Yes one of the signing authorities that hardware manufacturers load.
First, Microsoft refuses to sign anything under the GPL.
Why? Where have you heard that?
Second, the FSF would have to get every motherboard vendor to accept their key, but at the same time anything signed and released under the GPLv3 would need to include said key
They wouldn't have to get every they would get some. And on those ones they would be a signing authority that is trusted by the free community.
Not that the motherboard vendors would listen to the FSF since their goal is Microsoft compliance and nothing else.
I don't think that's true. The motherboard vendors have a long history of supporting a diverse computing ecosystem particularly in the server space. On $300 consumer computers they are less interested in diversity because their customer base is less interested in diversity.
This needs clarification. Users have absolutely no control over iOS devices at all, and I'm sure Apple would attack anything the FSF would set up.
Users can repoint by their devices at the management servers. By default they are pointed at Apple's but that can be changed to any companies. The software to run management servers is Enterprise SDK. Far from attacking this, Apple fully supports alternative management schemes. They demand end users have a support structure, not that the support structure be Apple.
Consumers when in huge numbers they decided to make Microsoft / Western Digital / Intel standard their computer of choice, to the extent that virtually every other alternative: DEC, Unisys, IBM Microchannel, Apple power, Amiga.... disappeared.
Joshua thank you for responding directly. I think the problem is generally that the language being used in the campaign doesn't explain the differences between the x86 policies and the ARM policies. As an aside I think that's the same problem with the anti-Apple campaign where I felt that the information being given, oversimplified Apple's policies to the point of making it inaccurate.
What I am curious about though is why the FSF doesn't directly support these freedoms as a clearinghouse. For example registering as a signer and in the Apple case offering a Enterprise SDK server config that people can run the iOS devices against.
If the FSF were more responsible about these things, they could register with Microsoft as a signing authority and have their key be one of the default signing keys embedded in hardware. Then we have asian manufacturers, Microsoft and FSF and everyone is going to trust one of them.
No it doesn't. You don't want the key to be loadable at all you want it installed in hardware and unchangeable. You might want the OS to change, but you don't want to change how the OS is signed.
Microsoft has been pretty clear about where UEFI is and the spec. They've been publishing papers, having websites, publishing books, giving talks, having videos on channel 9 for over a dozen years. You may disagree with them, but you can't accuse them of lack of disclosure.
This post is nonsense. The iPhone is expensive in unsubsidized markets. A $400 subsidy doesn't add $400 to the price rather it is a subsidy what consumers pay. As for American phone subsidies. Phone subsidies have been a crucial component of building America's cellular infrastructure. It may be completely irrational but that irrationality doesn't change the fact:
a) The quality of one's total cellular experience is highly dependent on the quality of the handset. b) The better the cellular experience the more one is willing to pay. c) Adding the price of the phone to the monthly reoccurring services doesn't change the total amount much (i.e $400/20 = $20 / mo).
So it makes sense to subsidize the handset and add the cost to the monthly bill.
There is a huge difference between "not going to happen", "slapping a coat of paint on a pinto" and a 13% drop off. Windows system sales were dropping at about 10% year over year for the last 2 years for most OEMs. And in terms of revenue for much longer than that. I'd say the Windows 8 drop is 3% not 13%, but regardless of which is right 13% is well within the acceptable margins of customer resistance.
Microsoft's customers are cheap. Microsoft's customers are satisfied with low end systems running Windows 7, running software that still works fine on WindowsXP - 32 bit. I'm not arguing that Microsoft's customer's base is going to like the shift to Windows 8. Rather what I'm disagreeing with you on is whether they will be willing (excluding the bottom 1/3rd of the market) to walk away from the Windows franchise all together rather than accept a higher price, higher margin, rapid update strategy. That's the point of disagreement.
The data does not support your contention that there is no market at the $1000 price point for Windows machines. The data does not support your contention that customers simply will not pay more for Windows machines regardless of how good they are. We had these arguments six months ago when Microsoft began moving towards this strategy and now the data is in. Average sales prices of Windows OEM systems are up. Average margin is up. Sales are off a tad, there is resistance, but nothing like the sorts of drops in marketshare RIM has experienced the last 3 years, to use your analogy.
And most importantly, it really doesn't make very much difference how much sales are off for Windows 8. Windows 8 is important for OEM's to create target hardware and developers to have access to target platforms. This system is rightfully targeted at advancing the Windows ecosystem, not selling computers. Very much like the early days of Apple after OSX where Apple's marketshare plunged. Or the problems Sun had in the move from SunOS to Solaris. I'm not sure it would matter much if Windows 8 sold 0 copies to end users, other than Microsoft needed to get OEMs to start making more expensive machines capable of running Metro/touch applications comfortably. The important desktop OS are the non-transitional systems for the OEMs and developers which are loaded with Metro applications and run Win32/.NET applications in some sort of legacy guest OS style. Those are the ones that transition end users.
The strategy is accomplishing its objectives. 6 months ago nothing like the: Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS12, Samsung ATIV, HP Envy, Lenovo IdeaPad, Thinkpad twist, Microsoft Surface Pro... did exist or could exist. Heck I've got a $2500 Retina and I'm a bit jealous of the $1500 Windows market. I might pick one up soon: so as someone who has been buying Apple for 10 years, no it is not the case that people will automatically choose Apple once the price goes over $1000.
As for the Surface as an expensive Windows RT tablet. No argument, that's overpriced. It is not remotely as good a tablet as the Apple iPad, nor remotely as cheap as the Android tablets which are comparable in quality. Expensive crap won't sell even with Windows 8, I'm not arguing that this will change. I should say the 2nd generation Microsoft keyboard (what they call the "type cover" as opposed to the first generation "touch cover") is far far better than the first generation (which was IMHO unusable). I don't know if Microsoft is really interested in becoming an OEM or mainly wanted to build the surface as a target model. I suspect the latter but if they do really want to move units their problem is pricing not Windows 8:
Price the Windows Surface RT tablet at $300 with the touch cover and it would fly off the shelves. Price it at over $600 and no it won't sell much. Office just isn't enough. Price the Windows Surface Pro at around $1K and now it is directly up against the Macbook air and other Windows ultra books and frankly the specs aren't so hot. Price the Window Surface Pro at $600 and put it up against the iPad and the mid range Windows 7 machines and it would fly off shelves.
Then there is the fact that there are probably 3000+ that buy a PC at $400-$550 for every one person buying $1K units and the math is clear,
The numbers aren't remotely that bad. $700+ Ultra books were 11% of the laptop market 2Q2012, and the $700+ market is 14% of all laptops. Average selling price of corporate / home machines was up $13 year over year and that was before Windows 8 driving up the midrange. Windows servers 2Q2012 were $8.7b in server sales with 1.9m units sold i.e. average selling price of $4600. I think your customer base has biased you. Yes Windows has a pricing problem, and a cheapskate customer base but they can be moved.
Nonsense about usage. I adore Outlooks task manager integration with the calendar. The ability to create tasks with dependencies, show them in Gantt format, have them automatically schedule and be integrated with coworkers is far far beyond anything gmail does.
Another area is OLE based editing of email. That allows for vastly more complex email than gmail.
Public folders are managed databases with full ability to set backup and retention policies.
Automatic disclosure detection and warnings for users which help be compliant with things like HIIPA. On the other direction the ability to flag messages to particular legal holds.
There just is no comparison between the feature set of Gmail and Outlook. Sure Google is good at search. That's a nice feature. That is one advantage among whole areas where Google doesn't even offer a product.
They still have those problems. And quite often it makes sense when faced with a price war to lose the market rather than cut prices. Oracle and DB2 have been losing data-warehouse market for years to SQLServer that doesn't mean it is a good idea to cut prices to compete.
That being said had WordPerfect have known:
a) How fast the market would grow b) That the market would standardardize around a Windows only product c) That OS/2 was dead d) That Unix and VMS support wouldn't matter e) How good Word was going to become
They might have done things differently. But it is excusable they didn't guess all that.
I was talking about the price of the OS, nobody would consider PCs of even 15 years ago to be Walmart priced, but windows damned well was.
OSes have mostly been a vehicle to sell hardware, IBM paid Microsoft for the early versions. I don't of almost any expensive OSes. I picked up SCO at its height with the custom 486/i860 dual processor and compiler for $1k. Solaris the worst I ever paid was $2k.
That being said, most retail customers have no idea which parts are expensive and which cheap. Yes I agree Microsoft Windows OEM is very cheap. Microsoft isn't greedy though with Windows 8, they aren't charging more for Windows they are driving up hardware costs.
____
As for Metro OS. Yes they could have done that, or they could change the public's perception. Microsoft has a full line of server product which while cheap are not "Walmart". Once the $300 Dells don't exist and those customers either move up market or go elsewhere, the perception of Microsoft as the Walmart brand will end.
That's not related to GP's point. Most complex mail clients crash. I doubt Google's web based clients could handle 10% of what Outlook does and not crash, and yes Outlook should still be more stable than it is.
Most everyone uses a web based email for home and for continuity. Also many of the advantages of Exchange don't exist without corporate setup and management which doesn't do anything for home. Microsoft is starting to explore creating a consumer oriented version of Exchange for Hotmail / Outlook.com That may very well change things.
I don't know about the "the suits". The pricing had been in effect for many years, there was no change for WordPerfect. A good quality professional typewriter could cost up to $5000 at that time. Word Perfect was cheaper than the mini computer systems for mass production. Their were cheap Word Processing programs aimed at the amateur market that were much cheaper.
Microsoft has always shocked competitors by cutting margins. Right now it is doing that in the data-warehouse space and the ERP space.
has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years
IBM compatibles did not sell at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years. Commodore, Synclair, Atari owned that market slice during the 80s and the early 90s. Apple was lower end than Microsoft. Microsoft was positioned nicely in the middle range with the "junky" systems beneath them and the "too expensive" systems: DEC, SGI, Sun, IBM RISC/6000... above them.
The Walmart pricing is a product of the 2000s where corporations stopped upgrading rapidly and thus applications had to support older machines, and discount machines offered the capabilities of older machines. That's a nasty cycle that Microsoft partially created by allowing for a pause with Windows XP. They realize their mistake and they are fixing it.
And yeah, the bottom 1/3rd of the Windows market, which shouldn't have been part of the midrange in the first place might go for something cheaper.
How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed.
That is not at all what happened. First off Microsoft Word for DOS at the time of the Windows switch was already a rather good product and quite popular. While it was clearly in 2nd / 3rd place it wasn't coming out of nowhere.
WordPerfect was heavily focused on cross platform and many non DOS versions. They were working on a Windows versions and came out within about a year of Windows 3.0's release. DOS was still the dominant platform when WordPerfect for Windows came out. It wasn't all that much more buggy than any of the word Processors were. Word was a bit faster, and better integrated the all around best experience but AmiPro, WordPerfect... were better and frankly DeScribe was likely the most feature rich least buggy word processor of the time.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating. WordPerfect was hit with a common problem where it made economic sense for them lose marketshare rather than immediately cut prices by 90%. They eventually did offer a product mixed with Borland's Paradox and QuatroPro but by then it was too late.
1) There is a lot of additional syntactic sugar which makes this much easier to use in practice. In theory of course you don't need any syntactic sugar for anything but it helps. Making this easy and uniform for developers is different than bare bones tools
2) The calling functions know how to respond. So a system can come back with "failed require" or "failed ensure" and the caller should know how to respond. Assert just throws an error to the end user. Which means you can embedded these deep into calls and sometimes get useful behaviors.
Well no the issue is = (assignment) vs. == logical test. == corresponds to what we use = for in math. So it makes more sense to have = be a logical operator and use something else for assignment.
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Yes one of the signing authorities that hardware manufacturers load.
First, Microsoft refuses to sign anything under the GPL.
Why? Where have you heard that?
Second, the FSF would have to get every motherboard vendor to accept their key, but at the same time anything signed and released under the GPLv3 would need to include said key
They wouldn't have to get every they would get some. And on those ones they would be a signing authority that is trusted by the free community.
Not that the motherboard vendors would listen to the FSF since their goal is Microsoft compliance and nothing else.
I don't think that's true. The motherboard vendors have a long history of supporting a diverse computing ecosystem particularly in the server space. On $300 consumer computers they are less interested in diversity because their customer base is less interested in diversity.
This needs clarification. Users have absolutely no control over iOS devices at all, and I'm sure Apple would attack anything the FSF would set up.
Users can repoint by their devices at the management servers. By default they are pointed at Apple's but that can be changed to any companies. The software to run management servers is Enterprise SDK. Far from attacking this, Apple fully supports alternative management schemes. They demand end users have a support structure, not that the support structure be Apple.
Consumers when in huge numbers they decided to make Microsoft / Western Digital / Intel standard their computer of choice, to the extent that virtually every other alternative: DEC, Unisys, IBM Microchannel, Apple power, Amiga.... disappeared.
Joshua thank you for responding directly. I think the problem is generally that the language being used in the campaign doesn't explain the differences between the x86 policies and the ARM policies. As an aside I think that's the same problem with the anti-Apple campaign where I felt that the information being given, oversimplified Apple's policies to the point of making it inaccurate.
What I am curious about though is why the FSF doesn't directly support these freedoms as a clearinghouse. For example registering as a signer and in the Apple case offering a Enterprise SDK server config that people can run the iOS devices against.
If the FSF were more responsible about these things, they could register with Microsoft as a signing authority and have their key be one of the default signing keys embedded in hardware. Then we have asian manufacturers, Microsoft and FSF and everyone is going to trust one of them.
What you are describing is what Microsoft is doing on x86 systems, pretty much.
No it doesn't. You don't want the key to be loadable at all you want it installed in hardware and unchangeable. You might want the OS to change, but you don't want to change how the OS is signed.
Microsoft has been pretty clear about where UEFI is and the spec. They've been publishing papers, having websites, publishing books, giving talks, having videos on channel 9 for over a dozen years. You may disagree with them, but you can't accuse them of lack of disclosure.
This post is nonsense. The iPhone is expensive in unsubsidized markets. A $400 subsidy doesn't add $400 to the price rather it is a subsidy what consumers pay. As for American phone subsidies. Phone subsidies have been a crucial component of building America's cellular infrastructure. It may be completely irrational but that irrationality doesn't change the fact:
a) The quality of one's total cellular experience is highly dependent on the quality of the handset.
b) The better the cellular experience the more one is willing to pay.
c) Adding the price of the phone to the monthly reoccurring services doesn't change the total amount much (i.e $400/20 = $20 / mo).
So it makes sense to subsidize the handset and add the cost to the monthly bill.
There is a huge difference between "not going to happen", "slapping a coat of paint on a pinto" and a 13% drop off. Windows system sales were dropping at about 10% year over year for the last 2 years for most OEMs. And in terms of revenue for much longer than that. I'd say the Windows 8 drop is 3% not 13%, but regardless of which is right 13% is well within the acceptable margins of customer resistance.
Microsoft's customers are cheap. Microsoft's customers are satisfied with low end systems running Windows 7, running software that still works fine on WindowsXP - 32 bit. I'm not arguing that Microsoft's customer's base is going to like the shift to Windows 8. Rather what I'm disagreeing with you on is whether they will be willing (excluding the bottom 1/3rd of the market) to walk away from the Windows franchise all together rather than accept a higher price, higher margin, rapid update strategy. That's the point of disagreement.
The data does not support your contention that there is no market at the $1000 price point for Windows machines. The data does not support your contention that customers simply will not pay more for Windows machines regardless of how good they are. We had these arguments six months ago when Microsoft began moving towards this strategy and now the data is in. Average sales prices of Windows OEM systems are up. Average margin is up. Sales are off a tad, there is resistance, but nothing like the sorts of drops in marketshare RIM has experienced the last 3 years, to use your analogy.
And most importantly, it really doesn't make very much difference how much sales are off for Windows 8. Windows 8 is important for OEM's to create target hardware and developers to have access to target platforms. This system is rightfully targeted at advancing the Windows ecosystem, not selling computers. Very much like the early days of Apple after OSX where Apple's marketshare plunged. Or the problems Sun had in the move from SunOS to Solaris. I'm not sure it would matter much if Windows 8 sold 0 copies to end users, other than Microsoft needed to get OEMs to start making more expensive machines capable of running Metro/touch applications comfortably. The important desktop OS are the non-transitional systems for the OEMs and developers which are loaded with Metro applications and run Win32/.NET applications in some sort of legacy guest OS style. Those are the ones that transition end users.
The strategy is accomplishing its objectives. 6 months ago nothing like the: Lenovo Yoga, Dell XPS12, Samsung ATIV, HP Envy, Lenovo IdeaPad, Thinkpad twist, Microsoft Surface Pro... did exist or could exist. Heck I've got a $2500 Retina and I'm a bit jealous of the $1500 Windows market. I might pick one up soon: so as someone who has been buying Apple for 10 years, no it is not the case that people will automatically choose Apple once the price goes over $1000.
As for the Surface as an expensive Windows RT tablet. No argument, that's overpriced. It is not remotely as good a tablet as the Apple iPad, nor remotely as cheap as the Android tablets which are comparable in quality. Expensive crap won't sell even with Windows 8, I'm not arguing that this will change. I should say the 2nd generation Microsoft keyboard (what they call the "type cover" as opposed to the first generation "touch cover") is far far better than the first generation (which was IMHO unusable). I don't know if Microsoft is really interested in becoming an OEM or mainly wanted to build the surface as a target model. I suspect the latter but if they do really want to move units their problem is pricing not Windows 8:
Price the Windows Surface RT tablet at $300 with the touch cover and it would fly off the shelves. Price it at over $600 and no it won't sell much. Office just isn't enough.
Price the Windows Surface Pro at around $1K and now it is directly up against the Macbook air and other Windows ultra books and frankly the specs aren't so hot. Price the Window Surface Pro at $600 and put it up against the iPad and the mid range Windows 7 machines and it would fly off shelves.
Then there is the fact that there are probably 3000+ that buy a PC at $400-$550 for every one person buying $1K units and the math is clear,
The numbers aren't remotely that bad. $700+ Ultra books were 11% of the laptop market 2Q2012, and the $700+ market is 14% of all laptops. Average selling price of corporate / home machines was up $13 year over year and that was before Windows 8 driving up the midrange. Windows servers 2Q2012 were $8.7b in server sales with 1.9m units sold i.e. average selling price of $4600. I think your customer base has biased you. Yes Windows has a pricing problem, and a cheapskate customer base but they can be moved.
Nonsense about usage. I adore Outlooks task manager integration with the calendar. The ability to create tasks with dependencies, show them in Gantt format, have them automatically schedule and be integrated with coworkers is far far beyond anything gmail does.
Another area is OLE based editing of email. That allows for vastly more complex email than gmail.
Public folders are managed databases with full ability to set backup and retention policies.
Automatic disclosure detection and warnings for users which help be compliant with things like HIIPA. On the other direction the ability to flag messages to particular legal holds.
There just is no comparison between the feature set of Gmail and Outlook. Sure Google is good at search. That's a nice feature. That is one advantage among whole areas where Google doesn't even offer a product.
They still have those problems. And quite often it makes sense when faced with a price war to lose the market rather than cut prices. Oracle and DB2 have been losing data-warehouse market for years to SQLServer that doesn't mean it is a good idea to cut prices to compete.
That being said had WordPerfect have known:
a) How fast the market would grow
b) That the market would standardardize around a Windows only product
c) That OS/2 was dead
d) That Unix and VMS support wouldn't matter
e) How good Word was going to become
They might have done things differently. But it is excusable they didn't guess all that.
I was talking about the price of the OS, nobody would consider PCs of even 15 years ago to be Walmart priced, but windows damned well was.
OSes have mostly been a vehicle to sell hardware, IBM paid Microsoft for the early versions. I don't of almost any expensive OSes. I picked up SCO at its height with the custom 486/i860 dual processor and compiler for $1k. Solaris the worst I ever paid was $2k.
That being said, most retail customers have no idea which parts are expensive and which cheap. Yes I agree Microsoft Windows OEM is very cheap. Microsoft isn't greedy though with Windows 8, they aren't charging more for Windows they are driving up hardware costs.
____
As for Metro OS. Yes they could have done that, or they could change the public's perception. Microsoft has a full line of server product which while cheap are not "Walmart". Once the $300 Dells don't exist and those customers either move up market or go elsewhere, the perception of Microsoft as the Walmart brand will end.
That's not related to GP's point. Most complex mail clients crash. I doubt Google's web based clients could handle 10% of what Outlook does and not crash, and yes Outlook should still be more stable than it is.
Good points. Though 10 meg clip art laden emails should be stationary and thus tiny from Exchange's standpoint.
Compatibility is good but not great. If your #1 need is to support Microsoft clients, buy Microsoft.
Most everyone uses a web based email for home and for continuity. Also many of the advantages of Exchange don't exist without corporate setup and management which doesn't do anything for home. Microsoft is starting to explore creating a consumer oriented version of Exchange for Hotmail / Outlook.com That may very well change things.
I don't know about the "the suits". The pricing had been in effect for many years, there was no change for WordPerfect. A good quality professional typewriter could cost up to $5000 at that time. Word Perfect was cheaper than the mini computer systems for mass production. Their were cheap Word Processing programs aimed at the amateur market that were much cheaper.
Microsoft has always shocked competitors by cutting margins. Right now it is doing that in the data-warehouse space and the ERP space.
Good point. It was the focus on being willing to sell so cheaply both retail and via. OEM bundling.
has sold at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years
IBM compatibles did not sell at Walmart prices for damned near 30 years. Commodore, Synclair, Atari owned that market slice during the 80s and the early 90s. Apple was lower end than Microsoft. Microsoft was positioned nicely in the middle range with the "junky" systems beneath them and the "too expensive" systems: DEC, SGI, Sun, IBM RISC/6000 ... above them.
The Walmart pricing is a product of the 2000s where corporations stopped upgrading rapidly and thus applications had to support older machines, and discount machines offered the capabilities of older machines. That's a nasty cycle that Microsoft partially created by allowing for a pause with Windows XP. They realize their mistake and they are fixing it.
And yeah, the bottom 1/3rd of the Windows market, which shouldn't have been part of the midrange in the first place might go for something cheaper.
How did MS Office become dominant? Because Wordperfect was run by morons who thought that even though Windows was the dominant platform they could just sit on ass and repackage their DOS version and made a buggy POS that bombed.
That is not at all what happened. First off Microsoft Word for DOS at the time of the Windows switch was already a rather good product and quite popular. While it was clearly in 2nd / 3rd place it wasn't coming out of nowhere.
WordPerfect was heavily focused on cross platform and many non DOS versions. They were working on a Windows versions and came out within about a year of Windows 3.0's release. DOS was still the dominant platform when WordPerfect for Windows came out. It wasn't all that much more buggy than any of the word Processors were. Word was a bit faster, and better integrated the all around best experience but AmiPro, WordPerfect... were better and frankly DeScribe was likely the most feature rich least buggy word processor of the time.
Where Microsoft won was price pure and simple. $129 "competitive upgrades" for an entire office suite when most of the competition was selling each component at $495 (retail) was devastating. WordPerfect was hit with a common problem where it made economic sense for them lose marketshare rather than immediately cut prices by 90%. They eventually did offer a product mixed with Borland's Paradox and QuatroPro but by then it was too late.
That's not Outlook, that's an Exchange setting. If you were using Outlook as your gmail client you wouldn't get that either.
2 things;
1) There is a lot of additional syntactic sugar which makes this much easier to use in practice. In theory of course you don't need any syntactic sugar for anything but it helps. Making this easy and uniform for developers is different than bare bones tools
2) The calling functions know how to respond. So a system can come back with "failed require" or "failed ensure" and the caller should know how to respond. Assert just throws an error to the end user. Which means you can embedded these deep into calls and sometimes get useful behaviors.
You are mixing up a lot of things there.
g for global is a scoping issue. I would think you make it an exception and gx where x is the normal type.
Similarly for m and v I'd do another letter: vx where x is the components of the vector.
Also what is reference vs. pointer?
Well no the issue is = (assignment) vs. == logical test. == corresponds to what we use = for in math. So it makes more sense to have = be a logical operator and use something else for assignment.