For those that don't know, Outlook was really designed to be run with MS Exchange server.
Outlook can be installed in either "Corporate or Workgroup" or "Internet Mail" modes. So it appears as if it was designed to work in stand-alone mode.
As for the TNEF problem: I run Outlook in "Workgroup" mode, but only with the Internet Mail service installed, and I do not have this problem. (I did turn off RTF mail.)
I haven't seen a TNEF or winmail.dat attachment in a few years, and when I did, it was the product of a misconfirgured Exchange Server (one that was trying to send RTF to the Internet.) So I don't think this is an Outlook issue at all.
The worst thing about the situation was Microsoft's snotty technotes about how this problem could only be adequately solved if everyone upgraded to Exchange (we actually solved it by flipping a config switch). The idiot Exchange Admin had the same attitude, refusing to believe that Microsoft would ship a product with misconfigured defaults, and there must be something wrong with the rest of the non-TNEF-compliant Internet.
Do you have an analog amplifier or speakers? Whoops! A SMDI player can refuse to play because your Audio channel isn't "secure" from end-to-end. Makes it hard to play the music you want to if you have to buy all new equipment and a new OS...
The only reason they get away with it is because nobody plays SDMI music.
Vendors are still free to provide 'non-certified' drivers on their websites that are fully functional, except for the fact that the SMDI player can refuse to use them. (Most clueful people run with the more up-to-date non-certified drivers, so this should be enough user pain to prevent SDMI from making any traction in the short term.)
A side effect of all this is that you'll probably never see a SDMI player for any open source OS (including Apple Darwin/OSX?!).
And how many Linux or Solaris workstation users even have a 'root filesystem'?
There might have been some good historical reasons for all of those obscure directories, but they are largely irrelevant for an end-user system with a cheap big fast disk.
Apple screwed IBM and Moto out in the CHRP plan, but so did Microsoft (Windows NT) and IBM themselves (OS/2-PPC) and the early cancellation of PowerPersonal.
The point of CHRP was never to expand MacOS's market share. It was to expand IBM/Motorola's market share versus Intel's. When Intel managed to scale their chips and business customers thumbed their noses at PowerPC, it was clear from the start that Apple teamed up with the wrong chip makers.
I seriously doubt any sound card manufacturers will want to cripple their products in such a manner, and so wont release SDMI signed drivers, leading to the death of SDMI.
It's happened:
Microsoft digitally signs drivers that pass the Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL) tests to assure consumers that they are using the highest-quality drivers. This practice is standard and guarantees the authenticity of components because the signature cannot be forged, nor can the code be modified without destroying the signature. To learn more about Windows Hardware Quality Labs, see the Windows Hardware Quality Labs page at the Microsoft Web site.
Ultra SCSI is important because standard SCSI-2 devices knock down the whole chain to 20MB/s Max. This is why all Ultra boards have a non-Ultra connector for legacy devices.
With an Ultra SCSI DVD drive, the other 13 Ultra160 disks you have can continue to chug away at full speed.
Re:Computer games -- Woohoo!
on
Hackers
·
· Score: 1
The interesting thing about the Atari 800 hackers in the book is that they had to reverse engineer an undocumented machine in order to get the same graphic/sound quality that Atari did for their games.
The book is really in two parts IIRC. The beginning talks about the development of "Hacking". The second part is a contemporary history of the beginning of the computer game industry, focusing on Sierra Online.
If Levy or someone else were to update the book, there's really two books that could come out of it: (1) An updated story on MIT's hacking tradition, including the story of the Lisp machines, and of course Stallman + GNU and the story of Linux and 386BSD. (2) A more complete history of the computer games industry, covering the rest of Sierra's history, companies like Electronic Arts and Broderbund and Id, up through to the recent assimilation of the industry into the current console-oriented market.
The first (the real one) was actually uttered by Moore and deals with transistor density. Boring.
The second was concocted by Intel's marketing department and describes their past and future plans to entice you to buy a new product every couple years, guaranteeing them a nice revenue stream. The way it's usually described is Every 18 Months the performance/price of the CPU doubles. (Substitute Mhz for performance as necessary.)
DVDs might have come out in 1997, but software players were not on the market right away. If I understand the system correctly, early computer DVD players (such as Creative's) did the CSS decryption in hardware.
It's one thing to reverse engineer a hardware solution, another when it's a software player. The DVD Forum deserves what they got for moving their precious encryption into software to save money.
The one big desktop approach that Matrox uses Win2K is br0ken. You can't have independant resolutions or monitor positions, and your #1 screen is always to the right.
Apparently, this is due to limitations in Windows, and won't be fixed until "Whistler" at the earliest.
Indentured Servitude was a horrid institution. It was essentially serfdom. There's a reason your high school history book mentioned this tradition -- it sucked and created very long term inequities.
Generations of the decendants of the people who came over that way were unable to get out of that social basement. Many (such as some of my ancestors) survived as sharecroppers until the 1930s -- more than 160 years of hard, fruitless agricultural labor, only to be bankrupted into urban factories, where at least there was a union movement. Behind American Indians and Freed Slaves, these people got the worst deal of the American economic system.
I work with some very competant H1-B types, some going for their green card, some counting the days until they can get to a lucrative job back in India. Would anyone wish "Temporary" status on their decendants? Look at the horrid "Guest Worker" situation they have in some European countries.
The other problem with Hydro in the US is that we've already dammed almost every damn river, and almost all of those dams have hydro powerplants (since the power sales were part of the federal dam financing formula).
The few remaining potential dam locations haven't been developed because of the massive environmental implications, usually so severe that people recognized them even back in the 60s.
95% of what Microsoft installs in your system folder:extentions are shared libraries, and that is the Apple recommended place for them.
The fact that only one major Mac vendor uses shared libs is pretty sad. What's even sadder is that the userbase complains about it. What's even more sad is that some users are complaining about MOSX's lack of an 'extension manager'.
(They are conditioned to believe that "Extensions" are all INITs that patch the OS, which has never been true.)
The anti-PPro FUD mostly came from consumer-oriented "Windows" mags. And of course, for their audience, they were right: Win95 wasn't out yet, WinNT and OS/2 (and Linux) were nitch OSes, and 95% of the PC masses were running 16-bit Windows 3.1 code.
On the other hand, when Compaq and other vendors started shipping SMP Pentium Pro-based servers with hardware RAID, the industry as a whole woke up and realized that Intel was for real. Specifically, UNIX vendors realized that they better move up market and move there fast. (We moved from P60 based boxes hosting 40 users to Proliant 5000s hosting 500+. The server room sure looked empty after the conversion.)
It's more than a coincidence that Windows NT started to take off in 1995, it was the hardware that actually made serving applications on Intel a good idea, and NT was the only OS that was really positioned to do so at the time.
The same kind of licence that allowed the US Government to establish a nation- and world-wide internet by making sure that all commercial and non-commercial vendors had access to a reference implmenentation of the networking stack?
Likewise, just because you've whored your way up to 25 karma (or several hundred in the case of Enoch Root, Fascdot, or Sig11), doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to say either.
Why not just get rid of karma all together? Virtually everyone whose been here longer than a couple months has over 25 karma, so they get the +1 and you can't see anyone elses karma anyway.
This makes karma worthless as a "reputation" system, which was the orginal idea anyway. Just give the +1 based on seniority.
Slashdot did not always have karma. There was a period when there was moderation and no karma. People got the positive reinforcement for posting something acceptable, but there weren't folks like waldoj and Shoeboy keeping score. IMO, the S/N ratio was much higher.
When you throw out numbers for home-built systems like that, it show that you believe that your time has no monetary value.
How much time did it take you to research vendors, order components, assemble the components, and test and debug the components? Figure it out at $30/hour because that's the minimum you'd have to pay someone to do it for you.
On top of that, add the amount of time you've spent rooting around the Internet getting information. Is this RAM any good? Are there any problems with this video card and that motherboard? Does this BIOS have problems with Windows 2000 or Linux? Which hard disks are known to be crap? And so on. That kind of background knowledge in the real world doesn't come cheaply.
Now, add in risk factors. Even if something doesn't go wrong, the potential that it could can be assigned a cost. (This is how project budgeting works, or should work.): Will this vendor ship me a remarked part? Will the guy ship me a part at all in a reasonable time frame? Will the guy on Pricewatch in Arkansas steal my credit card info and commit fraud? Will I have to spend my time doing returns and exchanges? Will these supposedly incompatible parts actually be incompatible or problematic? And so on.
Larger vendors can afford these costs because they are spread across dozens or thousands of systems. You've only got one box when you are done.
So, by the time you have your PC, you've invested thousands of virutal dollars into the system. Great, if you have the time and inclination. But because you paid yourself $2500 to save $1000 doesn't mean you are necessarily smart, nor does it mean you got a good deal, and it certainly has no bearing on the real world prices of Dells or Apples.
NT 4.0 was available for PowerPC PReP systems like the IBM PowerPersonal and some Motorola stuff, but was never compatible with Macintosh hardware.
It could have been without much effort, but neither Apple or Microsoft seemed to want it. A latter unified PPC hardware standard called CHRP was introduced, but by then the non-Apple PPC market was pretty much dead. (Both IBM and Motorola had dropped their PPC PC lines, Microsoft had dropped NT/PPC, and Apple only partially supported CHRP.)
"Classic" is actually more like Win-OS/2 because it actually boots a virtual machine.
"Carbon" is more similar to WoW (API translation to 'native' Cocoa calls.), although for I all know Carbon might actually talk directly to Mach/BSD too.
The only con I can think of is beta-level applications that require you to change parameters in the source code and recompile.
Of course, most Linux users nowdays use binary packages, so I can't imagine that source distribution would be real popular in the Mac user/non-programmer community.
But Guess What?!? All the OEMs see AMD and think, "Hmmm...what kind of cheap 5hit components can I throw together and make a profit selling?"
Yes, it's very strange that none of the major vendors are targeting AMD-based systems at the lucrative corporate market, instead putting nice fast chips in low-end Office Depot small biz machines, and bells-and-whistles home machines like CPQ Presarios.
The only reasons for this I can think of are:
1) Corporations want motherboard components to change very slowly so they can use the same disk image for longer than a couple months.
2) AMD doesn't have the capacity to fill a desktop line which might last a year or more.
3) The vendors know that AMD motherboards are not as reliable as Intel ones, and are afraid of having to do a major recall if their more saavy customers found out.
(A few years ago, I saw a study which said that the average larger corporation spends something like $20,000/year/desktop to support a PC user. So, you're right, the marginal hardware cost difference between AMD and Intel is irrelelevant.)
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For those that don't know, Outlook was really designed to be run with MS Exchange server.
Outlook can be installed in either "Corporate or Workgroup" or "Internet Mail" modes. So it appears as if it was designed to work in stand-alone mode.
As for the TNEF problem: I run Outlook in "Workgroup" mode, but only with the Internet Mail service installed, and I do not have this problem. (I did turn off RTF mail.)
I haven't seen a TNEF or winmail.dat attachment in a few years, and when I did, it was the product of a misconfirgured Exchange Server (one that was trying to send RTF to the Internet.) So I don't think this is an Outlook issue at all.
The worst thing about the situation was Microsoft's snotty technotes about how this problem could only be adequately solved if everyone upgraded to Exchange (we actually solved it by flipping a config switch). The idiot Exchange Admin had the same attitude, refusing to believe that Microsoft would ship a product with misconfigured defaults, and there must be something wrong with the rest of the non-TNEF-compliant Internet.
Do you have an analog amplifier or speakers? Whoops! A SMDI player can refuse to play because your Audio channel isn't "secure" from end-to-end. Makes it hard to play the music you want to if you have to buy all new equipment and a new OS...
Depends whether VMWare emulates the real hardware of a certified soundcard, or uses a non-certfied 'dummy' driver to talk to the Linux sound device.
The only reason they get away with it is because nobody plays SDMI music.
Vendors are still free to provide 'non-certified' drivers on their websites that are fully functional, except for the fact that the SMDI player can refuse to use them. (Most clueful people run with the more up-to-date non-certified drivers, so this should be enough user pain to prevent SDMI from making any traction in the short term.)
A side effect of all this is that you'll probably never see a SDMI player for any open source OS (including Apple Darwin/OSX?!).
And how many Linux or Solaris workstation users even have a 'root filesystem'?
There might have been some good historical reasons for all of those obscure directories, but they are largely irrelevant for an end-user system with a cheap big fast disk.
Apple screwed IBM and Moto out in the CHRP plan, but so did Microsoft (Windows NT) and IBM themselves (OS/2-PPC) and the early cancellation of PowerPersonal.
The point of CHRP was never to expand MacOS's market share. It was to expand IBM/Motorola's market share versus Intel's. When Intel managed to scale their chips and business customers thumbed their noses at PowerPC, it was clear from the start that Apple teamed up with the wrong chip makers.
Did you read the pages at the MS website? That's exactly what Microsoft's driver model does, if the audio player requests it.
Yeah, it's stupid, but that's the price of getting your drivers onto the Windows ME CD.
It's happened:
Source
Ultra SCSI is important because standard SCSI-2 devices knock down the whole chain to 20MB/s Max. This is why all Ultra boards have a non-Ultra connector for legacy devices.
With an Ultra SCSI DVD drive, the other 13 Ultra160 disks you have can continue to chug away at full speed.
The interesting thing about the Atari 800 hackers in the book is that they had to reverse engineer an undocumented machine in order to get the same graphic/sound quality that Atari did for their games.
The book is really in two parts IIRC. The beginning talks about the development of "Hacking". The second part is a contemporary history of the beginning of the computer game industry, focusing on Sierra Online.
If Levy or someone else were to update the book, there's really two books that could come out of it: (1) An updated story on MIT's hacking tradition, including the story of the Lisp machines, and of course Stallman + GNU and the story of Linux and 386BSD. (2) A more complete history of the computer games industry, covering the rest of Sierra's history, companies like Electronic Arts and Broderbund and Id, up through to the recent assimilation of the industry into the current console-oriented market.
There's two Moore's Laws.
The first (the real one) was actually uttered by Moore and deals with transistor density. Boring.
The second was concocted by Intel's marketing department and describes their past and future plans to entice you to buy a new product every couple years, guaranteeing them a nice revenue stream. The way it's usually described is Every 18 Months the performance/price of the CPU doubles. (Substitute Mhz for performance as necessary.)
DVDs might have come out in 1997, but software players were not on the market right away. If I understand the system correctly, early computer DVD players (such as Creative's) did the CSS decryption in hardware.
It's one thing to reverse engineer a hardware solution, another when it's a software player. The DVD Forum deserves what they got for moving their precious encryption into software to save money.
The one big desktop approach that Matrox uses Win2K is br0ken. You can't have independant resolutions or monitor positions, and your #1 screen is always to the right.
Apparently, this is due to limitations in Windows, and won't be fixed until "Whistler" at the earliest.
Indentured Servitude was a horrid institution. It was essentially serfdom. There's a reason your high school history book mentioned this tradition -- it sucked and created very long term inequities.
Generations of the decendants of the people who came over that way were unable to get out of that social basement. Many (such as some of my ancestors) survived as sharecroppers until the 1930s -- more than 160 years of hard, fruitless agricultural labor, only to be bankrupted into urban factories, where at least there was a union movement. Behind American Indians and Freed Slaves, these people got the worst deal of the American economic system.
I work with some very competant H1-B types, some going for their green card, some counting the days until they can get to a lucrative job back in India. Would anyone wish "Temporary" status on their decendants? Look at the horrid "Guest Worker" situation they have in some European countries.
The other problem with Hydro in the US is that we've already dammed almost every damn river, and almost all of those dams have hydro powerplants (since the power sales were part of the federal dam financing formula).
The few remaining potential dam locations haven't been developed because of the massive environmental implications, usually so severe that people recognized them even back in the 60s.
95% of what Microsoft installs in your system folder:extentions are shared libraries, and that is the Apple recommended place for them.
The fact that only one major Mac vendor uses shared libs is pretty sad. What's even sadder is that the userbase complains about it. What's even more sad is that some users are complaining about MOSX's lack of an 'extension manager'.
(They are conditioned to believe that "Extensions" are all INITs that patch the OS, which has never been true.)
The anti-PPro FUD mostly came from consumer-oriented "Windows" mags. And of course, for their audience, they were right: Win95 wasn't out yet, WinNT and OS/2 (and Linux) were nitch OSes, and 95% of the PC masses were running 16-bit Windows 3.1 code.
On the other hand, when Compaq and other vendors started shipping SMP Pentium Pro-based servers with hardware RAID, the industry as a whole woke up and realized that Intel was for real. Specifically, UNIX vendors realized that they better move up market and move there fast. (We moved from P60 based boxes hosting 40 users to Proliant 5000s hosting 500+. The server room sure looked empty after the conversion.)
It's more than a coincidence that Windows NT started to take off in 1995, it was the hardware that actually made serving applications on Intel a good idea, and NT was the only OS that was really positioned to do so at the time.
Translation:
The same kind of licence that allowed the US Government to establish a nation- and world-wide internet by making sure that all commercial and non-commercial vendors had access to a reference implmenentation of the networking stack?
Likewise, just because you've whored your way up to 25 karma (or several hundred in the case of Enoch Root, Fascdot, or Sig11), doesn't mean you have anything worthwhile to say either.
Why not just get rid of karma all together? Virtually everyone whose been here longer than a couple months has over 25 karma, so they get the +1 and you can't see anyone elses karma anyway.
This makes karma worthless as a "reputation" system, which was the orginal idea anyway. Just give the +1 based on seniority.
Slashdot did not always have karma. There was a period when there was moderation and no karma. People got the positive reinforcement for posting something acceptable, but there weren't folks like waldoj and Shoeboy keeping score. IMO, the S/N ratio was much higher.
When you throw out numbers for home-built systems like that, it show that you believe that your time has no monetary value.
How much time did it take you to research vendors, order components, assemble the components, and test and debug the components? Figure it out at $30/hour because that's the minimum you'd have to pay someone to do it for you.
On top of that, add the amount of time you've spent rooting around the Internet getting information. Is this RAM any good? Are there any problems with this video card and that motherboard? Does this BIOS have problems with Windows 2000 or Linux? Which hard disks are known to be crap? And so on. That kind of background knowledge in the real world doesn't come cheaply.
Now, add in risk factors. Even if something doesn't go wrong, the potential that it could can be assigned a cost. (This is how project budgeting works, or should work.): Will this vendor ship me a remarked part? Will the guy ship me a part at all in a reasonable time frame? Will the guy on Pricewatch in Arkansas steal my credit card info and commit fraud? Will I have to spend my time doing returns and exchanges? Will these supposedly incompatible parts actually be incompatible or problematic? And so on.
Larger vendors can afford these costs because they are spread across dozens or thousands of systems. You've only got one box when you are done.
So, by the time you have your PC, you've invested thousands of virutal dollars into the system. Great, if you have the time and inclination. But because you paid yourself $2500 to save $1000 doesn't mean you are necessarily smart, nor does it mean you got a good deal, and it certainly has no bearing on the real world prices of Dells or Apples.
NT 4.0 was available for PowerPC PReP systems like the IBM PowerPersonal and some Motorola stuff, but was never compatible with Macintosh hardware.
It could have been without much effort, but neither Apple or Microsoft seemed to want it. A latter unified PPC hardware standard called CHRP was introduced, but by then the non-Apple PPC market was pretty much dead. (Both IBM and Motorola had dropped their PPC PC lines, Microsoft had dropped NT/PPC, and Apple only partially supported CHRP.)
"Classic" is actually more like Win-OS/2 because it actually boots a virtual machine.
"Carbon" is more similar to WoW (API translation to 'native' Cocoa calls.), although for I all know Carbon might actually talk directly to Mach/BSD too.
The only con I can think of is beta-level applications that require you to change parameters in the source code and recompile.
Of course, most Linux users nowdays use binary packages, so I can't imagine that source distribution would be real popular in the Mac user/non-programmer community.
But Guess What?!? All the OEMs see AMD and think, "Hmmm...what kind of cheap 5hit components can I throw together and make a profit selling?"
Yes, it's very strange that none of the major vendors are targeting AMD-based systems at the lucrative corporate market, instead putting nice fast chips in low-end Office Depot small biz machines, and bells-and-whistles home machines like CPQ Presarios.
The only reasons for this I can think of are:
1) Corporations want motherboard components to change very slowly so they can use the same disk image for longer than a couple months.
2) AMD doesn't have the capacity to fill a desktop line which might last a year or more.
3) The vendors know that AMD motherboards are not as reliable as Intel ones, and are afraid of having to do a major recall if their more saavy customers found out.
(A few years ago, I saw a study which said that the average larger corporation spends something like $20,000/year/desktop to support a PC user. So, you're right, the marginal hardware cost difference between AMD and Intel is irrelelevant.)