Making the 5200 intentionally incompatible with the computers was the first of a long series of fuckups for Atari. (XEGS was the right idea, just 5 years too late.)
Every version of Netscape was Embrace+Extend. Only that the W3C rubberstamped whatever Netscape submitted until they got to something really important such as the DOM or CSS.
The whole point of the HTML 3.2 spec was to go through and mark all of Netscape's proprietary bullshit as 'depreciated' as a warning to them. They didn't listen.
If Apple ressurected the Network Server formfactor, this time with 2 or 4-way G4s and modern SCSI disks, they'd sell tons of them at a very nice profit margin.
Even if people did not use them as servers, there's quite a few 'core market' Mac users doing video and sound that have to go to third parties for RAID parts and expansion chassises. These folks are practically begging Apple to take their money.
They are talking about the midrange market, where AMD currently has a 0.0% marketshare. Sledgehammer might get some real server deployments with Linux, but with NT support and major vendor support missing, it's primarily going to be in end-user (aka games) boxes.
The comparison is between Linux and commercial UNIX, not Linux and Windows.
Does Linux (or Unix in general) have a lower TCO than Windows NT for the lowerend department-level tasks that people tend to use NT for? I think that's debatable, and you'll get different numbers from different people.
were a good company and then they screwed up, everyone knows that by now
Would a "good company" preach open, standards based tech to high heaven and all their customers and then turn around, abuse that trust, and spit in the face of the standards committees by introducing a proprietary DOM and a proprietary style sheet engine? I don't think so, but that's exact what Netscape did.
Netscape were the biggest Extend and Embrace Bullshitters of all time. I'd rather have Microsoft than those fukwits.
if Richard Stalman had got his priorities right in the first place and written the GNU Kernel before he wrote all the system tools
I would imagine that most of the GNU user space was written by people running SunOS (etc) and later Linux, who couldn't care less about what kernel they were running on.
"Free Software" was only half the motivation for GNU user space. The other half was the partially broken and incompatible user tools found on most commercial UNIXes, and the need for some basic level of compatibility. (The fact that it took GNU to come up with somthing so essential and basic and standard as "gzip" says something about the UNIX boys, who were off jousting windmills with things like CDE.)
For the record, IBM also had a patent on the ISA bus, as well such base standards like VGA, only that they were available for much more favorable licencing terms than MCA.
Re:Novell's not going anywhere anytime soon...
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 1
No, my post is accurate, and here's why:
1) For the record, Who cares? NetWare 5.1 could have the jizziest functionality ever invented, but it's still a proprietary platform with (maybe) 10% of the market, most of which has other perfectly suitable application serving solutions in place. Any IT manager developing realworld apps on NetWare should have been shitcanned as soon as he thought of the idea. (If NW lives past version 6, come and find me and I'll gladly pay you $10 and admit I was full of it.)
Maybe if they'd gotten all that great functionality out when they had 80% of the market, but... screw that... They owned UNIX, They did nothing with it! Sorry for yelling, but dumping Unix and then spending 5 years trying to rebuild something sorta Unix-like on top of their quaintly primitive OS was a bonehead move, any way you slice it. See all those NT mail and DB servers out there? They could have been Novell boxes.
2) Novell says NetWare is no key strategical platform, but that's bullshit. I'd bet 90% of their revenue comes from shops using NetWare for the grunt file+print stuff, and their sales guys can't get their calls returned at the NT/Unix shops.
As I said, they have lots of good tech, but it's going to take them a good amount of time and investment and luck to sell that stuff into non-NetWare markets. Novell won't go bankrupt (hell, even Banyan is still around in some form), but it's going to be 2-3 years before the light is at the end of the tunnel.
NetWare 3.x and 4.x had no memory protection and was cooprative multitasking. NetWare 5 fixes these things, but who wants to commit a new API on a fading platform. Too little, too f-ing late.
Novell announced back in the early 90s that they would phase out NetWare in favor of UnixWare. They didn't do it, and their butts have been kicked by multi-purpose systems like NT and Unix ever since.
Re:Novell's not going anywhere anytime soon...
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Their technology is always really cool and cutting-edge
Lots of good stuff out of Novell, but the key piece of it all, NetWare, is definitely NOT cool and cutting edge.
Besides the primative tech employed in NetWare, it's basically just not cost effective to licence and support a platform that will only be used for file+print serving, unless you have a huge corporation. Novell has tried to add "NDS-enabled" apps on top of the NW platform, but there is no third party support, very little corporate application support, and so all of that is basically preaching (and profiting) from the converted.
It's hard to sell cool tech when the foundation is rotting (and expensive to boot). Maybe someday Novell will remake itself as an applicaiton company selling that cool tech on the NT and Unix platforms, but that's a looong road from here. (Especially considering their "mindshare" and reputation problem, as you pointed out.)
If you put brake fluid into your crankcase, I can assure you that you would be mocked by your mechanic. Maybe not to your face, but your look when you seen the repair bill is satisfaction enough.
Part of the problem, of course, is that people buy cheap-o crap computer tech and expect "free" assistance in maintaining it. On the other hand, they buy very expensive automobiles, and happily pay $60/hour to let the experts work on it.
(PS, Modern cars are not user maintainable by design. Most of the dealership profit is on the service side nowdays.)
Yeah, I agree that the market can support two consoles (but four?) for a medium term period of 2-4 years. Then someone will introduce one console that will become dominant for a while, and so on. It's only the dominant machines that really have a shelf-life of longer than 5 years, and can't be considered a "betamax".
If you look at the history of consoles, it seems to have switched back and forth between competitive and one console dominant modes:
1) Atari 2600 was dominant (in a market bigger and more profitable than the current market, BTW)
2) Then, ColecoVision and the Atari 5200 battled
3) Then NES ruled
4) Then the Genesis and SNES battled
5) Then the 3DO and Jaguar flopped
6) Then Playstation ruled
7) Now, it's unlikely that one console will be dominant.
"Why would any kid want a 'Sony' when compared to the huge brandnames of Nintendo and Sega?"
The problem with your argument is that the core audience is 13 years old and doesn't have much brand loyalty or even brand knowledge at all. In fact being a known brand might even translate into "old and bad" to this crowd. (For them, 2 years ago might as well have been in the seventeenth century for all they know.)
History indicates that the market can really only support one console at a time for a 5 year period. That means 3 out of the 4 "eighth generation" systems are going to die a ugly or perhaps just a mediocre death.
Only three consoles have been real certifiable hits on that level: The Atari 2600, the original NES, and the Sony Playstation. (You could make an argument for the Genesis and the SNES, but the SNES started late and the Genesis died early.)
Neither the PS2 or the XBox has an architecture for the ages, so either one could be the BetaMax.
+ Sony has spread some PR about the PS2 being the next great home computer. However, the Playstation 2, being a closed and proprietary platform, will never attract broad applicaiton support beyond games and maybe a web browser.
You guys think Windows is a closed system, but at least someone doesn't have to buy $20K of custom hardware and sign a stack of NDAs to build an app for it.
+ The XBox, even thought it's based on PC hardware, *is not a PC*, and does not have the advantages of a PC. When you are marketing to lower middle-class parents buying a toy for their 12 year olds, you can't rev the hardware every 18 months like the PC world tends to do.
That means that what MS has announced is what you are going to get, for the next 3 years. Just like Sony.
On top of that Microsoft has no real coherent interactive TV strategy (XBox != WebTV) or application strategy to go along with the XBox. Meaning that this will never be more than a game box either.
There's probably a few people here who remember the days when they chucked their 2600s and ColecoVisions and went on with life gaming on Atari 800s, C-64s, and Apples. And, what do you know, those platforms are still around to some extent and getting press on Slashdot. Maybe this is a fading hope, but someday someone will realise that there is a huge market out there for a *real* home computer, that is very cheap, simple, runs personal applications, and is also a kick-ass game machine. Sony won't do it, and Microsoft can't.
The first piece of commercial software I ever bought was "AvalonHill NukeWar" for the Trash 80, written in BASIC of course. Basically just Battleship, but still a pretty fun game.
Weren't the "sub-50 IQ people" also acting in bad faith? It seems like Sun's plan all along was to give microsoft Java, wait for the inevitable embrace and extend, and then generate lots of PR about MS's political tactics by filing a high profile lawsuit.
It seems to have worked pretty well for Sun -- Microsoft has locked themselves out of the booming Java market, J++ was rightfully FUDed out of existance, MS spending $millions to reinvent technology they already had a licence to, and the ABM folks (like most slashdotters) have a huge object example of how MS operates right out in the open.
That's completely and totally not true -- I first read the term "Windoze" on Amiga-dominated BBS systems in the early 90s, and they were refering to the speed, particularly the graphics speed. (This was before there was any concept of "security bugs" for a desktop operating system.)
Once a person sees that, they'll realize what GNU is: an organization bent on forcing people to use the worst hypertext system ever devised by man(?).
This is a distribution issue. If RedHat or Debian (etc) want to grab a bunch of software off of the Internet and call it an operating system, that's fine. But that doesn't mean they have to use the help system that the original author used.
Think about it. If you wrote the greatest utility in the world, but documented it in a text file instead of a real help system, would you be pissed if someone else made a 'man' or a WinHelp or GUNInfo file out it?
Besides, the fact that these guys (the distributors) are too lazy to provide a common help system for their OS just makes them look like slobs. A user who opens the help system should never be told to go look for another help system.
Well, I've seen quite a few ROBs in thrift store junk piles, so I suppose it depends on the condition and all the parts being there. (I'm more into pre-crash stuff myself.)
For those that might not remember when the NES was introduced, ROB was the big sell -- Every NES advert prominently featured it. (As the article pointed out, the NES was originally pushed as some sort of educational/entertainment system, not as a pure video game box. The early games were very cartoony -- not at all the outer space shootemup Atari-style games.)
At this point in the 2.0 to 2.2 development process, it seemed like a majority of Slashdot readers were running a 2.1 kernel instead of a 2.0 version and were extremely happy with it.
Look around here - Almost nobody is running a 2.3/"2.4Test" kernel. Because it's too damn far from being ready, and considering the original target shipdate of XMas 1999, that means there has been a bunch of fuckups. (Not that Linux 2.4 matters at all in my eternal scheme of things, but reading between the lines on LKML, it seems to be a generally held opinion. It will ship when it's ready, but until then enormous effort will be spent backporting stuff to 2.2.)
Now it could well be that Slashdot is far less technical than it used to be, but I still think there's plently of people who would love to beta test a new kernel. They just don't want to alpha test one.
There was litterally a policy "If you can't fix it in 15 mins, escalate the problem"
Do you why they have this policy? Because they know how much people get paid, how much the insurance and lighting and floorspace costs, lost productity costs due to IT issues, and what the work backlog looks like.
The fact is that the price of managing a corporate network is about 15% software licencing, 15% hardware costs, and 70% labor costs. If it takes 2 hours to fix someone's Pentium, the sad fact is that it would have been cheaper to just throw it away and drop a brand new $800 Celeron box on the person's desk.
Back in my sysadmin days, I was a decent troubleshooter. Yeah, I enjoy it too. I also had pride, I hated to admit defeat, but there was one thing I learned -- There is no such thing as 15 minute problem -- If you can fix it in 15 minutes, it really wasn't a problem to begin with. I also did most of my sysadmin work as a contractor, so I could hear the cash register bell ringing in my head while I was dinking with this stuff.
Files do not magically disappear from an AutoCAD setup. Finding the real problem and CHKDSKing to hell is probably going to take far longer than an FDISK and image dump. One place I worked had a sign in the technicians cage that read Thou Shall Not Open the Case. One of the smartest places I ever worked.
Slashdot Mirror
Making the 5200 intentionally incompatible with the computers was the first of a long series of fuckups for Atari. (XEGS was the right idea, just 5 years too late.)
Every version of Netscape was Embrace+Extend. Only that the W3C rubberstamped whatever Netscape submitted until they got to something really important such as the DOM or CSS.
The whole point of the HTML 3.2 spec was to go through and mark all of Netscape's proprietary bullshit as 'depreciated' as a warning to them. They didn't listen.
If Apple ressurected the Network Server formfactor, this time with 2 or 4-way G4s and modern SCSI disks, they'd sell tons of them at a very nice profit margin.
Even if people did not use them as servers, there's quite a few 'core market' Mac users doing video and sound that have to go to third parties for RAID parts and expansion chassises. These folks are practically begging Apple to take their money.
Hmmm. Looks like you are being Slashdotted.
Anyway, I'd love to see an O'Reilly book - Essential MacOS X System Administration - with a nicely drawn dogcow on the cover.
They are talking about the midrange market, where AMD currently has a 0.0% marketshare. Sledgehammer might get some real server deployments with Linux, but with NT support and major vendor support missing, it's primarily going to be in end-user (aka games) boxes.
The comparison is between Linux and commercial UNIX, not Linux and Windows.
Does Linux (or Unix in general) have a lower TCO than Windows NT for the lowerend department-level tasks that people tend to use NT for? I think that's debatable, and you'll get different numbers from different people.
were a good company and then they screwed up, everyone knows that by now
Would a "good company" preach open, standards based tech to high heaven and all their customers and then turn around, abuse that trust, and spit in the face of the standards committees by introducing a proprietary DOM and a proprietary style sheet engine? I don't think so, but that's exact what Netscape did.
Netscape were the biggest Extend and Embrace Bullshitters of all time. I'd rather have Microsoft than those fukwits.
if Richard Stalman had got his priorities right in the first place and written the GNU Kernel before he wrote all the system tools
I would imagine that most of the GNU user space was written by people running SunOS (etc) and later Linux, who couldn't care less about what kernel they were running on.
"Free Software" was only half the motivation for GNU user space. The other half was the partially broken and incompatible user tools found on most commercial UNIXes, and the need for some basic level of compatibility. (The fact that it took GNU to come up with somthing so essential and basic and standard as "gzip" says something about the UNIX boys, who were off jousting windmills with things like CDE.)
The goal of hardware tweakers is to get the maximun effects while not droping below that critical point of 60 ftp (or 72 as that article clames).
So, why is the common practice to quote the maximum framerate and not the minimum framerate?
Why are "timedemo" tests usually lightweight compared to actual gameplay?
You're right on, but I don't think the dicksizing motivations should be ruled out either.
For the record, IBM also had a patent on the ISA bus, as well such base standards like VGA, only that they were available for much more favorable licencing terms than MCA.
No, my post is accurate, and here's why:
... screw that ... They owned UNIX, They did nothing with it! Sorry for yelling, but dumping Unix and then spending 5 years trying to rebuild something sorta Unix-like on top of their quaintly primitive OS was a bonehead move, any way you slice it. See all those NT mail and DB servers out there? They could have been Novell boxes.
1) For the record, Who cares? NetWare 5.1 could have the jizziest functionality ever invented, but it's still a proprietary platform with (maybe) 10% of the market, most of which has other perfectly suitable application serving solutions in place. Any IT manager developing realworld apps on NetWare should have been shitcanned as soon as he thought of the idea. (If NW lives past version 6, come and find me and I'll gladly pay you $10 and admit I was full of it.)
Maybe if they'd gotten all that great functionality out when they had 80% of the market, but
2) Novell says NetWare is no key strategical platform, but that's bullshit. I'd bet 90% of their revenue comes from shops using NetWare for the grunt file+print stuff, and their sales guys can't get their calls returned at the NT/Unix shops.
As I said, they have lots of good tech, but it's going to take them a good amount of time and investment and luck to sell that stuff into non-NetWare markets. Novell won't go bankrupt (hell, even Banyan is still around in some form), but it's going to be 2-3 years before the light is at the end of the tunnel.
I/O does not an app server make.
NetWare 3.x and 4.x had no memory protection and was cooprative multitasking. NetWare 5 fixes these things, but who wants to commit a new API on a fading platform. Too little, too f-ing late.
Novell announced back in the early 90s that they would phase out NetWare in favor of UnixWare. They didn't do it, and their butts have been kicked by multi-purpose systems like NT and Unix ever since.
Their technology is always really cool and cutting-edge
Lots of good stuff out of Novell, but the key piece of it all, NetWare, is definitely NOT cool and cutting edge.
Besides the primative tech employed in NetWare, it's basically just not cost effective to licence and support a platform that will only be used for file+print serving, unless you have a huge corporation. Novell has tried to add "NDS-enabled" apps on top of the NW platform, but there is no third party support, very little corporate application support, and so all of that is basically preaching (and profiting) from the converted.
It's hard to sell cool tech when the foundation is rotting (and expensive to boot). Maybe someday Novell will remake itself as an applicaiton company selling that cool tech on the NT and Unix platforms, but that's a looong road from here. (Especially considering their "mindshare" and reputation problem, as you pointed out.)
If you put brake fluid into your crankcase, I can assure you that you would be mocked by your mechanic. Maybe not to your face, but your look when you seen the repair bill is satisfaction enough.
Part of the problem, of course, is that people buy cheap-o crap computer tech and expect "free" assistance in maintaining it. On the other hand, they buy very expensive automobiles, and happily pay $60/hour to let the experts work on it.
(PS, Modern cars are not user maintainable by design. Most of the dealership profit is on the service side nowdays.)
Yeah, I agree that the market can support two consoles (but four?) for a medium term period of 2-4 years. Then someone will introduce one console that will become dominant for a while, and so on. It's only the dominant machines that really have a shelf-life of longer than 5 years, and can't be considered a "betamax".
If you look at the history of consoles, it seems to have switched back and forth between competitive and one console dominant modes:
1) Atari 2600 was dominant (in a market bigger and more profitable than the current market, BTW)
2) Then, ColecoVision and the Atari 5200 battled
3) Then NES ruled
4) Then the Genesis and SNES battled
5) Then the 3DO and Jaguar flopped
6) Then Playstation ruled
7) Now, it's unlikely that one console will be dominant.
Flashback a couple years:
"Why would any kid want a 'Sony' when compared to the huge brandnames of Nintendo and Sega?"
The problem with your argument is that the core audience is 13 years old and doesn't have much brand loyalty or even brand knowledge at all. In fact being a known brand might even translate into "old and bad" to this crowd. (For them, 2 years ago might as well have been in the seventeenth century for all they know.)
History indicates that the market can really only support one console at a time for a 5 year period. That means 3 out of the 4 "eighth generation" systems are going to die a ugly or perhaps just a mediocre death.
Only three consoles have been real certifiable hits on that level: The Atari 2600, the original NES, and the Sony Playstation. (You could make an argument for the Genesis and the SNES, but the SNES started late and the Genesis died early.)
Neither the PS2 or the XBox has an architecture for the ages, so either one could be the BetaMax.
+ Sony has spread some PR about the PS2 being the next great home computer. However, the Playstation 2, being a closed and proprietary platform, will never attract broad applicaiton support beyond games and maybe a web browser.
You guys think Windows is a closed system, but at least someone doesn't have to buy $20K of custom hardware and sign a stack of NDAs to build an app for it.
+ The XBox, even thought it's based on PC hardware, *is not a PC*, and does not have the advantages of a PC. When you are marketing to lower middle-class parents buying a toy for their 12 year olds, you can't rev the hardware every 18 months like the PC world tends to do.
That means that what MS has announced is what you are going to get, for the next 3 years. Just like Sony.
On top of that Microsoft has no real coherent interactive TV strategy (XBox != WebTV) or application strategy to go along with the XBox. Meaning that this will never be more than a game box either.
There's probably a few people here who remember the days when they chucked their 2600s and ColecoVisions and went on with life gaming on Atari 800s, C-64s, and Apples. And, what do you know, those platforms are still around to some extent and getting press on Slashdot. Maybe this is a fading hope, but someday someone will realise that there is a huge market out there for a *real* home computer, that is very cheap, simple, runs personal applications, and is also a kick-ass game machine. Sony won't do it, and Microsoft can't.
The first piece of commercial software I ever bought was "AvalonHill NukeWar" for the Trash 80, written in BASIC of course. Basically just Battleship, but still a pretty fun game.
Weren't the "sub-50 IQ people" also acting in bad faith? It seems like Sun's plan all along was to give microsoft Java, wait for the inevitable embrace and extend, and then generate lots of PR about MS's political tactics by filing a high profile lawsuit.
It seems to have worked pretty well for Sun -- Microsoft has locked themselves out of the booming Java market, J++ was rightfully FUDed out of existance, MS spending $millions to reinvent technology they already had a licence to, and the ABM folks (like most slashdotters) have a huge object example of how MS operates right out in the open.
That's completely and totally not true -- I first read the term "Windoze" on Amiga-dominated BBS systems in the early 90s, and they were refering to the speed, particularly the graphics speed. (This was before there was any concept of "security bugs" for a desktop operating system.)
Once a person sees that, they'll realize what GNU is: an organization bent on forcing people to use the worst hypertext system ever devised by man(?).
This is a distribution issue. If RedHat or Debian (etc) want to grab a bunch of software off of the Internet and call it an operating system, that's fine. But that doesn't mean they have to use the help system that the original author used.
Think about it. If you wrote the greatest utility in the world, but documented it in a text file instead of a real help system, would you be pissed if someone else made a 'man' or a WinHelp or GUNInfo file out it?
Besides, the fact that these guys (the distributors) are too lazy to provide a common help system for their OS just makes them look like slobs. A user who opens the help system should never be told to go look for another help system.
Well, I've seen quite a few ROBs in thrift store junk piles, so I suppose it depends on the condition and all the parts being there. (I'm more into pre-crash stuff myself.)
For those that might not remember when the NES was introduced, ROB was the big sell -- Every NES advert prominently featured it. (As the article pointed out, the NES was originally pushed as some sort of educational/entertainment system, not as a pure video game box. The early games were very cartoony -- not at all the outer space shootemup Atari-style games.)
At this point in the 2.0 to 2.2 development process, it seemed like a majority of Slashdot readers were running a 2.1 kernel instead of a 2.0 version and were extremely happy with it.
Look around here - Almost nobody is running a 2.3/"2.4Test" kernel. Because it's too damn far from being ready, and considering the original target shipdate of XMas 1999, that means there has been a bunch of fuckups. (Not that Linux 2.4 matters at all in my eternal scheme of things, but reading between the lines on LKML, it seems to be a generally held opinion. It will ship when it's ready, but until then enormous effort will be spent backporting stuff to 2.2.)
Now it could well be that Slashdot is far less technical than it used to be, but I still think there's plently of people who would love to beta test a new kernel. They just don't want to alpha test one.
There was litterally a policy "If you can't fix it in 15 mins, escalate the problem"
Do you why they have this policy? Because they know how much people get paid, how much the insurance and lighting and floorspace costs, lost productity costs due to IT issues, and what the work backlog looks like.
The fact is that the price of managing a corporate network is about 15% software licencing, 15% hardware costs, and 70% labor costs. If it takes 2 hours to fix someone's Pentium, the sad fact is that it would have been cheaper to just throw it away and drop a brand new $800 Celeron box on the person's desk.
Back in my sysadmin days, I was a decent troubleshooter. Yeah, I enjoy it too. I also had pride, I hated to admit defeat, but there was one thing I learned -- There is no such thing as 15 minute problem -- If you can fix it in 15 minutes, it really wasn't a problem to begin with. I also did most of my sysadmin work as a contractor, so I could hear the cash register bell ringing in my head while I was dinking with this stuff.
Files do not magically disappear from an AutoCAD setup. Finding the real problem and CHKDSKing to hell is probably going to take far longer than an FDISK and image dump. One place I worked had a sign in the technicians cage that read Thou Shall Not Open the Case. One of the smartest places I ever worked.