themselves. If they can compete with Microsoft (and yes, that's possible), then they will be able survive, and prosper (well, assuming they have a profitable business plan, anyway).
The Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism has a little more credibility than RMS, however. Capitalism and the Free Market has been proven over hundreds of years to be a viable, even a desirable economic system. It works best when the market is allowed to "police" itself. A particularly potent quote from their comment is
RMS, on the other hand, peddles communism without the stigmatic name attached. We've all seen how well communism works when the theory is applied to the real world (think Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba). The problem with communism is that the theory is fundamentally flawed. It's based on the insane assumption that humans are willing to sacrifice for the common good. That's blatantly false. Human nature is self-preservation. It's about looking out for number one. The survivial instinct can extend past the individual to small groups (children, family, a close-knit community), but when you're talking about a nation-wide or world-wide level, that breaks down. The family unit or close-knit community is tiny enough to be considered the individual. You can't tell me that any person or family would willingly go to half-rations (or worse!) if the other half of their food could be used to feed starving people half a continent away. No, people will donate food and money only after their own needs and wants are provided for.
On the other hand, capitalism and free market economics firmly accepts and embraces this human nature. The core is to do the best you can in your market. It's all about survival, and those that can't survive don't.
Yes, I'm being fairly simplistic here, but at the core of capitalism and communism, my assessment is true.
If you remember a cartoony interface, then there's no other option but that you were confusing IE6 with MSN Explorer. As far as not liking IE6 goes, it couldn't be based on looks (it looks no different from IE5.5, on everything but XP), nor functionality (IE6 is very much w3c compliant. It fixes the old annoying CSS width bug. And yet, it's still backwards compatible with earlier broken versions of IE). I don't want to make the assumption that it was just the plain typical slashdot, "Microsoft is evil, I hate everything about them, especially their newest software because it's better than anything I have on linux, but I'll continue to use the old stuff," argument. Hate Microsoft if you must, but please judge their software on its own merits. And IE6 has some very impressive merits indeed.
To answer the first: There is no "latest version". When Microsoft releases a Version N, that's it. If they roll patches into it, it then becomes Version N.1, or .5, or whatever. So, you'll still have to apply the patch.
As for 6 on 98 or ME, no, I've not tried it. I have run it on Win2K, though, and it looked just the same as on XP. XP adds the green circles on the forward/back arrows, and lots of color to the rest of the toolbar. On win2k, those were not there. They shouldn't be there on 98 or ME, either, but since I've not tried it I can't say for sure. Are you sure you didn't download the MSN Explorer? That's a completely different product, and it does have the cartoony, Mozilla-ish look to it. If the top bar has large icons, with things like Hotmail email, that's definitely MSN Explorer. You want Internet Explorer. MSN Explorer is a shell around IE, so if you use that, you have to figure out what version of IE you have installed, and patch against that version.
Windows Update is only updated something like twice a month. The patch is not there yet, but will be soon. But thanks for playing.
Wrong. The problem exists in all IE versions. There are patches for 5.0, 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0. I don't believe MS supports 4.0 any longer.
And IE 6 looks little different from IE5, unless you happen to be using XP
This patch was mentioned in the recent MSN Messenger "virus" story. Just to recap, the "virus" was no virus at all, but just an exploitation of the old (as in, known since December) document.open bug in MSIE. This was fixed with Monday's patch. Everybody using IE should have installed this already, but those who haven't should do so now.
Because Trillian is not Messenger. The way this works is IE embeds a Messenger COM object. Since Trillian, if it even defines a COM object that could be embedded by IE, is not Messenger, the GUID that defines the object will be different. Since the object is embedded by GUID, of course Trillian isn't going to work. However, if Trillian exposed the same or similar functionality in a COM object (not likely), and the so-called "virus" was targetted towards Trillian users (also not likely; too small of a target), then Trillian would be "affected".