If you can get a SMB connection to a NT box, it will happily cough up a list of all the user names and descriptions without any authentication required.
So putting a GUI on it really isn't going to slow down hackers.
To the end user in the market, this is the same as not working
The "end user" is some spare tire-wearing system administrator. The only IA64 applicaiton Microsoft plans to ship on launch is SQL Server. Somehow I think that some 150K DBA can figure out that the IA32 compatibility is for legacy object code, or maybe some little utilities (like WinZip, etc).
I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market.
This incorrect statement just shows that you haven't been paying any attention to Intel's IA64 marketing.
x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware.
And that's why IA64 is not based on x86, DUH.
Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No.
Incorrect. Sun was running on Moto 68K at the time. The i386 series was very clearly an attempt to catch up to Motorola. Unfortunatly for Intel, IBM and Microsoft fucked up the OS support.
NT's old compatibility code is a serious cause of slow-downs an instabilities
What old compatibility code? Neither WOW or NTVDM even run unless you launch a 16-bit app. Try reading up on NT sometime. My guess is that your super reliable source doesn't even know the difference between Windows NT and Windows 9x/ME, and neither do you.
BTW, I'm actually hoping that I'm getting trolled here and that you are not as blockhead stupid as you seem to be.
he truth of the matter is, piracy MADE MicroSquish
Yea, and don't think Gates hasn't known this since about 5 minutes after he sent out that letter. The rampant piracy of Microsoft BASIC established it as the standard and any other BASIC was DOA.
Microsoft has traditionally been one of the most pro-piracy companies around. Not just BASIC - Windows 3 and MS Office became standards not through the DOS-loving IT managers, but because the users revolted and just pirated the software.
However, things are a little different now. You have to trust that changing thieir historical stance on piracy was a decision not made lightly at Microsoft, and they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think that it was the best way to increase long term revenues.
For example, Microsoft has a two tiered OS strategy (and I don't believe that they don't until they stop selling 9x/ME) -- maybe they let you pirate ME and lock down on XP. The Office market is already saturated - by moving to a low cost of entry subscription service and adding copy protection, Microsoft obviously thinks they can get a lot of those pirates to pay up.
The guy is snotty, but he has a proper point in his reply. AMD releasing an 64-bit CPU with NO commercial operating system compatibility it totally fucking braindead. And as for Open Source OSes, if that's all you got, wtf hang onto the i386 ISA?
The best AMD can hope with their 64-bit consumer CPU is some optimized Windows video drivers to improve people's Quake scores. Not quite the same market as Sparc or Itaninum, so it's pointless to compare AMD-64 to any real server/workstation chip.
Just like how the i386 brought 10 years of "extenders" instead of real 32-bit OSes, I bet a good number of these 64-bit chips WILL be nicely chunking 80-fucking-86 real mode code in some consumer's Windows ME machine. Yes - this sort of backward compatibility rules, if you like the idea that 20 year old asm code is necessary to run your computer. All Fanboys rally around in support!
Not to mention that your post is incorrect at many points: IA64 does have (slow) IA32 compatibility, and besides it's primarily aimed for a market which is currently buying Sun Sparcs and the like and doesn't give a shit about IA32 compatibility. Furthermore, there's nothing about NT's DOS emulation which makes the OS unstable or slow - it's all in userspace.
Re:MS Tricks Department
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 1
Video game consoles aren't sold with retail-level marketing. They are stacked up in a big pile in WalMart and carried home by mom and dad for birthdays and christmas.
Nintendo understands this and that is why they've continued to sell games through thick and thin for years. Microsoft is falling back on it's hype-machine styled for the IT market. Well guess what? Joe Sixpack and his kids aren't tuned into what people are saying on webboards and usenet.
The only thing that pre-release FUD in the console market accomplishes is that a bunch of 20-30 year olds can wank themselves in public about kids toys. When in fact most of them could afford any or all of the consoles, so it isn't exactly a critical decsion for them, unlike Joe Sixpack's kids. (And besides, if they ever got a girlfriend, they'd find better ways to spend their money).
The last company to try a 'dealer' strategy with video games was Atari with the Jaguar, and that was only because the big retailers still hated their guts from events 10 years in the past. Didn't work too well.
Re:rootness and capabilities
on
New Linux Worm
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· Score: 1
Hey Mr. Informative - IIS doesn't run under IUSR_machinename -- it runs under LocalSystem (as does most other built-in services). Once you have gotten IIS to execute code, you've essentially have ownership of the machine.
IIS uses IUSR_machinename via impersonation to check ACLs for anonymous internet users.
Coleco actually wasn't doing too well at the time. Their last big hit was the Davy Crockett coonskin hat, and that was in the 60s. They were best known for selling plastic snow sleds for $5.
Then they hit with both the Colecovision and Cabbage Patch dolls at just about the same time. After those went away, they had nothing to fall back on, and quietly went out of business.
Fuck, there was a 5% growth rate last year. You really call that 'going down'?
Of course, all the cheap credit that Greenspan was flipping around was causing all that growth. And you can't keep the economy going on cheap credit. (Yesterday's lowered rate will probably just increase inflation without increasing growth. That plus an energy crisis equals good ol' 70s style stagflation.)
GHW Bush does gets some credit for the Clinton boom. Why? He raised taxes which cut the deficit (and then the GOP abandoned him for it). Clinton also gets some credit for raising taxes again, and generally not increasing spending too much (cutting defense by quite a bit for example).
Now we got GW Bush. Pretty much the only affect on the economy he could have had has been using the "R" word for political purposes. Trust me, hearing the president talking about a recession was a shock to most Americans in the midst of the hugest boom in recent history. That and proposed huge tax cut + proposed huge military spending increases + proposed pretty big domestic spending increases (as political payola to the dems), has made Wall Street pretty damn nervous.
Not that Wall Street == the economy, but Bush definately has had psychological effect on people's short term outlook. Which may have been the effect he was looking for - have the downterm early in his term unlike his father who had it late (as in right before the election).
Besides, by your logic, Carter was responsible for the Reagan boom and Reagan was responsible for the Bush recession.
Yeah, I was pissed when Hearst didn't pick up Cintra Wilson in the new Chronicle. Too scary for Walnut Creek, I guess.
As for the JavaScript issue, it pisses me off to say this, but I wouldn't expect anything soon, if ever. Users have been screaming for more fine-grained control over the JavaScript/DOM sandbox for years and years (particularly wrt window.open()), and Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft haven't done jack to this date.
Java has these sorts of user controls, and IE even has a dialog that allows you to manage the Java sandbox in it's 'zones' metaphor. Why not JavaScript?
Another bitch - I have IE set to prompt to run plugins (like Flash). So, it prompts me, but doesn't give any indication if the plugin is just Flash or Acrobat, or is EvilPrivacyDestroyer 2.0. And then, just to maximize annoyance, when I push "No", it pops up another dialog telling me that I just pushed "No". Thanks a bunch, MS. (Of course, this is better than Mozilla, which offers no fine-grained plugin controls at all.)
Because this is the first step towards a Members Only content area. Junkbuster can't get you past a login screen.
Content sites that can't make it on ad revenue really only have once choice, and that's the porn model - free teaser content, and a subscription service to get at the rest.
Really, I can't imagine that Slashdot's ads are that bothersome. I'm pressing PgDn before I even see what the ad is, and then there's a ton of content before one is forced to view another ad. (Although Netscape tends to hang while displaying the nested tables, forcing you to look at the ad for a longer period of time.)
PC Mag has another problem, one that's shared by most of the print computer magazines -- sales have fallen way down because people read about computers on the Internet. This has forced them to drop ad rates and cut content, and thus become thin little things that are 75% ads. (However, I would argue that even at it's peak 10 years ago, PC Magazine was 75% sales brochure content anyway.)
With that in mind, why on earth should it impose GUI standards? It shouldn't!
Well, X does some "GUI" things like fonts, middle-button paste, and drag-n-drop. Once you've gone that far, you might as well support a real clipboard.
The main problem people have with X is that it doesn't provide enough common code. This is half X's problem, and half the problem of Unix developers who refuse to agree on anything and instead contunally insist on fighting Widget War VIII, and like it that way.
BTW, the MacOS GUI framework was designed in the early 80s and is still in use.
Your example is a VBism. Under JScript you can do Session("aJSObject")=aJSObject. Can't say for PerlScript, but I imagine it's similar with perl hashes.
Besides, the IIS Session support is so slow that you wouldn't want to use it for any substantial amount of information. Generally it's only wise to put a UID in there and then have a header block that uses that UID to reconstitute your state objects (generally DB-backed). After about 500 users, apparently using ADO/MS-SQL is actually faster than getting info out of the IIS session object!
Besides, the WebLogic servlet container docs explicitly recommend against using their session object for storing anything but strings. Not to mention the fact that even though JSP is compiled, it's still slower at code execution than interpreted ASP. (But the programming functionality and more scalable platforms make up for that, in my book.)
Are you kidding? PCs are already sold pretty much at razor-thin margin -- if anything this increases the value of marketing (as well as support). Just as with long distance service, you have to convince the consumer that a Dell really is better than a PartsBin 2000, when they really are the same thing.
In fact, "special-purpose" modifications are already becoming the trend to push the margins back up. People will pay more for a computer with a volume knob on the monitor because that's a doohickey they can see (just like the consumer stereo market!) Who cares if it's got the world's crappiest sound card inside?
While, the "death of the general purpose PC" might be streaching it, the article does bring out an important point about what the hard drive companies are up to with CPRM.
As many have pointed out, CPRM is probably useless on a "general purpose" computer -- there's just too many software packages and operating systems and filesystems to deal with, not to mention the somewhat educated userbase.
However, where it is useful is Single Purpose devices. What if you could just wedge out the IDE drive on your HD-Tivo and get access to the unencrypted MPEG-2 stream. Instant Internet Rebroadcast. Repeat for various other audio and video devices.
Sure, the Single Purpose Device guys (read: the MPAA and the RIAA) could go and invent their own disk interface or their own encryption systems, but what that's probably too high cost of a solution for them. They want to freeload off of the economies of scale of PCs and use standard motherboards and IDE disks, and they want to push the encryption down to the hardware level and make it automatic.
The drive companies are of course jumping on this because it potentially opens up a market 10x the size of the PC market. The could make a killing if they just offer a nice enough package for the consumer electronics people to buy in - Imagine if every TV had a cheap IDE drive in it.
Oh, I agree that Notes is a POS. However, a lot of the Qunicy stuff is *not* generated by Notes. Look at the RIP files to see -- lots of explorer.exe and winword.exe faults from when Notes wasn't even running. For these minor faults, Dr Watson does NOT pop up, and the user is blissfully unaware of what is going on.
So either Quincy is broken (or over sensative), or there's something going on under the hood of Windows that isn't pretty. Note that I haven't seen this on NT, only older mucked-up 9x installs.
As a confirmation to what the guy says - if you've ever had the unpleasure to run Lotus Notes, you might notice that it's debugger "Dr. Quincy" will spontanously generate "R.I.P" log files on some Win boxes until the harddrive fills up.
These are the result of GPFs that Win 9x has hidden from the user. The ususal solution is to disable the debugger (quincy -u or something).
The consipricy theory is that this is somewhat by design in Win9x -- it's supposed to deal with a lot of flakey drivers and 16-bit stuff and not totally croak. Of course, it contributes to the overall end-user experience that Windows in slow and unpredictable.
I think he is talking about a layer underneath the toolkit and DE environments where code could be shared. You know, compartmentalized, modularized tools done in the Unix way instead of a multitide of huge monolithic incompatible systems that you need to keep around to run all of your apps.
Your attitude is sort of disturbing: "AT&T and The Open Group has bequethed to us POSIX and X11, and that is where the standard environment ends, now and forever, so sayth the lord". Well, this ignores the fact that commercial UNIX was a profound failure on the desktop, and the commercial UNIX players that devised this whole mess no longer have much interest in desktop computing at all.
The future of desktop UNIX computing is now in the hands of Open Source projects, and they need to either work around the problems and legacy issues with the ancient 'standard environment' (particularly the gap between X11 services and DE services), or they need to move forward with defining an architecture that can maximize the utility of the system for the next 20 years.
(Not to mention that your XML comment is entirely offbase.)
During the "Windows Refund" thing, it came out that Microsoft was charging OEMs as little as $29/copy for Windows. The difference between that and the retail price is primarly the cost of support (which the OEM has to bear to get that discount).
As cheap as PCs have become, that thirty bucks is not a significant factor in the cost from the OEM's standpoint, especially in terms of the support costs. If it was, you'd see them shipping Linux or Solaris or some other alternative.
Now if Linux was actually cheaper to support in a home user situation, you might see the tables turn.... But that will never happen, so forget I mentioned it.
Problem was that the number of WWW users was growing at 10x times a year for quite a few years. Which left deja in the position of having a supposed massmarket service when there were 100 users who had no clue what USENET was for every 1 user that did. Not to mention that archiving USENET never made them a dime in profit.
So they had to try something to save the business while they still had some capital left. What they tried was stupid, sure, they couldn't just sit there and go out of business.
Google has a much better strategy. Google's real product is sold to Yahoo and others. Google.com, on the other hand, is specifically target- marketed towards computer nerds, which explains the excellent indexing of Linux and Unix related issues. This allows them to sell ads for top dollar, but whether they make any money of google.com and usenet archives is a different story.
Just to reinforce how old and lame that joke has become, some dork columnist for the SF Chronicle picked up on it yesterday: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2001/02/20/DD166082.DTL
Congrats for having a totally suburban sense of humor.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can get a SMB connection to a NT box, it will happily cough up a list of all the user names and descriptions without any authentication required.
So putting a GUI on it really isn't going to slow down hackers.
To the end user in the market, this is the same as not working
The "end user" is some spare tire-wearing system administrator. The only IA64 applicaiton Microsoft plans to ship on launch is SQL Server. Somehow I think that some 150K DBA can figure out that the IA32 compatibility is for legacy object code, or maybe some little utilities (like WinZip, etc).
I doubt this. Intel is not aiming for Sun's market.
This incorrect statement just shows that you haven't been paying any attention to Intel's IA64 marketing.
x86 simply does not match the benefits of using Sun hardware.
And that's why IA64 is not based on x86, DUH.
Was Intel targetting Sun when they released the first 32-bit PC space processors? No.
Incorrect. Sun was running on Moto 68K at the time. The i386 series was very clearly an attempt to catch up to Motorola. Unfortunatly for Intel, IBM and Microsoft fucked up the OS support.
NT's old compatibility code is a serious cause of slow-downs an instabilities
What old compatibility code? Neither WOW or NTVDM even run unless you launch a 16-bit app. Try reading up on NT sometime. My guess is that your super reliable source doesn't even know the difference between Windows NT and Windows 9x/ME, and neither do you.
BTW, I'm actually hoping that I'm getting trolled here and that you are not as blockhead stupid as you seem to be.
he truth of the matter is, piracy MADE MicroSquish
Yea, and don't think Gates hasn't known this since about 5 minutes after he sent out that letter. The rampant piracy of Microsoft BASIC established it as the standard and any other BASIC was DOA.
Microsoft has traditionally been one of the most pro-piracy companies around. Not just BASIC - Windows 3 and MS Office became standards not through the DOS-loving IT managers, but because the users revolted and just pirated the software.
However, things are a little different now. You have to trust that changing thieir historical stance on piracy was a decision not made lightly at Microsoft, and they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think that it was the best way to increase long term revenues.
For example, Microsoft has a two tiered OS strategy (and I don't believe that they don't until they stop selling 9x/ME) -- maybe they let you pirate ME and lock down on XP. The Office market is already saturated - by moving to a low cost of entry subscription service and adding copy protection, Microsoft obviously thinks they can get a lot of those pirates to pay up.
The guy is snotty, but he has a proper point in his reply. AMD releasing an 64-bit CPU with NO commercial operating system compatibility it totally fucking braindead. And as for Open Source OSes, if that's all you got, wtf hang onto the i386 ISA?
The best AMD can hope with their 64-bit consumer CPU is some optimized Windows video drivers to improve people's Quake scores. Not quite the same market as Sparc or Itaninum, so it's pointless to compare AMD-64 to any real server/workstation chip.
Just like how the i386 brought 10 years of "extenders" instead of real 32-bit OSes, I bet a good number of these 64-bit chips WILL be nicely chunking 80-fucking-86 real mode code in some consumer's Windows ME machine. Yes - this sort of backward compatibility rules, if you like the idea that 20 year old asm code is necessary to run your computer. All Fanboys rally around in support!
Not to mention that your post is incorrect at many points: IA64 does have (slow) IA32 compatibility, and besides it's primarily aimed for a market which is currently buying Sun Sparcs and the like and doesn't give a shit about IA32 compatibility. Furthermore, there's nothing about NT's DOS emulation which makes the OS unstable or slow - it's all in userspace.
Video game consoles aren't sold with retail-level marketing. They are stacked up in a big pile in WalMart and carried home by mom and dad for birthdays and christmas.
Nintendo understands this and that is why they've continued to sell games through thick and thin for years. Microsoft is falling back on it's hype-machine styled for the IT market. Well guess what? Joe Sixpack and his kids aren't tuned into what people are saying on webboards and usenet.
The only thing that pre-release FUD in the console market accomplishes is that a bunch of 20-30 year olds can wank themselves in public about kids toys. When in fact most of them could afford any or all of the consoles, so it isn't exactly a critical decsion for them, unlike Joe Sixpack's kids. (And besides, if they ever got a girlfriend, they'd find better ways to spend their money).
The last company to try a 'dealer' strategy with video games was Atari with the Jaguar, and that was only because the big retailers still hated their guts from events 10 years in the past. Didn't work too well.
Hey Mr. Informative - IIS doesn't run under IUSR_machinename -- it runs under LocalSystem (as does most other built-in services). Once you have gotten IIS to execute code, you've essentially have ownership of the machine.
IIS uses IUSR_machinename via impersonation to check ACLs for anonymous internet users.
Coleco actually wasn't doing too well at the time. Their last big hit was the Davy Crockett coonskin hat, and that was in the 60s. They were best known for selling plastic snow sleds for $5.
Then they hit with both the Colecovision and Cabbage Patch dolls at just about the same time. After those went away, they had nothing to fall back on, and quietly went out of business.
Fuck, there was a 5% growth rate last year. You really call that 'going down'?
Of course, all the cheap credit that Greenspan was flipping around was causing all that growth. And you can't keep the economy going on cheap credit. (Yesterday's lowered rate will probably just increase inflation without increasing growth. That plus an energy crisis equals good ol' 70s style stagflation.)
GHW Bush does gets some credit for the Clinton boom. Why? He raised taxes which cut the deficit (and then the GOP abandoned him for it). Clinton also gets some credit for raising taxes again, and generally not increasing spending too much (cutting defense by quite a bit for example).
Now we got GW Bush. Pretty much the only affect on the economy he could have had has been using the "R" word for political purposes. Trust me, hearing the president talking about a recession was a shock to most Americans in the midst of the hugest boom in recent history. That and proposed huge tax cut + proposed huge military spending increases + proposed pretty big domestic spending increases (as political payola to the dems), has made Wall Street pretty damn nervous.
Not that Wall Street == the economy, but Bush definately has had psychological effect on people's short term outlook. Which may have been the effect he was looking for - have the downterm early in his term unlike his father who had it late (as in right before the election).
Besides, by your logic, Carter was responsible for the Reagan boom and Reagan was responsible for the Bush recession.
Yeah, I was pissed when Hearst didn't pick up Cintra Wilson in the new Chronicle. Too scary for Walnut Creek, I guess.
As for the JavaScript issue, it pisses me off to say this, but I wouldn't expect anything soon, if ever. Users have been screaming for more fine-grained control over the JavaScript/DOM sandbox for years and years (particularly wrt window.open()), and Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft haven't done jack to this date.
Java has these sorts of user controls, and IE even has a dialog that allows you to manage the Java sandbox in it's 'zones' metaphor. Why not JavaScript?
Another bitch - I have IE set to prompt to run plugins (like Flash). So, it prompts me, but doesn't give any indication if the plugin is just Flash or Acrobat, or is EvilPrivacyDestroyer 2.0. And then, just to maximize annoyance, when I push "No", it pops up another dialog telling me that I just pushed "No". Thanks a bunch, MS. (Of course, this is better than Mozilla, which offers no fine-grained plugin controls at all.)
Because this is the first step towards a Members Only content area. Junkbuster can't get you past a login screen.
Content sites that can't make it on ad revenue really only have once choice, and that's the porn model - free teaser content, and a subscription service to get at the rest.
Really, I can't imagine that Slashdot's ads are that bothersome. I'm pressing PgDn before I even see what the ad is, and then there's a ton of content before one is forced to view another ad. (Although Netscape tends to hang while displaying the nested tables, forcing you to look at the ad for a longer period of time.)
PC Mag has another problem, one that's shared by most of the print computer magazines -- sales have fallen way down because people read about computers on the Internet. This has forced them to drop ad rates and cut content, and thus become thin little things that are 75% ads. (However, I would argue that even at it's peak 10 years ago, PC Magazine was 75% sales brochure content anyway.)
With that in mind, why on earth should it impose GUI standards? It shouldn't!
Well, X does some "GUI" things like fonts, middle-button paste, and drag-n-drop. Once you've gone that far, you might as well support a real clipboard.
The main problem people have with X is that it doesn't provide enough common code. This is half X's problem, and half the problem of Unix developers who refuse to agree on anything and instead contunally insist on fighting Widget War VIII, and like it that way.
BTW, the MacOS GUI framework was designed in the early 80s and is still in use.
Your example is a VBism. Under JScript you can do Session("aJSObject")=aJSObject. Can't say for PerlScript, but I imagine it's similar with perl hashes.
Besides, the IIS Session support is so slow that you wouldn't want to use it for any substantial amount of information. Generally it's only wise to put a UID in there and then have a header block that uses that UID to reconstitute your state objects (generally DB-backed). After about 500 users, apparently using ADO/MS-SQL is actually faster than getting info out of the IIS session object!
Besides, the WebLogic servlet container docs explicitly recommend against using their session object for storing anything but strings. Not to mention the fact that even though JSP is compiled, it's still slower at code execution than interpreted ASP. (But the programming functionality and more scalable platforms make up for that, in my book.)
Are you kidding? PCs are already sold pretty much at razor-thin margin -- if anything this increases the value of marketing (as well as support). Just as with long distance service, you have to convince the consumer that a Dell really is better than a PartsBin 2000, when they really are the same thing.
In fact, "special-purpose" modifications are already becoming the trend to push the margins back up. People will pay more for a computer with a volume knob on the monitor because that's a doohickey they can see (just like the consumer stereo market!) Who cares if it's got the world's crappiest sound card inside?
While, the "death of the general purpose PC" might be streaching it, the article does bring out an important point about what the hard drive companies are up to with CPRM.
As many have pointed out, CPRM is probably useless on a "general purpose" computer -- there's just too many software packages and operating systems and filesystems to deal with, not to mention the somewhat educated userbase.
However, where it is useful is Single Purpose devices. What if you could just wedge out the IDE drive on your HD-Tivo and get access to the unencrypted MPEG-2 stream. Instant Internet Rebroadcast. Repeat for various other audio and video devices.
Sure, the Single Purpose Device guys (read: the MPAA and the RIAA) could go and invent their own disk interface or their own encryption systems, but what that's probably too high cost of a solution for them. They want to freeload off of the economies of scale of PCs and use standard motherboards and IDE disks, and they want to push the encryption down to the hardware level and make it automatic.
The drive companies are of course jumping on this because it potentially opens up a market 10x the size of the PC market. The could make a killing if they just offer a nice enough package for the consumer electronics people to buy in - Imagine if every TV had a cheap IDE drive in it.
Oh, I agree that Notes is a POS. However, a lot of the Qunicy stuff is *not* generated by Notes. Look at the RIP files to see -- lots of explorer.exe and winword.exe faults from when Notes wasn't even running. For these minor faults, Dr Watson does NOT pop up, and the user is blissfully unaware of what is going on.
So either Quincy is broken (or over sensative), or there's something going on under the hood of Windows that isn't pretty. Note that I haven't seen this on NT, only older mucked-up 9x installs.
As a confirmation to what the guy says - if you've ever had the unpleasure to run Lotus Notes, you might notice that it's debugger "Dr. Quincy" will spontanously generate "R.I.P" log files on some Win boxes until the harddrive fills up.
These are the result of GPFs that Win 9x has hidden from the user. The ususal solution is to disable the debugger (quincy -u or something).
The consipricy theory is that this is somewhat by design in Win9x -- it's supposed to deal with a lot of flakey drivers and 16-bit stuff and not totally croak. Of course, it contributes to the overall end-user experience that Windows in slow and unpredictable.
I think he is talking about a layer underneath the toolkit and DE environments where code could be shared. You know, compartmentalized, modularized tools done in the Unix way instead of a multitide of huge monolithic incompatible systems that you need to keep around to run all of your apps.
Your attitude is sort of disturbing: "AT&T and The Open Group has bequethed to us POSIX and X11, and that is where the standard environment ends, now and forever, so sayth the lord". Well, this ignores the fact that commercial UNIX was a profound failure on the desktop, and the commercial UNIX players that devised this whole mess no longer have much interest in desktop computing at all.
The future of desktop UNIX computing is now in the hands of Open Source projects, and they need to either work around the problems and legacy issues with the ancient 'standard environment' (particularly the gap between X11 services and DE services), or they need to move forward with defining an architecture that can maximize the utility of the system for the next 20 years.
(Not to mention that your XML comment is entirely offbase.)
It was eMachines, who is nothing compared to Compaq or Dell. And yes, I know that 5- and 10-packs of OEM Windows don't have that steep of a discount.
During the "Windows Refund" thing, it came out that Microsoft was charging OEMs as little as $29/copy for Windows. The difference between that and the retail price is primarly the cost of support (which the OEM has to bear to get that discount).
As cheap as PCs have become, that thirty bucks is not a significant factor in the cost from the OEM's standpoint, especially in terms of the support costs. If it was, you'd see them shipping Linux or Solaris or some other alternative.
Now if Linux was actually cheaper to support in a home user situation, you might see the tables turn.... But that will never happen, so forget I mentioned it.
I'm aware of how google places ads. The question is if it's profitable.
Problem was that the number of WWW users was growing at 10x times a year for quite a few years. Which left deja in the position of having a supposed massmarket service when there were 100 users who had no clue what USENET was for every 1 user that did. Not to mention that archiving USENET never made them a dime in profit.
So they had to try something to save the business while they still had some capital left. What they tried was stupid, sure, they couldn't just sit there and go out of business.
Google has a much better strategy. Google's real product is sold to Yahoo and others. Google.com, on the other hand, is specifically target- marketed towards computer nerds, which explains the excellent indexing of Linux and Unix related issues. This allows them to sell ads for top dollar, but whether they make any money of google.com and usenet archives is a different story.
Just to reinforce how old and lame that joke has become, some dork columnist for the SF Chronicle picked up on it yesterday: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2001/02/20/DD166082.DTL
Congrats for having a totally suburban sense of humor.
I recently saw a big, brand new Lucent phone switch where someone had foolishly plugged in a console, logged in as root, and left.
The OS was identified by login as something like "Bell Labs System V UNIX". Which is closely related to SCO UnixWare, but not quite the same thing.
Right - Both IBM and Sun's business breaks down to this:
1) Hardware
2) Services
3) Software
4) Other
Microsoft's business is this:
1) Software
2) Hardware
3) Other
4) Services
Note the relative positions of Software and Services and think how Linux might fit into that picture...