What? The RIAA members make billions every year selling uncompressed audio on CDs. It's third parties that started the whole compressed MP3 thing, and they did it for practical bandwidth reasons. It certainly wasn't the RIAA who decided that everything on Napster sounds like shit.
Of course, what the RIAA would like would be some sort of DVD-like authenticaiton/copy-protection mechanism, but it's going to be damn hard to move the existing CD and MP3 userbase over to something else.
I buy that logic for certain pieces of software, like WordPerfect or OnTrack or something like Adobe Illustrator.
But 3D Studio MAX or Maya are the most expensive pieces of normal end-user software you can find, and I'm sure a good number of Warez sites carry it just to show how elite they are.
Ho, bandwidth costs money, and if you are demanding uncompressed WAVs, they're going out of buisness, and you are going get old and die waiting for the download to complete.
Right now, CDs are the best way to get uncompressed digital audio, and it's going to stay that way for the next couple years. Perhaps the custom CD stores will come to help here.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you are just trying to up the ante in a trollish way, but I agree with the general point. Compressed audio should be sold at a discount relative to the price of CDs.
The quote was "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run".
Of course, there was actually very good reasons why 1-2-3 had problems. In it's day it was the most memory intensive application people ran on PCs, and consequentally Lotus had to invent their own expanded memory API (The LIM EMS spec). Later on, MS invented 386 XMS extended memory, and of course considered EMS to be depreciated.
That was all a long time ago though, and I don't know if there are any credible stories about the API changing with modern Windows versions. (The Real/QuickTime thing was about file type registration, IIRC.) Something like 98% of Windows 3.1 apps run on Win 98, and there's even some hidden tools to tweak it to run Windows 2.0 programs. Furthermore, any API change has a high enough likelyhood of breaking one of Microsoft's own applications that it would probably scare them off.
which will mean repartitioning, installing the new OS, and maybe reinstalling some apps depending on how smoothly everything moves over. Hundreds of times.
Of course, exactly that was the "migration path" from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Windows 98 to Windows 2000, and any broken Windows install to a working Windows install.
Windows shops are pretty much used to the whole reformat/reinstall thing. (And if Microsoft can't write an upgrade tool that works, why would one think these Open Windows guys could?)
and it was only possible because it implemented a well-known, standardized API (POSIX)
And furthermore, UNIX used to be very expensive and the better versions only ran on proprietary hardware. It was nearly impossible in the old days for a casual user to get root access to a system. That was a huge incentive for people to work on a PC clone version.
How much did eMachines give back during the big Windows Refund thing? Something like $29, I think. How much effort would you put in to clone something that's cheaper than a tank of gas?
Nobody really cares about making Linux "the OS choice for gamers", the point is to provide games for people who run Linux for whatever other reasons, usually because it's unix. (And it certainly isn't a "cutting edge mentaltiy"!)
I'm not sure where this attitute that Linux has to be the premeire OS for Gamers to be successful comes from. Perhaps the "Gamers" believe themselves to be the center of the universe?
Truth is, these gamer kids spend a lot of money, but they don't give a crap about the features of a unix OS, much less any OS that hasn't been comprimised to hell for game purposes (and that includes Windows 2000). They are going to be on Wintendo until Microsoft phases it out, or the rest of the world comes to it's collective senses and switches to something else. Nobody's pandering to them, or at least they shouldn't be.
Anyway, the econ lesson is: there's not enough gamers in the world to give a game the really huge sales numbers companies hope for (Alpha Centuri, Quake III, Starcraft, etc). When a game has saturated the "gamer" market and the "casual game playing Windows user" market, it can move on to the Mac and Linux market to get even more casual users. Quake shipped simutanously because id make the correct assumption that it would be so successful that it should be developed multi-platform in the beginning. Most other companies aren't so bold.
Re:That would only move files with a dot in the na
on
Natural Language CLIs?
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· Score: 1
That might be true for Windows 9x, but Windows 2000 will match extention-less filenames with a*.* (any extention, including null), and will also match the dots with * (so a* works too).
While I can't check it, NT's CMD.EXE has always worked this way, IIRC. Can't recall what OS/2 did, but it wouldn't shock me if it was the same because that's where NT's command interpreter came from.
I enjoy the trolls as much as the next embittered old-timer, so if so, good job. (Although, IIRC this was in the era before trolling became really popular. Pre-moderation, maybe.)
Sorry, dude, but most of the underpriveledged in the US do not live in rural areas - they live in urban and innerring suburban areas that can have broadband installed quite economically.
That 1930s argument worked for the Rural Electrification Program, but it shouldn't work in 2000, where "rural" is a codeword for "extremely low density suburb". (Yet, often still gets REA subsidies, even to this day!)
So, considering that you have computer and T1 access at work, I'd guess that your whining about being an "underpriveledged individual" are a load, and what this is really about is a small plea to subsidize your decision to live in the sticks.
Netscape's business plan from the beginning was that giving away standards compliant client software was the best advertising possible for their server software. They never intended to make any significant money from client sales, but their evangalism of "standards" made them a very popular corporate vendor for a while.
They declared war on Microsoft publically, and Microsoft publically declared war back. They knew that the browser war was coming. So what do you do:
1) Continue to make great, standards compliant software, so that you can maintain your mindshare advantage over Microsoft and continue to sell server products.
2) Extend your 'open standards' client with a load of completely proprietary extentions, plus a bunch of bloat that only works with your server software. On top of that, make it so that it doesn't even work properly.
Netscape chose #2, for whatever reason. Their browser market share declined, and took with it their momentum in the server market. (Everyone knew that the "portal" was nothing more than people too lazy to change their home page, so those eyeballs are looking at www.msn.com now.)
Yeah, and scripts that don't use document.all are unusable in IE4 (Windows 98 default), and therefore you have two code paths anyway. And the breakdown will probably be IE4/5 versus Netscape6, not IE4 versus IE6/NS6.
The current defacto standard for DHTML is Internet Explorer. You are deluding yourself into thinking that Mozilla has enough clout to bend that standard into something like the W3C's. I am saying there's a huge risk that that is not true, and that despite all of Netscape 6's flashy features, it's marketshare might be so small that it will receive about the same mindshare as Netscape 4 (or 3) does now.
It would sure suck to have a brand new browser treated like a downlevel client, wouldn't it? But that's the position that Mozilla is putting themselves when they give the finger to millions of lines of IE almost-compliant JavaScript, almost all of which contains.all.
Just like Microsoft taking NS3 as a baseline and then forking in their own direction, Netscape should be looking at IE5 the same way - Emulate it and then stick to the standards from then on. Netscape will end up looking great, and proprietary ol' Microsoft will be perceived as the bad guy. Refuse to run the existing DHTML out there, and nobody will bother with you long enough to care.
Not that I'm not talking about "ced[ing] control of [future] standards" to Microsoft. I'm talking about producing a product that is attractive to users because it runs legacy JavaScript, just like the 85% browser does. Don't push a stupid, semantic difference of principle in front of an enormous practical advantage. They won the last round, and it's time to deal with it.
"A better strategy for the Mozilla team would have been to write an IE-compatible browser"
I have to suck it up and agree with you here.
Remember when the marketshares were reversed, Microsoft had to write a 98% compatible Netscape v3 clone before they pushed ahead with their own feature set.
Netscape should not have to emulate every bad behavior of IE, but their refusal to support minor Microsoftisms like 'document.all' really makes me wonder if they want to be seen as a friend or a foe of the average web developer.
Anyway, the situation is not bleak right now. On the public web, IE has no where near the clout that Netscape held in 1995. (Back then, if you weren't using the latest Netscape, you couldn't even see half the sites.) But, IE-only sites are all over Intranets, and many fancier public sites support Netscape 4 only in fallback-mode, leaving the fancy dynamic stuff to IE users only. (This is actually a good thing considering the br0kenness of NS4's DOM.)
The huge risk is that when Netscape 6 finally ships, it will be put in that same fallback-mode bin, and all of it's standards-compliant DOM will go to waste because developers will refuse to rewrite their IE-specific code.
There are various hacks to work around SFP, but the real problem is that Microsoft failed to include a mechanism to allow the administrator to turn off SFP on a file-by-file basis.
This may or may not have been intentional (you wouldn't want an installer turning off SFP), and it might be fixed in the future. I guess it just goes to show that you can't blow your foot off with a squirt gun.
I think this is already true with the iMacs. Apple gets to save on 5 cents in parts, and you get to buy a $25 analog minijack-to-USB converter. Wonderful.
First, the iMac was a whole new paradigm for computers
Not really - Apple had sold all-in-one units for years (ignoring the Mac toasters, going back to the 030-based performas). They only thing they did is with the iMac is add some colored plastic and drop the low-end units that required a seperate monitor.
Novell's inability to ship an application server was their demise. Virtually all of their large customers ended up installing WinNT for their low-end mail/database/web applications, and once Microsoft had their foot in the door, it was the beginning of the end of Novell's F&P market.
The irony of this all was that Novell owned the best application server platform ever made, UNIX. But they were unwilling to price it properly or market it to their NetWare user base. (Some might remember Novell's SuperNOS plans to to replace NetWare with UnixWare. If this would have happened in the mid-90s, the current Unix-on-x86 craze would have been kickstarted years earlier.)
Back to SCO -- OpenServer/Xenix/whatever should have been killed years ago from the sound of it. They've been milking that legacy base for so long that it's killed their reputation. On the other hand, just like Novell, they've been totally unable to market UnixWare to the midlevel server market. Maybe some day, "UNIX" will fall into the hands of someone who knows how to price and market it correctly. Until then, Linux will rule the Unix/x86 market.
Because you ripped the MP3s, they are legal. Fair Use allows you to make a backup of *your CD* (and not anyone elses.) So downloading MP3s or copying a friends CD is technically illegal, even though you've paid for a copy.
Despite being beloved in San Francisco, Feinstein seems to find herself on the wrong side of every Silicon Valley issue (Clipper Chip, anyone?).
No shock that the GOP (normally run out of Orange County, but apparently can still smell money) has found a nice clean cut pro-tech industry Valley moderate to take her on come fall. She could be in trouble.
You are right on -- Kylix is aimed at a completely different market than gcc and the traditional GNU dev tools.
Borland is marketing Kylix at their existing Windows userbase, who primarily code internal corporate applications, and who are considering their long- and short-term dependance on Windows. I would imagine that 90% of the stuff developed with Kylix never makes it outside of the company it was developed for. I seriously doubt that Borland believes that the traditional Unix developer wants/needs their tools.
So, of course there will be some Delphi stuff showing up on Freshmeat, and some clowns might even try to market shareware to the Linux folks (har). So what -- if it's Open Source and it really bugs you, you can port it to whatever compiler you want.
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What? The RIAA members make billions every year selling uncompressed audio on CDs. It's third parties that started the whole compressed MP3 thing, and they did it for practical bandwidth reasons. It certainly wasn't the RIAA who decided that everything on Napster sounds like shit.
Of course, what the RIAA would like would be some sort of DVD-like authenticaiton/copy-protection mechanism, but it's going to be damn hard to move the existing CD and MP3 userbase over to something else.
I buy that logic for certain pieces of software, like WordPerfect or OnTrack or something like Adobe Illustrator.
But 3D Studio MAX or Maya are the most expensive pieces of normal end-user software you can find, and I'm sure a good number of Warez sites carry it just to show how elite they are.
Ho, bandwidth costs money, and if you are demanding uncompressed WAVs, they're going out of buisness, and you are going get old and die waiting for the download to complete.
Right now, CDs are the best way to get uncompressed digital audio, and it's going to stay that way for the next couple years. Perhaps the custom CD stores will come to help here.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you are just trying to up the ante in a trollish way, but I agree with the general point. Compressed audio should be sold at a discount relative to the price of CDs.
The quote was "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run".
Of course, there was actually very good reasons why 1-2-3 had problems. In it's day it was the most memory intensive application people ran on PCs, and consequentally Lotus had to invent their own expanded memory API (The LIM EMS spec). Later on, MS invented 386 XMS extended memory, and of course considered EMS to be depreciated.
That was all a long time ago though, and I don't know if there are any credible stories about the API changing with modern Windows versions. (The Real/QuickTime thing was about file type registration, IIRC.) Something like 98% of Windows 3.1 apps run on Win 98, and there's even some hidden tools to tweak it to run Windows 2.0 programs. Furthermore, any API change has a high enough likelyhood of breaking one of Microsoft's own applications that it would probably scare them off.
which will mean repartitioning, installing the new OS, and maybe reinstalling some apps depending on how smoothly everything moves over. Hundreds of times.
Of course, exactly that was the "migration path" from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Windows 98 to Windows 2000, and any broken Windows install to a working Windows install.
Windows shops are pretty much used to the whole reformat/reinstall thing. (And if Microsoft can't write an upgrade tool that works, why would one think these Open Windows guys could?)
and it was only possible because it implemented a well-known, standardized API (POSIX)
And furthermore, UNIX used to be very expensive and the better versions only ran on proprietary hardware. It was nearly impossible in the old days for a casual user to get root access to a system. That was a huge incentive for people to work on a PC clone version.
How much did eMachines give back during the big Windows Refund thing? Something like $29, I think. How much effort would you put in to clone something that's cheaper than a tank of gas?
Nobody really cares about making Linux "the OS choice for gamers", the point is to provide games for people who run Linux for whatever other reasons, usually because it's unix. (And it certainly isn't a "cutting edge mentaltiy"!)
I'm not sure where this attitute that Linux has to be the premeire OS for Gamers to be successful comes from. Perhaps the "Gamers" believe themselves to be the center of the universe?
Truth is, these gamer kids spend a lot of money, but they don't give a crap about the features of a unix OS, much less any OS that hasn't been comprimised to hell for game purposes (and that includes Windows 2000). They are going to be on Wintendo until Microsoft phases it out, or the rest of the world comes to it's collective senses and switches to something else. Nobody's pandering to them, or at least they shouldn't be.
Anyway, the econ lesson is: there's not enough gamers in the world to give a game the really huge sales numbers companies hope for (Alpha Centuri, Quake III, Starcraft, etc). When a game has saturated the "gamer" market and the "casual game playing Windows user" market, it can move on to the Mac and Linux market to get even more casual users. Quake shipped simutanously because id make the correct assumption that it would be so successful that it should be developed multi-platform in the beginning. Most other companies aren't so bold.
That might be true for Windows 9x, but Windows 2000 will match extention-less filenames with a*.* (any extention, including null), and will also match the dots with * (so a* works too).
While I can't check it, NT's CMD.EXE has always worked this way, IIRC. Can't recall what OS/2 did, but it wouldn't shock me if it was the same because that's where NT's command interpreter came from.
I enjoy the trolls as much as the next embittered old-timer, so if so, good job. (Although, IIRC this was in the era before trolling became really popular. Pre-moderation, maybe.)
Back in the distant history of slashdot, there was an NSA story with an AC who claimed to have worked in sigint.
A few "Company X is going down, I know because I work there" posts, but otherwise you're right.
Of course, the difference between "MrBogus (173033)" and Anonymous Coward is 1 point and a whole lotta nothing.
I'm a Unix dummy, but here's a common one when I admined NT boxes:
Domain Admins: Full Control
Report Writers Group: Change
Report Readers Group: Read
Backup Software Service: Read
(Implict - Everyone: No Access)
Also, none of the line staff know the password of the real Administrator accounts, so su doesn't cut it.
Running 7-anything on a Plus/SE/Classic is a huge mistake.
Download 6.08 from Apple's web site, and you will be much happier. (Dig around on the old printer disks to find the TrueType extention for System 6.)
Sorry, dude, but most of the underpriveledged in the US do not live in rural areas - they live in urban and innerring suburban areas that can have broadband installed quite economically.
That 1930s argument worked for the Rural Electrification Program, but it shouldn't work in 2000, where "rural" is a codeword for "extremely low density suburb". (Yet, often still gets REA subsidies, even to this day!)
So, considering that you have computer and T1 access at work, I'd guess that your whining about being an "underpriveledged individual" are a load, and what this is really about is a small plea to subsidize your decision to live in the sticks.
Netscape's business plan from the beginning was that giving away standards compliant client software was the best advertising possible for their server software. They never intended to make any significant money from client sales, but their evangalism of "standards" made them a very popular corporate vendor for a while.
They declared war on Microsoft publically, and Microsoft publically declared war back. They knew that the browser war was coming. So what do you do:
1) Continue to make great, standards compliant software, so that you can maintain your mindshare advantage over Microsoft and continue to sell server products.
2) Extend your 'open standards' client with a load of completely proprietary extentions, plus a bunch of bloat that only works with your server software. On top of that, make it so that it doesn't even work properly.
Netscape chose #2, for whatever reason. Their browser market share declined, and took with it their momentum in the server market. (Everyone knew that the "portal" was nothing more than people too lazy to change their home page, so those eyeballs are looking at www.msn.com now.)
Please refer me to a URL that is standards compliant that doesn't work in Mozilla.
How about: W3C XHTML standard pages not displayed
Yeah, and scripts that don't use document.all are unusable in IE4 (Windows 98 default), and therefore you have two code paths anyway. And the breakdown will probably be IE4/5 versus Netscape6, not IE4 versus IE6/NS6.
.all.
The current defacto standard for DHTML is Internet Explorer. You are deluding yourself into thinking that Mozilla has enough clout to bend that standard into something like the W3C's. I am saying there's a huge risk that that is not true, and that despite all of Netscape 6's flashy features, it's marketshare might be so small that it will receive about the same mindshare as Netscape 4 (or 3) does now.
It would sure suck to have a brand new browser treated like a downlevel client, wouldn't it? But that's the position that Mozilla is putting themselves when they give the finger to millions of lines of IE almost-compliant JavaScript, almost all of which contains
Just like Microsoft taking NS3 as a baseline and then forking in their own direction, Netscape should be looking at IE5 the same way - Emulate it and then stick to the standards from then on. Netscape will end up looking great, and proprietary ol' Microsoft will be perceived as the bad guy. Refuse to run the existing DHTML out there, and nobody will bother with you long enough to care.
Not that I'm not talking about "ced[ing] control of [future] standards" to Microsoft. I'm talking about producing a product that is attractive to users because it runs legacy JavaScript, just like the 85% browser does. Don't push a stupid, semantic difference of principle in front of an enormous practical advantage. They won the last round, and it's time to deal with it.
"A better strategy for the Mozilla team would have been to write an IE-compatible browser"
I have to suck it up and agree with you here.
Remember when the marketshares were reversed, Microsoft had to write a 98% compatible Netscape v3 clone before they pushed ahead with their own feature set.
Netscape should not have to emulate every bad behavior of IE, but their refusal to support minor Microsoftisms like 'document.all' really makes me wonder if they want to be seen as a friend or a foe of the average web developer.
Anyway, the situation is not bleak right now. On the public web, IE has no where near the clout that Netscape held in 1995. (Back then, if you weren't using the latest Netscape, you couldn't even see half the sites.) But, IE-only sites are all over Intranets, and many fancier public sites support Netscape 4 only in fallback-mode, leaving the fancy dynamic stuff to IE users only. (This is actually a good thing considering the br0kenness of NS4's DOM.)
The huge risk is that when Netscape 6 finally ships, it will be put in that same fallback-mode bin, and all of it's standards-compliant DOM will go to waste because developers will refuse to rewrite their IE-specific code.
There are various hacks to work around SFP, but the real problem is that Microsoft failed to include a mechanism to allow the administrator to turn off SFP on a file-by-file basis.
This may or may not have been intentional (you wouldn't want an installer turning off SFP), and it might be fixed in the future. I guess it just goes to show that you can't blow your foot off with a squirt gun.
I think this is already true with the iMacs. Apple gets to save on 5 cents in parts, and you get to buy a $25 analog minijack-to-USB converter. Wonderful.
First, the iMac was a whole new paradigm for computers
Not really - Apple had sold all-in-one units for years (ignoring the Mac toasters, going back to the 030-based performas). They only thing they did is with the iMac is add some colored plastic and drop the low-end units that required a seperate monitor.
Novell's inability to ship an application server was their demise. Virtually all of their large customers ended up installing WinNT for their low-end mail/database/web applications, and once Microsoft had their foot in the door, it was the beginning of the end of Novell's F&P market.
The irony of this all was that Novell owned the best application server platform ever made, UNIX. But they were unwilling to price it properly or market it to their NetWare user base. (Some might remember Novell's SuperNOS plans to to replace NetWare with UnixWare. If this would have happened in the mid-90s, the current Unix-on-x86 craze would have been kickstarted years earlier.)
Back to SCO -- OpenServer/Xenix/whatever should have been killed years ago from the sound of it. They've been milking that legacy base for so long that it's killed their reputation. On the other hand, just like Novell, they've been totally unable to market UnixWare to the midlevel server market. Maybe some day, "UNIX" will fall into the hands of someone who knows how to price and market it correctly. Until then, Linux will rule the Unix/x86 market.
Because you ripped the MP3s, they are legal. Fair Use allows you to make a backup of *your CD* (and not anyone elses.) So downloading MP3s or copying a friends CD is technically illegal, even though you've paid for a copy.
Despite being beloved in San Francisco, Feinstein seems to find herself on the wrong side of every Silicon Valley issue (Clipper Chip, anyone?).
No shock that the GOP (normally run out of Orange County, but apparently can still smell money) has found a nice clean cut pro-tech industry Valley moderate to take her on come fall. She could be in trouble.
You are right on -- Kylix is aimed at a completely different market than gcc and the traditional GNU dev tools.
Borland is marketing Kylix at their existing Windows userbase, who primarily code internal corporate applications, and who are considering their long- and short-term dependance on Windows. I would imagine that 90% of the stuff developed with Kylix never makes it outside of the company it was developed for. I seriously doubt that Borland believes that the traditional Unix developer wants/needs their tools.
So, of course there will be some Delphi stuff showing up on Freshmeat, and some clowns might even try to market shareware to the Linux folks (har). So what -- if it's Open Source and it really bugs you, you can port it to whatever compiler you want.
Microsoft(R) Visual Basic(TM), or another Object Basic implementation?