The Windows For Workgroups TCP/IP help file proudly proclaimed that the stack was of BSD orgin. That stack made it into Windows 95 without much modification.
If the system stays the same (sharing MP3s with other users), how the hell are they going to make this work? Intercept the data and add add copy protection? Automagically convert it to WMF?
If so, it looks like Napster will become nothing more than a fat client storefront for the record industry. Which means they will be able to push content (or withhold it) for the privledge of your subscription fee.
Well, what's the difference? Compaq, Dell, and IBM are legitimate in server space because they make their own cases, motherboard layouts, RAID hardware and drivers, BIOSes, management software, and so on.
VA just grabs a stock Asus or ServerWorks motherboard, stock ATX case, stock BIOS, and so on, and then runs some extra QA for Linux to make sure the shit works. They are nothing more than an oversized, overhyped screwdriver clone shop with a marketing twist towards Linux and a public offering to show for it.
There's only two things for VA to do to be serious about the server market. 1) Provide some value add above what I could do with webbrowser, a phillipshead and Pricewatch. 2) Stop ignoring the other 75% of the server market and start shipping NT and Novell systems.
HTTP 1.1 and your friendly webserver and client can and do handle compression on the wire. So this is automagic for SOAP/XML-RPC.
As for storing XML files, maybe if the application warrents it. Most of the XML work I've done has been Generate It/Send It/Throw It Away and Receive It/Parse It/Throw It Away.
You are right on, but don't forget that the #1 design goal of the X Window System is to be "policy free" -- so not only is it based on lots of obsolete assumptions (not so bad), it never really solved most problems to begin with (worse).
In short it was a political comprimise made so that all the waring Unix and Minicomputer factions could at least agree on *something* that wouldn't get too much in the way of whatever proprietary shit they were building. And the open source Desktop Environment people have picked right up on this, building services into their DE instead of the underlying foundation where it belongs.
The long-and-short of it is that the X desktop is broken from a normal user standpoint, unless all of the apps they run are from the same vendor (er, project). Well, no shit - that was by design from the Commercial Unix forefathers. You want to use a standard clipboard between two apps. Sorry, that's policy. Printing? Policy. The same scrollbars on two different programs? Yup, Policy. How about "It works"? Wasn't that a policy that some people could agree on?
But, anyway, bitching is no good. X is what you have, and what you are going to have to live with until 2020 at least. Barring Apple open-sourcing Quartz/Aqua, that is.
I don't know if MS has crippled Interix, but they've priced it *much* cheaper than Softway did. I just followed the link above and found it was now $99 for the base package (no X, no Motif), which is cheap enough to order just to check it out. (Hopefully I won't have to compile basic things like vi!)
Minor twit, but I don't think Interix is considered the "Microsoft POSIX Subsystem" -- the old POSIX POS is still bundled with 2000. Hopefully WinXP will do away with that and just ship Interix in the base product, but that's probably dreaming.
Maybe not "we need to outlaw this", but instead "We need to forbid this in Federal contract requirements".
File this one under "There's no such thing as bad publicity" - I'd expect RedHat's government contracts to double.
Anyway, I'd love to see some congressman from Washington state try to outlaw any piece of IT used by most major corporations. He'd have his attitude adjusted pretty quickly.
Do you (or Allchin) even know why the US Government paid UC-Berkeley to develop TCP/IP and various utilities?
In this case, the "Berkeley Licence" (aka "Open Source") was explicitly used to transfer software and knowledge from Defense Dept-funded universities and to profit making corporations (like Microsoft). The societal benefit was that we all got a mostly compatible networking standard, and of course the Internet - which wouldn't have happened if every corporation reinveted the wheel instead of using Berkeley's stuff.
BTW, The MS stuff I've seen has UC copyrights from 1983 (as per the advert clause). That would predate the FreeBSD project by quite a few years.
The feature set is no longer impressive, the learning curve is too high, administration is too difficult. Time to move on.
Admin learning curve is fairly high for Notes. It's also pretty high for multiserver Exchange install and even generic SMTP/POP/NNTP solutions too, though.
However, the Application Development learning curve in Notes is probably the lowest game in town. Many, many Notes apps are built by secrataries and normal business users. Yes, these applications suck, but on the other hand they work well enough and are better than nothing. (The main reason dev is 'easy' for simple things on Notes is that the database stuff is built-in. I agree that the platform is totally unsuitable for complex apps, relational data, or web work)
The true test in an organization is how stupid forms like Expense Reports and Vacation Requests and so on get processed. In Notes shops, these are processed electronically 90% of the time. In Microsoft shops (including MS themselves), with the rare exception these forms are still pen-n-paper or printed out of Excel and faxed or whatever.
So, sure Notes is more expensive from the IT side, but if the business users embrace it, it's much much more easy to get 'value' or 'ROI' out of it. Next time you see a Notes installation with a bunch of crappy apps, remember that those apps were probably built by amatures, and then think about what that implies.
Note that back in the early 90s, the MWave was a cost saving solution for IBM -- PCMCIA modems were a couple hundred bucks at retail and were pretty flakey to boot. (I don't know how much onboard laptop modems cost, but I imagine it was still substantial.)
Modem standards were also changing rapidly, and IBM was able to go from 14.4K to 28.8K to 33.6K just using firmware upgrades - which was great for those of us who got free modem upgrades that would have cost a few hundred bucks at each step. (Not to mention that power management actually worked with the MWave, too.)
Furthermore, IBM had to build a machine that could work internationally, and MWave allowed them to do it in software and not ship different versions of the same hardware.
They were probably a little slow to move off of MWave when 56K solidified and winmodem type hardware got real cheap. But back in the day, I can see how MWave made sense as engineering solution for the time.
(The MWave originally shipped with DOS and OS/2 support. Later NT and Win95 support was added. So it never really was a "Winmodem".)
I used to have one of those 1994-era MWave ThinkPads, and the MWave implementation was problematic, but it wasn't totally horrible. (They took a little tweaking in DOS to get set up, but so did everything in those days.)
The cool thing was that your machine was probably originally advertised with a 14.4Kbps modem, and that was later software upgraded to 33.6K. Every competing laptop with a built-in modem was still at 14.4 and is still at 14.4K.
The other good thing was that you didn't have to deal with the kludgy DOS/Windows PCMCIA drivers, where maybe after an hour of tweaking you'd have a 50/50 chance of getting a PCMCIA modem working. maybe. The MWave just worked and had relatively straight forward AT scripts.
As far as the sound support went, the SoundBlaster emulation was always much better than the various ESS laptop chips of the era, and the MIDI support vastly superior to anything you could find a in a laptop. And yes, you could play sounds and use the modem at the same time (although you probably wouldn't want to use it for online gaming or streaming audio! But those weren't exactly popular applications back in '94)
If a computer were considered a "Digital Audio Recording Device" under the AHRA, that would mean that it would be subject to a RIAA tax on both the player (computer) and the media (hard drives, CD-ROMs). On the other hand, Napster-like activities would probably then be legal.
Since the vast majority of soundcard-equipped computers are beeping away in companies running Excel or whatever, and have nothing to do with MP3s, this would be a huge windfall for the recording industry, paid for largely at the expense of every business that uses a computer. So be careful what you wish for!
There *are* pre-1995 archives out there. For years Deja had a page up announcing that they had aquired an archive back to 1993 and it was going to be up RSN. It never happened, but hopefully Google will get that data and bring it online, if only so that I can see what a dope I was back in those days.
Lots of it depends on your newsfeed. My ISP has outsourced news to Supernews, and the groups I read are 90% spam free.
This could be due to agressive cancelling/reporting, but I think it's mainly because the newbie idjots who buy things from spam just aren't on Usenet anymore, so the spammers have gone elsewhere. (Note that porn, as always, are probably the big exception to this and any rule you can devise about the Internet.)
You know there was a time when shells were optional components on computers. Of course the people who really understood computers wrote their own program loaders and didn't have to rely on a command line. The shell is just a usablitity tool, and has nothing to do with how the computer "really works".
Just like the shell, the GUI is just another form of abstraction which makes certain tasks easier. Sure cp *.foo ~/foo is easier with a commandline, but for people who create filenames that aren't easily regexed, it's probably easier with a mouse (and there's no amount of teaching that can solve that problem) Both are an abstraction of how the computer moves inodes around on the disk.
I think the Unix perception is "Because the init, login, and the startx process is a massive hairball of shellscripts, that must be How It Really Works(tm)." Well, no, that's just Unix's kludgy way of making it work by exchanging flexibility for fragility.
We've now got a whole bunch of interesting component technologies free and widely available which offer lots of possibilities in terms of providing a user interface (cli, gui, or hybrid). Don't lock yourself into thinking that stdin and pipes is be-all-and-end-all because it's nothing more than a 60s hack -- and once you've broken that conception, the idea that everything boils down to a CLI command doesn't hold much weight.
I've been with slip.net since 94, and they certainly started mom+pop. Or more accurately, a couple guys and a Unix box.
But of course, San Francisco based ISP aren't mom+pop any more. The article was more about the midsized players finding they can't make it in a business dominated by a few huge companies.
BTW, Slip.net has always had great internet service even if a bit pricy. My only complaint is the fuckups in DSL billing, but that eventually got straightened out. Now I'm a little worried to read that First World (Slip + Sirius + WELL + god knows what) is trying to get out of the ISP game, because these were the old timers around San Francisco, and they certainly knew how to do it.
Thank you for the explaination, but please add that the PS/TT Font Renderers in XFree don't handle the hinting information very well at all.
Poor hinting, NOT the lack of Anti-Aliasing, is the #1 reason that text looks like crap on XFree. While Windows has AA, it's only enabled for very small or relatively large fonts. Unless you routinely surf the web with a 16pt font, AA doesn't buy you squat on Windows.
My fear is that the "solution" to the Font problem on XFree will aliasing now that it's been invented and integrated into the popular toolkits. Well, that's not solving the problem - it's masking a symptom. And really, looking at blurry 12 point text is not as great as it might seem from those screenshots.
Believe it or not, there was actually an interface guideline for Windows 3. It was an IBM document that was also used as the basis for the OS/2 interface.
The document specified that the standard shortcuts for cut/copy/paste was Sh+Delete/Ctrl+Insert/Sh+Insert. Of course, Microsoft went and broke this standard right off by supporting Apple-style shortcuts in MS Word, but it took a couple years before all Windows apps supported Ctrl+X/C/V.
There was also the issue of Borland, a major framework vendor at the time, making up it's own UI widgets. Anyone remember those gigantic OK buttons with the green checkmark?
December 7, 1995, the day Microsoft announced it's Internet strategy, should live in Infamy far more than the launch of Windows 95. At last report, Netscape is still working on that A-Bomb comeback.
Well, it's easy to point at corruption and wag your finger, but you have to understand in the case of the DMCA the general opinion was that it was the right thing to do. This wasn't your average porkbarrel project or individualized tax loophole - the bill passed unanomiously or nearly so.
You could just imagine the conversation at some Washington bar:
Entertainment Type: Senator, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If we were to offer some service, that people were supposed to pay for, and someone invented a device that allowed them to recieve the service for free, should that be illegal in someway?
Senator: Well, of course.
ET: Well, let me tell you something. It isn't under current law.
Senator: [Should be asking why, but isn't, and ET wouldn't exactly want to explain Fair Use law anyway] Well, we could do something about that, what do you have in mind.
ET: In the new "Digital Millenium", our goal is to protect content with access devices blah blah blah blah.
Senator: Huh? OK. I need another drink.
(Some time later) Senator 2: But wouldn't this bill abridge people's fair use rights? My constituants like to record things of the TeeVee with the VeeCeeArr. Those things are really a wonder.
Senator 1: Well we'll just put a provision in there saying this bill doesn't do that (possibly never aware that that was the entire point of the bill to begin with...)
Slashdot Mirror
Proof?
The Windows For Workgroups TCP/IP help file proudly proclaimed that the stack was of BSD orgin. That stack made it into Windows 95 without much modification.
Well, you'll have to install WfW and find out.
Destruct your intellectual property right here: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/interix/
If the system stays the same (sharing MP3s with other users), how the hell are they going to make this work? Intercept the data and add add copy protection? Automagically convert it to WMF?
If so, it looks like Napster will become nothing more than a fat client storefront for the record industry. Which means they will be able to push content (or withhold it) for the privledge of your subscription fee.
Well, what's the difference? Compaq, Dell, and IBM are legitimate in server space because they make their own cases, motherboard layouts, RAID hardware and drivers, BIOSes, management software, and so on.
VA just grabs a stock Asus or ServerWorks motherboard, stock ATX case, stock BIOS, and so on, and then runs some extra QA for Linux to make sure the shit works. They are nothing more than an oversized, overhyped screwdriver clone shop with a marketing twist towards Linux and a public offering to show for it.
There's only two things for VA to do to be serious about the server market. 1) Provide some value add above what I could do with webbrowser, a phillipshead and Pricewatch. 2) Stop ignoring the other 75% of the server market and start shipping NT and Novell systems.
HTTP 1.1 and your friendly webserver and client can and do handle compression on the wire. So this is automagic for SOAP/XML-RPC.
As for storing XML files, maybe if the application warrents it. Most of the XML work I've done has been Generate It/Send It/Throw It Away and Receive It/Parse It/Throw It Away.
You are right on, but don't forget that the #1 design goal of the X Window System is to be "policy free" -- so not only is it based on lots of obsolete assumptions (not so bad), it never really solved most problems to begin with (worse).
In short it was a political comprimise made so that all the waring Unix and Minicomputer factions could at least agree on *something* that wouldn't get too much in the way of whatever proprietary shit they were building. And the open source Desktop Environment people have picked right up on this, building services into their DE instead of the underlying foundation where it belongs.
The long-and-short of it is that the X desktop is broken from a normal user standpoint, unless all of the apps they run are from the same vendor (er, project). Well, no shit - that was by design from the Commercial Unix forefathers. You want to use a standard clipboard between two apps. Sorry, that's policy. Printing? Policy. The same scrollbars on two different programs? Yup, Policy. How about "It works"? Wasn't that a policy that some people could agree on?
But, anyway, bitching is no good. X is what you have, and what you are going to have to live with until 2020 at least. Barring Apple open-sourcing Quartz/Aqua, that is.
I don't know if MS has crippled Interix, but they've priced it *much* cheaper than Softway did. I just followed the link above and found it was now $99 for the base package (no X, no Motif), which is cheap enough to order just to check it out. (Hopefully I won't have to compile basic things like vi!)
Minor twit, but I don't think Interix is considered the "Microsoft POSIX Subsystem" -- the old POSIX POS is still bundled with 2000. Hopefully WinXP will do away with that and just ship Interix in the base product, but that's probably dreaming.
And, the "Blue Box" (Classic MacOS VM) in OS X most likely decends from the AU/X MacOS-on-Unix environment.
Maybe not "we need to outlaw this", but instead "We need to forbid this in Federal contract requirements".
File this one under "There's no such thing as bad publicity" - I'd expect RedHat's government contracts to double.
Anyway, I'd love to see some congressman from Washington state try to outlaw any piece of IT used by most major corporations. He'd have his attitude adjusted pretty quickly.
Do you (or Allchin) even know why the US Government paid UC-Berkeley to develop TCP/IP and various utilities?
In this case, the "Berkeley Licence" (aka "Open Source") was explicitly used to transfer software and knowledge from Defense Dept-funded universities and to profit making corporations (like Microsoft). The societal benefit was that we all got a mostly compatible networking standard, and of course the Internet - which wouldn't have happened if every corporation reinveted the wheel instead of using Berkeley's stuff.
BTW, The MS stuff I've seen has UC copyrights from 1983 (as per the advert clause). That would predate the FreeBSD project by quite a few years.
The feature set is no longer impressive, the learning curve is too high, administration is too difficult. Time to move on.
Admin learning curve is fairly high for Notes. It's also pretty high for multiserver Exchange install and even generic SMTP/POP/NNTP solutions too, though.
However, the Application Development learning curve in Notes is probably the lowest game in town. Many, many Notes apps are built by secrataries and normal business users. Yes, these applications suck, but on the other hand they work well enough and are better than nothing. (The main reason dev is 'easy' for simple things on Notes is that the database stuff is built-in. I agree that the platform is totally unsuitable for complex apps, relational data, or web work)
The true test in an organization is how stupid forms like Expense Reports and Vacation Requests and so on get processed. In Notes shops, these are processed electronically 90% of the time. In Microsoft shops (including MS themselves), with the rare exception these forms are still pen-n-paper or printed out of Excel and faxed or whatever.
So, sure Notes is more expensive from the IT side, but if the business users embrace it, it's much much more easy to get 'value' or 'ROI' out of it. Next time you see a Notes installation with a bunch of crappy apps, remember that those apps were probably built by amatures, and then think about what that implies.
Note that back in the early 90s, the MWave was a cost saving solution for IBM -- PCMCIA modems were a couple hundred bucks at retail and were pretty flakey to boot. (I don't know how much onboard laptop modems cost, but I imagine it was still substantial.)
Modem standards were also changing rapidly, and IBM was able to go from 14.4K to 28.8K to 33.6K just using firmware upgrades - which was great for those of us who got free modem upgrades that would have cost a few hundred bucks at each step. (Not to mention that power management actually worked with the MWave, too.)
Furthermore, IBM had to build a machine that could work internationally, and MWave allowed them to do it in software and not ship different versions of the same hardware.
They were probably a little slow to move off of MWave when 56K solidified and winmodem type hardware got real cheap. But back in the day, I can see how MWave made sense as engineering solution for the time.
(The MWave originally shipped with DOS and OS/2 support. Later NT and Win95 support was added. So it never really was a "Winmodem".)
I used to have one of those 1994-era MWave ThinkPads, and the MWave implementation was problematic, but it wasn't totally horrible. (They took a little tweaking in DOS to get set up, but so did everything in those days.)
The cool thing was that your machine was probably originally advertised with a 14.4Kbps modem, and that was later software upgraded to 33.6K. Every competing laptop with a built-in modem was still at 14.4 and is still at 14.4K.
The other good thing was that you didn't have to deal with the kludgy DOS/Windows PCMCIA drivers, where maybe after an hour of tweaking you'd have a 50/50 chance of getting a PCMCIA modem working. maybe. The MWave just worked and had relatively straight forward AT scripts.
As far as the sound support went, the SoundBlaster emulation was always much better than the various ESS laptop chips of the era, and the MIDI support vastly superior to anything you could find a in a laptop. And yes, you could play sounds and use the modem at the same time (although you probably wouldn't want to use it for online gaming or streaming audio! But those weren't exactly popular applications back in '94)
Apple made a insultingly low merger offer for Sun back in the 1980s, so Sun responded in kind in the 90s with another insultingly low offer.
If Apple had bought Sun, that would have solved the "modern OS" problem about 10 years early. However, Unix would probably be dead as we know it.
If a computer were considered a "Digital Audio Recording Device" under the AHRA, that would mean that it would be subject to a RIAA tax on both the player (computer) and the media (hard drives, CD-ROMs). On the other hand, Napster-like activities would probably then be legal.
Since the vast majority of soundcard-equipped computers are beeping away in companies running Excel or whatever, and have nothing to do with MP3s, this would be a huge windfall for the recording industry, paid for largely at the expense of every business that uses a computer. So be careful what you wish for!
There *are* pre-1995 archives out there. For years Deja had a page up announcing that they had aquired an archive back to 1993 and it was going to be up RSN. It never happened, but hopefully Google will get that data and bring it online, if only so that I can see what a dope I was back in those days.
Lots of it depends on your newsfeed. My ISP has outsourced news to Supernews, and the groups I read are 90% spam free.
This could be due to agressive cancelling/reporting, but I think it's mainly because the newbie idjots who buy things from spam just aren't on Usenet anymore, so the spammers have gone elsewhere. (Note that porn, as always, are probably the big exception to this and any rule you can devise about the Internet.)
Some people here obviously haven't been reading their "Dummies" books -- You can add a keyboard shortcut to any shortcut icon in the Start menu.
Just look at the properties for the Command Prompt shortcut and set one!
You know there was a time when shells were optional components on computers. Of course the people who really understood computers wrote their own program loaders and didn't have to rely on a command line. The shell is just a usablitity tool, and has nothing to do with how the computer "really works".
Just like the shell, the GUI is just another form of abstraction which makes certain tasks easier. Sure cp *.foo ~/foo is easier with a commandline, but for people who create filenames that aren't easily regexed, it's probably easier with a mouse (and there's no amount of teaching that can solve that problem) Both are an abstraction of how the computer moves inodes around on the disk.
I think the Unix perception is "Because the init, login, and the startx process is a massive hairball of shellscripts, that must be How It Really Works(tm)." Well, no, that's just Unix's kludgy way of making it work by exchanging flexibility for fragility.
We've now got a whole bunch of interesting component technologies free and widely available which offer lots of possibilities in terms of providing a user interface (cli, gui, or hybrid). Don't lock yourself into thinking that stdin and pipes is be-all-and-end-all because it's nothing more than a 60s hack -- and once you've broken that conception, the idea that everything boils down to a CLI command doesn't hold much weight.
I've been with slip.net since 94, and they certainly started mom+pop. Or more accurately, a couple guys and a Unix box.
But of course, San Francisco based ISP aren't mom+pop any more. The article was more about the midsized players finding they can't make it in a business dominated by a few huge companies.
BTW, Slip.net has always had great internet service even if a bit pricy. My only complaint is the fuckups in DSL billing, but that eventually got straightened out. Now I'm a little worried to read that First World (Slip + Sirius + WELL + god knows what) is trying to get out of the ISP game, because these were the old timers around San Francisco, and they certainly knew how to do it.
No luck on Mozilla 0.7, but thank you for satisfying a long standing feature request of mine! I'll look for it in future releases.
Thank you for the explaination, but please add that the PS/TT Font Renderers in XFree don't handle the hinting information very well at all.
Poor hinting, NOT the lack of Anti-Aliasing, is the #1 reason that text looks like crap on XFree. While Windows has AA, it's only enabled for very small or relatively large fonts. Unless you routinely surf the web with a 16pt font, AA doesn't buy you squat on Windows.
My fear is that the "solution" to the Font problem on XFree will aliasing now that it's been invented and integrated into the popular toolkits. Well, that's not solving the problem - it's masking a symptom. And really, looking at blurry 12 point text is not as great as it might seem from those screenshots.
Believe it or not, there was actually an interface guideline for Windows 3. It was an IBM document that was also used as the basis for the OS/2 interface.
The document specified that the standard shortcuts for cut/copy/paste was Sh+Delete/Ctrl+Insert/Sh+Insert. Of course, Microsoft went and broke this standard right off by supporting Apple-style shortcuts in MS Word, but it took a couple years before all Windows apps supported Ctrl+X/C/V.
There was also the issue of Borland, a major framework vendor at the time, making up it's own UI widgets. Anyone remember those gigantic OK buttons with the green checkmark?
December 7, 1995, the day Microsoft announced it's Internet strategy, should live in Infamy far more than the launch of Windows 95. At last report, Netscape is still working on that A-Bomb comeback.
Well, it's easy to point at corruption and wag your finger, but you have to understand in the case of the DMCA the general opinion was that it was the right thing to do. This wasn't your average porkbarrel project or individualized tax loophole - the bill passed unanomiously or nearly so.
You could just imagine the conversation at some Washington bar:
Entertainment Type: Senator, let me ask you a hypothetical question. If we were to offer some service, that people were supposed to pay for, and someone invented a device that allowed them to recieve the service for free, should that be illegal in someway?
Senator: Well, of course.
ET: Well, let me tell you something. It isn't under current law.
Senator: [Should be asking why, but isn't, and ET wouldn't exactly want to explain Fair Use law anyway] Well, we could do something about that, what do you have in mind.
ET: In the new "Digital Millenium", our goal is to protect content with access devices blah blah blah blah.
Senator: Huh? OK. I need another drink.
(Some time later) Senator 2: But wouldn't this bill abridge people's fair use rights? My constituants like to record things of the TeeVee with the VeeCeeArr. Those things are really a wonder.
Senator 1: Well we'll just put a provision in there saying this bill doesn't do that (possibly never aware that that was the entire point of the bill to begin with...)