In addition to the load-balanced server explaination, I occassionally hit a IE (4/5/6) bug where it gets confused and thinks it's in "offline" mode.
You immedately get the 404 page, but when you press reload, it goes 'online' and finds the page. Something to do with going to localhost pages -- haven't quite figured it out yet.
Why would "It's the End of the World As We Know it (And I feel fine)" be a better choice than "START Me up"? Sounds like an urban legend devised by apocolyptic MS haters.
(The Win95 marketing campaign consisted of lots of TV commercials and billboards featuring the "Start" button.)
On the other hand (at least with the beta I tried), the theme feature removed your ability to set custom fonts and colors, a feature which had always existed in Windows.
That made it a bit annoying to work with -- the UI was designed to be "fun" and distracting, just that I couldn't make un-distracting. Overall, far less usable. So I had to turn it off and go with the W2K shell.
They were already screwed when they started BeIA -- it was a last ditch hope.
The main reason the company flopped was because they thought they could compete (or "co-exist", whatever that means) with Windows in the general purpose desktop OS market, where it didn't solve anyone's problems (unless 2ms latency helps your e-mail experience in someway I'm ignorant of.)
If they were smart, tney would have stuck to the original plan -- making high-end AV workstations using custom software for vertical markets.
If I worked at Apple, I would make sure that there was an early adopter penalty on all 'style' products, because they have a significant number of customers that will have to buy this thing RIGHT NOW.
Then, once you've fleeced that crowd, sell it at cost/loss to move some Macs.
If it functions as a standard firewire disk, I have no idea why it wouldn't be supported by Windows/Linux/etc. It's probably only some added-value software that makes it 'Mac only'.
Of course, marketing to PC people would involve explaining that they most likely do not have a powered firewire interface. Probably more trouble than it's worth.
As an Apple stockholder, you should appreciate this as a 'press release' product. Apple hasn't gotten anything substantially new out for a while (Sliver G4s were a big yawn even for the fanbase), and this keeps them in the business pages.
Maybe it will serve to kickstart the firewire device market. Couldn't hurt Apple's position in the long run. And as an Apple Store upsell item, or just free advertising when people get on the bus with one on their belt, it seems to serve it's purpose.
This thing seems to be aimed at the style-uber-alles G4 Cube market, where they'be already been burnt bad, so I doubt they are planning to make any real money off it. But how much real money is any computer company going to make off an MP3 player? Not much.
Actually, if you ignore the bottom third of the page (which is pure crap territory, AC and not), the AC content/crap ratio is usually far higher than 90%. In particular there's a AC poster called "--fred" who makes it worthwhile to cruise at 0.
I think history shows that most moderators do not adjust their filters, or they don't feel like it's a valuable use of their mod points on ACs.
(posted at +1 in parody of all the crap which gets posted with the bonus.)
Besides with the karma system having been around for so long, getting a 'trusted user' bonus doesn't mean that much any more.
Re:At the same time, it's not all ACs
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
It seems to me kinda pointless -- if you don't want to see AC and troll account posts, you can filter at 1.
The regular accounts that are participating in obvious trolling/flamebait will eventually get modded down to -1 also, so if you want to read those, you'll have to lower your threshold.
The only thing this seems to accomplish is to reduce the editor load of moderating AC posts from 0 to -1 Offtopic -- something I suspect is done more for automagic IP banning purposes than to improve the readers' comment fitering options.
He gave the hypothetical example of patent-encumbered BSD code which would be GPL-incompatible. I can't be bothered to find the original post, but there's a summary on Kernel Traffic.
That's fine, but when I'm using an open source operating system, I'd like to have what I consider the necessary information, and this includes Changelogs for all security updates.
Well, then Linux is not for you. Cox has previously admitted that he obfuscates changelog entries for security updates that were reported privately. Of course you could 'use the source' and work backwards, but Linux doesn't fall under a full disclosure policy.
(As a side note Cox seems to be more kvetchy about political issues lately. Like the minor flamewar he started last week when he insisted that BSD licenced modules be marked GPL-incompatitble because they might be patent encumbered.)
You like games, so Windows "major major asset" is games.
Fred is a DBA, so Windows "major major asset" is DB modeling tools.
Sally is a project manager, so Windows "major major asset" is project tools.
Biff is an accountant, so Windows "major major asset" is spreadsheet software.
Conculsion 1 : Games are just a piece of the puzzle.
Conculsion 2: Together, Fred, Sally and Biff buy as many games as you do and run them on Windows because that's where the rest of their action is. If another platform (Linux or Amiga) was better for gaming, it still wouldn't be attractive to them.
It seems to be the outlook of the "gamer" community that most games are purchased by "gamers. It's not true -- the PC game market is driven by normal people who do normal things on their computers and blow off steam with the occasional game. The "base case" is that the environment is attractive without the games, which are almost entirely a secondary market. (Of course, people seem to forget that, which is why hardware requirements have pushed the PC game market into the toilet.)
In other words, games won't bring about Linux users. Linux users will bring about the games.
PReP was an IBM/Motorola standard established so that they could eat Intel's business desktop market by selling Windows NT and OS/2-based RISC workstations. For a number of reasons, this effort pretty much when nowhere and was dropped by 1996.
The key words being "business" and "Windows". IBM/Moto's marketing efforts were so lame and such a spectacular failure, that it's no wonder that everyone has forgotten this billion dollar initiative, and laid the blame at Apple's feet.
Apple never really gave a clear indication that they were ever going to change thier business model from being a "systems vendor" to a software-only company. They really just wanted to get in early with what was supposed to be (according to IBM/Moto) the commodity CPU of the future and got dragged into the rest of it. (At this point, with Moto in embedded and IBM in big servers and a stangent parts supply, Apple probably sees that using PPC was a gigantic mistake to begin with.)
Furthermore, Apple had neither the marketshare nor the business users to drive the PReP/CHRP pony, so hopefully it's _obvious_ that it wasn't their idea.
There's also was serious problems with the lack of hardware indepedance in MacOS -- the clones had to use Apple-designed boards, and Apple wasn't planning to fix this until Copeland shipped (which it didn't).
Open PPC Hardware failing is Motorola and IBM's fault, not Apple's.
"That is to say, it is an error of design, not of implementation, as he claims."
Wouldn't that be the whole point of this challenge? -- that Linux has a better 'design', and therefore is supposedly immune to viruses.
We all know that the most suceptable system to viruses is DOS/Windows, and that's certainly by design (although there's loads of implementation issues too).
By the time Intel ships a 3.5Ghz chip, "today's apps" will be two years old.
Is there any doubt that FPU-intensive apps (games) shipping in 2002 won't be compiled for the P4?
Re:Total independant standard for benchmarking?
on
AthlonXP Released
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· Score: 2
Maybe what we need is an independent system (developed by an objective standards body) that rates processors based on their overall performance.
The CPU industry would not accept this (including AMD, I think). The fact is that benchmark numbers almost never scale linearly with CPU speed. Instead of shipping a chip that looks 10% faster than the previous model, they'd be advertising their product as only 4% faster. If you boil down to "5 Foobars", the new chip would round down to the speed of the previous chip. Ungood for them.
(Furthermore, I don't think that the market as a whole is as Mhz sensitive as everyone, including AMD, seems to think it is. This move really only makes a difference at retail.)
If you weren't talking out of your goatse, you would know that Windows NT *was* designed to be an easily ported OS, at least to 32-bit CPUs.
Read any account of the development of the OS -- originally it wasn't even supposed to run on i386, and Microsoft like many others thought that x86 wouldn't scale, and wanted to get a RISC-compatible product on the market. (This was a huge problem with OS/2 and it's mass of x86 asm.)
As to the difficulty of Win64, nobody really knows. Microsoft did talk about shipping a 64-bit Alpha NT4 port back in 97-98. Whether they could have is buried in Axis (MS - Intel - DEC - Compaq) poltics. Other than that, Win64 is pretty much tied market-wise to IA64, both of which just shipped.
(Intel's problems with Itanic have been well documented -- they certain weren't waiting for MS. In fact they seem to be expecting Linux to carry the water in that market, at least at first.)
I just want to point out that this discussion tree is all shoulda-coulda, and has nothing to do with the current state of the trial.
Force MS to open up and document all file formats
Did anyone mention Microsoft Office at any time, anywhere in the court proceedings? No. While it's true that MSO is probably a monopoly product, no court of law has determined that. Your desire to read Word documents on Unix is valid but irrelevant here.
Force MS to open up and document all APIs which they themselves use in any application
This is a very important point, specifically because of Microsoft's tendancy to introduce new APIs at the same time they ship a product that uses them. Furthermore, their internal applicaiton coders have at least read-only access to source code and access to preliminary documentation. It would makes sense to create an equal access situation (which is effectively what a breakup creates).
However, the Bush DOJ dropped the "comingling" portion of the case, and it won't happen. Sorry.
Really, what the current trial boils down to is Microsoft's OEM contracts. The best that could be hoped for is an open contract system where Microsoft can't order Compaq not to ship Netscape or OpenOffice. There's nothing preventing them (at this point) from using their OS as a distribution channel for web browsers and 'middleware' (like the.NET runtime).
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to the load-balanced server explaination, I occassionally hit a IE (4/5/6) bug where it gets confused and thinks it's in "offline" mode.
You immedately get the 404 page, but when you press reload, it goes 'online' and finds the page. Something to do with going to localhost pages -- haven't quite figured it out yet.
Why would "It's the End of the World As We Know it (And I feel fine)" be a better choice than "START Me up"? Sounds like an urban legend devised by apocolyptic MS haters.
(The Win95 marketing campaign consisted of lots of TV commercials and billboards featuring the "Start" button.)
I always thought that NT 4.0 was "Daytona" and Cairo was a yet undelivered OO OS, although many of the planned features made it into Windows 2000.
On the other hand (at least with the beta I tried), the theme feature removed your ability to set custom fonts and colors, a feature which had always existed in Windows.
That made it a bit annoying to work with -- the UI was designed to be "fun" and distracting, just that I couldn't make un-distracting. Overall, far less usable. So I had to turn it off and go with the W2K shell.
Wow -- is Java really going to get Windows native widgets (as it has on OS X)? Time to download the beta ...
They were already screwed when they started BeIA -- it was a last ditch hope.
The main reason the company flopped was because they thought they could compete (or "co-exist", whatever that means) with Windows in the general purpose desktop OS market, where it didn't solve anyone's problems (unless 2ms latency helps your e-mail experience in someway I'm ignorant of.)
If they were smart, tney would have stuck to the original plan -- making high-end AV workstations using custom software for vertical markets.
If I worked at Apple, I would make sure that there was an early adopter penalty on all 'style' products, because they have a significant number of customers that will have to buy this thing RIGHT NOW.
Then, once you've fleeced that crowd, sell it at cost/loss to move some Macs.
If it functions as a standard firewire disk, I have no idea why it wouldn't be supported by Windows/Linux/etc. It's probably only some added-value software that makes it 'Mac only'.
Of course, marketing to PC people would involve explaining that they most likely do not have a powered firewire interface. Probably more trouble than it's worth.
As an Apple stockholder, you should appreciate this as a 'press release' product. Apple hasn't gotten anything substantially new out for a while (Sliver G4s were a big yawn even for the fanbase), and this keeps them in the business pages.
Maybe it will serve to kickstart the firewire device market. Couldn't hurt Apple's position in the long run. And as an Apple Store upsell item, or just free advertising when people get on the bus with one on their belt, it seems to serve it's purpose.
This thing seems to be aimed at the style-uber-alles G4 Cube market, where they'be already been burnt bad, so I doubt they are planning to make any real money off it. But how much real money is any computer company going to make off an MP3 player? Not much.
If MS did go into the home computer market, the DOJ would moan about it and start another 5 year investigation.
The funny thing is that HPaq and Dell would probably just bend over and take it.
Actually, if you ignore the bottom third of the page (which is pure crap territory, AC and not), the AC content/crap ratio is usually far higher than 90%. In particular there's a AC poster called "--fred" who makes it worthwhile to cruise at 0.
I think history shows that most moderators do not adjust their filters, or they don't feel like it's a valuable use of their mod points on ACs.
[METOO]I second that idea[/METOO]
(posted at +1 in parody of all the crap which gets posted with the bonus.)
Besides with the karma system having been around for so long, getting a 'trusted user' bonus doesn't mean that much any more.
It seems to me kinda pointless -- if you don't want to see AC and troll account posts, you can filter at 1.
The regular accounts that are participating in obvious trolling/flamebait will eventually get modded down to -1 also, so if you want to read those, you'll have to lower your threshold.
The only thing this seems to accomplish is to reduce the editor load of moderating AC posts from 0 to -1 Offtopic -- something I suspect is done more for automagic IP banning purposes than to improve the readers' comment fitering options.
You missed the episode of What's Happenin? where the Doobie Brothers appear and lecture Rerun and the kids on the evils of "dubbing".
He gave the hypothetical example of patent-encumbered BSD code which would be GPL-incompatible. I can't be bothered to find the original post, but there's a summary on Kernel Traffic.
That's fine, but when I'm using an open source operating system, I'd like to have what I consider the necessary information, and this includes Changelogs for all security updates.
Well, then Linux is not for you. Cox has previously admitted that he obfuscates changelog entries for security updates that were reported privately. Of course you could 'use the source' and work backwards, but Linux doesn't fall under a full disclosure policy.
(As a side note Cox seems to be more kvetchy about political issues lately. Like the minor flamewar he started last week when he insisted that BSD licenced modules be marked GPL-incompatitble because they might be patent encumbered.)
You like games, so Windows "major major asset" is games.
Fred is a DBA, so Windows "major major asset" is DB modeling tools.
Sally is a project manager, so Windows "major major asset" is project tools.
Biff is an accountant, so Windows "major major asset" is spreadsheet software.
Conculsion 1 : Games are just a piece of the puzzle.
Conculsion 2: Together, Fred, Sally and Biff buy as many games as you do and run them on Windows because that's where the rest of their action is. If another platform (Linux or Amiga) was better for gaming, it still wouldn't be attractive to them.
infinite recursion without a base case.
Uhh - MS Office?
It seems to be the outlook of the "gamer" community that most games are purchased by "gamers. It's not true -- the PC game market is driven by normal people who do normal things on their computers and blow off steam with the occasional game. The "base case" is that the environment is attractive without the games, which are almost entirely a secondary market. (Of course, people seem to forget that, which is why hardware requirements have pushed the PC game market into the toilet.)
In other words, games won't bring about Linux users. Linux users will bring about the games.
One big misconception in your post --
PReP was an IBM/Motorola standard established so that they could eat Intel's business desktop market by selling Windows NT and OS/2-based RISC workstations. For a number of reasons, this effort pretty much when nowhere and was dropped by 1996.
The key words being "business" and "Windows". IBM/Moto's marketing efforts were so lame and such a spectacular failure, that it's no wonder that everyone has forgotten this billion dollar initiative, and laid the blame at Apple's feet.
Apple never really gave a clear indication that they were ever going to change thier business model from being a "systems vendor" to a software-only company. They really just wanted to get in early with what was supposed to be (according to IBM/Moto) the commodity CPU of the future and got dragged into the rest of it. (At this point, with Moto in embedded and IBM in big servers and a stangent parts supply, Apple probably sees that using PPC was a gigantic mistake to begin with.)
Furthermore, Apple had neither the marketshare nor the business users to drive the PReP/CHRP pony, so hopefully it's _obvious_ that it wasn't their idea.
There's also was serious problems with the lack of hardware indepedance in MacOS -- the clones had to use Apple-designed boards, and Apple wasn't planning to fix this until Copeland shipped (which it didn't).
Open PPC Hardware failing is Motorola and IBM's fault, not Apple's.
"That is to say, it is an error of design, not of implementation, as he claims."
Wouldn't that be the whole point of this challenge? -- that Linux has a better 'design', and therefore is supposedly immune to viruses.
We all know that the most suceptable system to viruses is DOS/Windows, and that's certainly by design (although there's loads of implementation issues too).
By the time Intel ships a 3.5Ghz chip, "today's apps" will be two years old.
Is there any doubt that FPU-intensive apps (games) shipping in 2002 won't be compiled for the P4?
Maybe what we need is an independent system (developed by an objective standards body) that rates processors based on their overall performance.
The CPU industry would not accept this (including AMD, I think). The fact is that benchmark numbers almost never scale linearly with CPU speed. Instead of shipping a chip that looks 10% faster than the previous model, they'd be advertising their product as only 4% faster. If you boil down to "5 Foobars", the new chip would round down to the speed of the previous chip. Ungood for them.
(Furthermore, I don't think that the market as a whole is as Mhz sensitive as everyone, including AMD, seems to think it is. This move really only makes a difference at retail.)
I think it was a deal comparable to MS's licencing of ScanDisk and Defrag for DOS 6.0 -- Roxio got peanuts, but it was better than nothing.
Note that Adaptec was smart, saw the writing on the wall a couple years ago, and spun Roxio off as a seperate company so that they could quietly die.
If you weren't talking out of your goatse, you would know that Windows NT *was* designed to be an easily ported OS, at least to 32-bit CPUs.
Read any account of the development of the OS -- originally it wasn't even supposed to run on i386, and Microsoft like many others thought that x86 wouldn't scale, and wanted to get a RISC-compatible product on the market. (This was a huge problem with OS/2 and it's mass of x86 asm.)
As to the difficulty of Win64, nobody really knows. Microsoft did talk about shipping a 64-bit Alpha NT4 port back in 97-98. Whether they could have is buried in Axis (MS - Intel - DEC - Compaq) poltics. Other than that, Win64 is pretty much tied market-wise to IA64, both of which just shipped.
(Intel's problems with Itanic have been well documented -- they certain weren't waiting for MS. In fact they seem to be expecting Linux to carry the water in that market, at least at first.)
I just want to point out that this discussion tree is all shoulda-coulda, and has nothing to do with the current state of the trial.
.NET runtime).
Force MS to open up and document all file formats
Did anyone mention Microsoft Office at any time, anywhere in the court proceedings? No. While it's true that MSO is probably a monopoly product, no court of law has determined that. Your desire to read Word documents on Unix is valid but irrelevant here.
Force MS to open up and document all APIs which they themselves use in any application
This is a very important point, specifically because of Microsoft's tendancy to introduce new APIs at the same time they ship a product that uses them. Furthermore, their internal applicaiton coders have at least read-only access to source code and access to preliminary documentation. It would makes sense to create an equal access situation (which is effectively what a breakup creates).
However, the Bush DOJ dropped the "comingling" portion of the case, and it won't happen. Sorry.
Really, what the current trial boils down to is Microsoft's OEM contracts. The best that could be hoped for is an open contract system where Microsoft can't order Compaq not to ship Netscape or OpenOffice. There's nothing preventing them (at this point) from using their OS as a distribution channel for web browsers and 'middleware' (like the