The irony is that you could have fit 1-2-3 and every formula you could possibly imagine on a 386 12 years ago.
If this is Microsoft's way of making more money in the future (network enabling desktop apps like Excel), they should seriously go back and rethink the issue until they can find a better "Killer App" than that. (Java's been struggling for the same Killer App for years, and the best thing they've come up with is Servlets/JSP, which is hardly that exciting.)
Right on - The "recognized link types" have been in the HTML spec for a loooong time, and as far as I know they've never been implemented.
I've been known to suffer brain farts when reading structured sites like documentation or other chaptered text where I think "I want to go and look at the last chapter" and I go and click on the back button taking me somewhere else. This usually happens when there is no navigation links constantly displayed in the window. (For example, in the common HTML rendering of the Linux HowTo format.)
One implementation I could see is that the browser could display a special toolbar with Next Section, Prev Section, Contents, Index, etc when it encounters these link types on a page. I can't be too hard to do -- for example Windows Help has a similar implementation where pages know about the site structure. (And sure, this problem could be solved by Frames, but why not present this knowledge to the browser and let it deal with it.)
Hate to break it to you, but most of Xerox PARC's work on the Alto was a direct response to the work already completed at Standford University by Raskin and others, including but not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
And for the bloat-haters out there, such an "AI Shell" would actually be very similiar to the natural language interpreter in Zork and other Infocom games. And that ran fine on 8-bit 48K machines.
Apple has something similiar with HyperTalk/AppleScript, but the filesystem bindings are really wierd, and furthermore, it doesn't really run interactively.
Actually, Microsoft has boatloads of failed, cancelled, or unreleased products, mainly because their business model is to try to prevent any competitors from detracting from Windows as a platform. Generally it works like this:
1) Some company announces something that could potentially affect Microsoft.
2) Microsoft realizes this and announces something similar, with boatloads of hype.
3) The Microsoft minions spread the word about their new product, hyping it up through the usual marketing channels (zdnet columnists, etc).
4) It turns out that the original idea was a nitch product, or nobody really wanted it anyway.
5) Microsoft quietly kills their product, removes any trace of it from it's website, and generally wipes it out of people's collective memories.
6) The original company goes out of business, gets bought, or does something else. Microsoft still has its Windows/Office profit centers and is happy.
Of course the thing that they totally missed the boat on was the current resurgance of Unix for small servers. (Which they could address by bundling Interix + some GNU tools in with the OS and making the GUI startup optional.)
That's not a good way to run a busineess from the capitalists point of view. But, if someone gives you a hundred million dollars to corner the market on poopscoops or whatever, most dotcom managers did the rational thing: Paid themselves a huge salary, hired all their friends and paid them a huge salary, bought the sexiest equipment and software you could find, hired lots of pretty girls for the marketing department, including your girlfriend and maybe your other girlfriend, and since the SuperBowl commercials went so well, why not give yourself a raise before these capitalists catch on?
Minor nitpick - DVI can also carry analog connections. I have a IBM P260 tube monitor that has two switchable inputs, one VGA and one DVI. I think the DVI is there for the RS6000 folks, but I'm using an $11 adapter to connect it to a PC VGA plug.
On Topic, Taco supposedly killed "FascdotKilledMyPr" when he (now OlympicSponsor [wtf?]) put his highly valued low UID login up for sale on eBay. And no, in this ironic story, I don't know why his first UID was killed.
The rational was that it was legal for Taco to do so under the DMCA.
Gassee should be removed from any job at any technology company, period.
When he was Apple, he was famous for his OPENMAC licence plate (meaning, unlike Jobs, he believed that adding slots to the Mac made it worth $10K on the market), but he was also the person responsible for killing the OS licencing plans, as well as the main force insisting that Apple have proprietary networking techology which absolutely killed them in corporate sales later.
Jobs at the very least produced some astounding tech at NeXT that still will be astounding when it ships again in a couple months. Gassee was one of those most responsible for positioning Apple as a high-end nitch workstation vendor, while letting the tech foundation crumble to dust. If Gassee would have done his job back in the 80s and beg/borrowed/stole/developed a Real OS for the Mac, Amelio wouldn't have been sitting there entertaining he and Jobs.
I like the idea of being able to disable various extentions, if only for testing reasons. Unfortunately, Mozilla/Netscape is still caught up in their "Browser For The Masses" quest that got them into this business to begin with. Which leads to a certain arrogant declarations about What Will Be Supported and What Will Not, and also a unwillingness to turn Mozilla into a Hacker's Browser, because most of those features would have to be removed for the real thing. (There's also the issue of support: "Your site won't work after I tweaked 200 random rendering settings!")
Generally, I think they've been right on. Breaking 90% of the DOM scripts for the sake of ideology wasn't one of those moments.
My main bitch is not that they dropped the little used, proprietary document.layers model.
It's that they willfully decided they were going to break IE compatibility by not supporting document.all in favor of (the correct) document.getElementById().
Problem is that Microsoft's document.all predates the W3C's document.getElementById(), and is the only version of this that works in IE4. Futhermore, even though IE5 supported getElementById(), Microsoft never really promoted it, so most IE scripters still use document.all. This isn't a ground-shattering Microsoft extend-and-embrace (like Netscape's document.layers was) -- it's a stupid little syntax difference.
This all means that you need two codepaths to do the same thing on IE4 (default on Win98 desktops)and IE5/NS6. It also brings about these sorts of "Mozilla broke my JavaScripts" complaints from webmonkeys who used Dreamweaver or something to generate this stuff and don't really understand the change.
And why? Because Netscape decided to shove a stick up their own butt over a really, really minor syntax point with the standards. They had no problem ripping off other proprietary stuff like.innerHTML (etc) from Microsoft, but when it came to a really basic, simple, cheap issue of compatibilty (which is in their best interest) they decided to get orthodox on everyone's ass, and make it just that much more difficult to support their <10% marketshare browser.
Apple Records did go after Apple computer, but the semi-infamouse Sosumi (So-Sue-Me) system sound resulted from another lawsuit by the McIntosh Amplifier people.
Why don't you just configure MS Proxy to support regular HTTP authentication? (over SSL if you are worried about sniffers, but NTLM really ain't that much better than clear text.)
No Author writes Novels using LaTeX. They do it with MS Word, XT's running WordPerfect, and old manual typewriters. Doesn't matter, just so it's double-spaced monospaced font with sorta consistant page numbers.
It's then some drunk smelly guy's problem to go through and do the markup in LaTeX (or whatever).
Unfortunately, HTML owes more of it's lineage to Lotus Notes and "What is the minimum I need to put my research paper online" than either of those products. Well, you've got Flash and PDF -- feel free to use 'em.
I think people will go to x86-64. Especially after Linux and *BSD have optimized versions for them.
And what percentage of AMD's sales channel currently is Linux/BSD? My guess is about 5%, not much more or less than Intel. Not enough to float an entire ISA on.
What's more likely is that AMD will sell the sledgehammer into the same channels they sell their current chips - home machines designed for gamers. That means WinME and a 64-bit chip that's running in 32/16/8-bit modes most of the time, plus maybe some "64-bit optimized" video drivers and games.
Linux users of this chip win big because they get a 64-bit arch subsidized by the great unwashed masses. However, for most users Sledge's 64-bitness will be a marketing feature along the lines of MMX or 3DNow.
Just thought that I would chime in that Microsoft is pretty reasonable as far as licence auditing goes, in my experience. (No certificate or licence # checks or anything, just a machine count using Server Manager.)
People here like to make them out to be jackbooted thugs, but the alternative (licence key servers or dongles) would be far far worse. And there's been talk of that for the next version of Office.
Plus, Microsoft's business model depends on a certain number of non-paying users that they will eventually catch up with. Some folks would love to take advantage of that situation by never paying them, but when it's a large org with thousands of desktops, that's wishful thinking.
My guess is that someone ratted them out to the SPA that they were using Office without paying for it. When MS called to offer a site licence, they either told them 1) Fuck Off, 2) We use WordPerfect (righhht..), or 3) DUHHH?!!! And thus the hardball started. It looks to me that it's 10-to-1 that they weren't actually 100% legal.
The main problem with Windows Explorer is that it has a tons of infrastructure, but Microsoft has made very little use of them.
So, here are millions of desktops carrying around god-knows-what memory bloat, and reduced stability unti IE5.0-SP1, and the best Microsoft can show for it in the default UI is a pie chart showing you your drive space in My Computer, and nasty Disney adverts on the desktop in IE4.
There are gobs of applicaitons for which 'desktop integration' would be great, but nobody takes advantage of it because nobody sees the light on the issue. Maybe Whistler will show the way, but I think once the 'integrated' OSS GUIs start to get more mature, you will see much more development there. (Because people can add do-dads easily, post them to Freshmeat, and find them in the next version of RedHat.)
Of course, the hallmark of the modern Microsoft interface is the "Start" menu, which wasn't in either MacOS or OS/2 2.x, and is based more on the Next pop-up menu or the CDE taskbar.
(The Apple menu was similar, only that Apple intended it only for "desk accesories", where MS used their menu as a central place to launch all programs, and built the installer support to use it that way.)
Yeah, that was actually a typo - I meant x2. Apologies for being so incorrectly "informative".
There were some cases when we had to go up to x4+ in the old days to fix certain output issues. Too many years and too many jobs ago to remember why exactly.
Slashdot Mirror
The irony is that you could have fit 1-2-3 and every formula you could possibly imagine on a 386 12 years ago.
If this is Microsoft's way of making more money in the future (network enabling desktop apps like Excel), they should seriously go back and rethink the issue until they can find a better "Killer App" than that. (Java's been struggling for the same Killer App for years, and the best thing they've come up with is Servlets/JSP, which is hardly that exciting.)
Right on - The "recognized link types" have been in the HTML spec for a loooong time, and as far as I know they've never been implemented.
I've been known to suffer brain farts when reading structured sites like documentation or other chaptered text where I think "I want to go and look at the last chapter" and I go and click on the back button taking me somewhere else. This usually happens when there is no navigation links constantly displayed in the window. (For example, in the common HTML rendering of the Linux HowTo format.)
One implementation I could see is that the browser could display a special toolbar with Next Section, Prev Section, Contents, Index, etc when it encounters these link types on a page. I can't be too hard to do -- for example Windows Help has a similar implementation where pages know about the site structure. (And sure, this problem could be solved by Frames, but why not present this knowledge to the browser and let it deal with it.)
Hate to break it to you, but most of Xerox PARC's work on the Alto was a direct response to the work already completed at Standford University by Raskin and others, including but not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
And for the bloat-haters out there, such an "AI Shell" would actually be very similiar to the natural language interpreter in Zork and other Infocom games. And that ran fine on 8-bit 48K machines.
Apple has something similiar with HyperTalk/AppleScript, but the filesystem bindings are really wierd, and furthermore, it doesn't really run interactively.
Actually, Microsoft has boatloads of failed, cancelled, or unreleased products, mainly because their business model is to try to prevent any competitors from detracting from Windows as a platform. Generally it works like this:
1) Some company announces something that could potentially affect Microsoft.
2) Microsoft realizes this and announces something similar, with boatloads of hype.
3) The Microsoft minions spread the word about their new product, hyping it up through the usual marketing channels (zdnet columnists, etc).
4) It turns out that the original idea was a nitch product, or nobody really wanted it anyway.
5) Microsoft quietly kills their product, removes any trace of it from it's website, and generally wipes it out of people's collective memories.
6) The original company goes out of business, gets bought, or does something else. Microsoft still has its Windows/Office profit centers and is happy.
Of course the thing that they totally missed the boat on was the current resurgance of Unix for small servers. (Which they could address by bundling Interix + some GNU tools in with the OS and making the GUI startup optional.)
That's not a good way to run a busineess from the capitalists point of view. But, if someone gives you a hundred million dollars to corner the market on poopscoops or whatever, most dotcom managers did the rational thing: Paid themselves a huge salary, hired all their friends and paid them a huge salary, bought the sexiest equipment and software you could find, hired lots of pretty girls for the marketing department, including your girlfriend and maybe your other girlfriend, and since the SuperBowl commercials went so well, why not give yourself a raise before these capitalists catch on?
Minor nitpick - DVI can also carry analog connections. I have a IBM P260 tube monitor that has two switchable inputs, one VGA and one DVI. I think the DVI is there for the RS6000 folks, but I'm using an $11 adapter to connect it to a PC VGA plug.
On Topic, Taco supposedly killed "FascdotKilledMyPr" when he (now OlympicSponsor [wtf?]) put his highly valued low UID login up for sale on eBay. And no, in this ironic story, I don't know why his first UID was killed.
The rational was that it was legal for Taco to do so under the DMCA.
OT, but funny thing from your Pen Windows link, under "Windows 95 FAQ":
When will Windows 95 and Cairo ship? 94-03-18
When will Windows 95 ship? When will Cairo ship?
Windows 95 is scheduled to ship in the second half of 1994. Cairo is scheduled to be released in the first half of 1995.
What is Daytona? 94-03-18
What is Daytona? When will it ship?
Daytona is an interim release of Windows NT that is scheduled to ship this spring.
So, apparently according to Microsoft, NT 4.0 was a "interim release" and Windows 2000 ("Cairo") was going to ship in 1995!!
Gassee should be removed from any job at any technology company, period.
When he was Apple, he was famous for his OPENMAC licence plate (meaning, unlike Jobs, he believed that adding slots to the Mac made it worth $10K on the market), but he was also the person responsible for killing the OS licencing plans, as well as the main force insisting that Apple have proprietary networking techology which absolutely killed them in corporate sales later.
Jobs at the very least produced some astounding tech at NeXT that still will be astounding when it ships again in a couple months. Gassee was one of those most responsible for positioning Apple as a high-end nitch workstation vendor, while letting the tech foundation crumble to dust. If Gassee would have done his job back in the 80s and beg/borrowed/stole/developed a Real OS for the Mac, Amelio wouldn't have been sitting there entertaining he and Jobs.
I like the idea of being able to disable various extentions, if only for testing reasons. Unfortunately, Mozilla/Netscape is still caught up in their "Browser For The Masses" quest that got them into this business to begin with. Which leads to a certain arrogant declarations about What Will Be Supported and What Will Not, and also a unwillingness to turn Mozilla into a Hacker's Browser, because most of those features would have to be removed for the real thing. (There's also the issue of support: "Your site won't work after I tweaked 200 random rendering settings!")
Generally, I think they've been right on. Breaking 90% of the DOM scripts for the sake of ideology wasn't one of those moments.
My main bitch is not that they dropped the little used, proprietary document.layers model.
.innerHTML (etc) from Microsoft, but when it came to a really basic, simple, cheap issue of compatibilty (which is in their best interest) they decided to get orthodox on everyone's ass, and make it just that much more difficult to support their <10% marketshare browser.
It's that they willfully decided they were going to break IE compatibility by not supporting document.all in favor of (the correct) document.getElementById().
Problem is that Microsoft's document.all predates the W3C's document.getElementById(), and is the only version of this that works in IE4. Futhermore, even though IE5 supported getElementById(), Microsoft never really promoted it, so most IE scripters still use document.all. This isn't a ground-shattering Microsoft extend-and-embrace (like Netscape's document.layers was) -- it's a stupid little syntax difference.
This all means that you need two codepaths to do the same thing on IE4 (default on Win98 desktops)and IE5/NS6. It also brings about these sorts of "Mozilla broke my JavaScripts" complaints from webmonkeys who used Dreamweaver or something to generate this stuff and don't really understand the change.
And why? Because Netscape decided to shove a stick up their own butt over a really, really minor syntax point with the standards. They had no problem ripping off other proprietary stuff like
Apple Records did go after Apple computer, but the semi-infamouse Sosumi (So-Sue-Me) system sound resulted from another lawsuit by the McIntosh Amplifier people.
Yes, it's a perfectly logical system. Someone couldn't predict the weather with 100% accuracy and we get blackouts. Double-Plus Good!
(the SF Bay area's suffering from colder- and wetter-than-normal weather at the moment, along with much of .ca.us, in a high-usage period).
This winter has been less cold and less wet than average. I hate to see what would happen if we really had a bad winter (1994?)
Why don't you just configure MS Proxy to support regular HTTP authentication? (over SSL if you are worried about sniffers, but NTLM really ain't that much better than clear text.)
The font looks to be defined as "sans-serif", so the problem is yours, bub.
No Author writes Novels using LaTeX. They do it with MS Word, XT's running WordPerfect, and old manual typewriters. Doesn't matter, just so it's double-spaced monospaced font with sorta consistant page numbers.
It's then some drunk smelly guy's problem to go through and do the markup in LaTeX (or whatever).
Sounds alot like Logo. Or Hypercard.
Unfortunately, HTML owes more of it's lineage to Lotus Notes and "What is the minimum I need to put my research paper online" than either of those products. Well, you've got Flash and PDF -- feel free to use 'em.
I think people will go to x86-64. Especially after Linux and *BSD have optimized versions for them.
And what percentage of AMD's sales channel currently is Linux/BSD? My guess is about 5%, not much more or less than Intel. Not enough to float an entire ISA on.
What's more likely is that AMD will sell the sledgehammer into the same channels they sell their current chips - home machines designed for gamers. That means WinME and a 64-bit chip that's running in 32/16/8-bit modes most of the time, plus maybe some "64-bit optimized" video drivers and games.
Linux users of this chip win big because they get a 64-bit arch subsidized by the great unwashed masses. However, for most users Sledge's 64-bitness will be a marketing feature along the lines of MMX or 3DNow.
Just thought that I would chime in that Microsoft is pretty reasonable as far as licence auditing goes, in my experience. (No certificate or licence # checks or anything, just a machine count using Server Manager.)
People here like to make them out to be jackbooted thugs, but the alternative (licence key servers or dongles) would be far far worse. And there's been talk of that for the next version of Office.
Plus, Microsoft's business model depends on a certain number of non-paying users that they will eventually catch up with. Some folks would love to take advantage of that situation by never paying them, but when it's a large org with thousands of desktops, that's wishful thinking.
My guess is that someone ratted them out to the SPA that they were using Office without paying for it. When MS called to offer a site licence, they either told them 1) Fuck Off, 2) We use WordPerfect (righhht..), or 3) DUHHH?!!! And thus the hardball started. It looks to me that it's 10-to-1 that they weren't actually 100% legal.
Yeah, but since everyone and their dog already has a SSL website, presumably they've already paid the root cert tax and can go on with their business.
(That is a big presumption that the same certs will work, but I can't any technical reasoh see why they couldn't.)
The main problem with Windows Explorer is that it has a tons of infrastructure, but Microsoft has made very little use of them.
So, here are millions of desktops carrying around god-knows-what memory bloat, and reduced stability unti IE5.0-SP1, and the best Microsoft can show for it in the default UI is a pie chart showing you your drive space in My Computer, and nasty Disney adverts on the desktop in IE4.
There are gobs of applicaitons for which 'desktop integration' would be great, but nobody takes advantage of it because nobody sees the light on the issue. Maybe Whistler will show the way, but I think once the 'integrated' OSS GUIs start to get more mature, you will see much more development there. (Because people can add do-dads easily, post them to Freshmeat, and find them in the next version of RedHat.)
Of course, the hallmark of the modern Microsoft interface is the "Start" menu, which wasn't in either MacOS or OS/2 2.x, and is based more on the Next pop-up menu or the CDE taskbar.
(The Apple menu was similar, only that Apple intended it only for "desk accesories", where MS used their menu as a central place to launch all programs, and built the installer support to use it that way.)
Yeah, that was actually a typo - I meant x2. Apologies for being so incorrectly "informative".
There were some cases when we had to go up to x4+ in the old days to fix certain output issues. Too many years and too many jobs ago to remember why exactly.