>
The development from young man who wants nothing to do with responsibility and kings and crowns and gondor and just wants to hang out in the north with his ranger buddies and occasionally come into rivendell and sweet-talk Arwen, into a mature responsible leader ready to fight the worst of the worst and rule the entire free world (in kindness) IS in the book...its just all done in 3rd-party recollections and in appendix A
If it is there, I certainly missed it. In the book he is always sober and ponderous, if not so mature. Certainly your characterisation of him as a youngster seems overblown to me.
>
companies aren't people. Companies generally cannot be relied on to keep promises.
Even if they were like people, people are not reliable too. They might have been a little from Reformation & Counterreformation to, say, the Instant Gratification culture, but they are not now and were never in several other cultures, like most of the Islamic ones for example.
>
they weaseled out of early open source promises
Were such promises ever made? Not doubting you, but I do not remember them being made.
>
things like VM sharing and value classes for Java
Can you provide URLs about these things? I am not familiar with them.
Anyway, agreed about the other examples of broken promises. Just keep in mind some of these are changes of focus that were brough by failure of former plans, not necesssarily by an intention to deceive. Granted they could have fared better had they been more open from the start.
>
academic research would all but stop, because the only product it produces is information, and the value of that information is drastically reduced.
Wrong on both accounts.
Academy nowadays is involved on creating much more than simple information, but is actually very often a part of the product development cycle. This would not stop, because companies still need products. But if it did, it would be good, because this corrupts academy, as argued by Dijkstra.
Then, the value of information would not be reduced to the general public, but its price would be reduced to corporate interests. That would be as it should be: academy should produce information to everyone fit to use that information, no matter how much one can pay for it.
Sure some areas would suffer from the absence of patents, but then so many areas are suffering now by the absurd application of the absurd IP idea.
Remember, IP is just a propaganda term. What we do have is copy rights, trademarks and patents, and they are government-granted, not natural, monopolies.
I am not against copy rights, trademarks and patents. But I do believe they should be much more limited in scope and time extension than they are now.
But it has already alienated lots of free software developers by not including an integrated X Window server, by a half-baked, half-hearted attempt of capitalising on the Open Source meme, and by repeatedly screwing their users in general -- think charging full price for 10.2, breaking the promise on iTools, etc.
Moreover MS W32 is being phased out by MS itself in favor of.Net, which Apple does not plan to support.
It may be too late for Apple, with only 3% market share, no open platform to run on, no OEMs to lower costs, cater for niche markets or simply generally popularise the platform, no cross-platform strategy.
But what I think might yet save Apple is to make Mac OS X copyleft under the GNU GPL; adopt Mono and WINE; integrate a X Window server; sell proprietary licenses of Mac OS X and of the Macintosh unified common reference design to willing OEMs all over the world.
>
their business is built on taking open source software proprietary
Just as everyone else, including MS. This at worst makes Sun as bad as MS, not worse. Anyway this was truer at the SunOS = 5, AKA Solaris >= 2, is based on AT&T Unix), and they also contributed a lot with NFS, NIS and other such stuff.
>
their broken promises over Java and Java's future
Never assign to ill faith what can be explained by incompetence (Napoleon). But what do you have in mind?
Without licensing Mac OS X they always get late or not at all to this kind of nice stuff, be it a breakthrough or just a niche product.
It is so late in the game now, with they holding only 3% of the market, that possibly their only chance now would be to release Mac OS X as free software (all of it, not only Darwin) and charge only for custom development, proprietary licensing and reference system design.
Yet bad companies do get sued more often than ones that still try to do good. That is, they would if there were still companies trying to do good, which I do not rule out but seriously doubt.
ot even the Wall Street Journal reports on every little piddling lawsuit that every single Fortune 500 company is involved in.
This is not any Fortune 500 company, but a high-visibility one.
This is not only a high-visibility Fortune 500 company, but one with a bad enough history.
This is also a mean, high-profile big company that happens to be in direct, ruthless, dishonest competition with the main public of Slashdot, that is, free software hackers, users and friends.
>
if the SmartPhone works as well as my Toshiba e740 PocketPC (crash crash crash)
It does crashes a lot, besides not installing unsigned apps, being slow and having several other problems.
Looks like MS took an unfinished product from Sendo and launched it thru other outlets. I would not be surprised if Sendo had left it unfinished on purpose, either that or MS did not let them have access to the source code to fix it and them they called it quits.
>
any small companies that MS has had dealings with that they haven't royally screwed over?
Not only small. IBM, Sybase, Orange... I think even Spyglass was not so small at the time.
Re:Just ignorance, nothing more
on
Linus Is A Hero
·
· Score: 2
>
The American public is, at the base, ignorant of computers.
This is not about computers, but culture in general and History in particular. History of computing, but bigger than computers and yet not technical at all.
BTW, has nothing to do with the Americas in general or the USNA in particular, as this is a Dutch site without even an English version.
>
Linus was the original bootloader writer
He, he was not only the bootloaderwriter, he is the kernelwriter and maintainer. The bootloaders are called LILO or GRUB, not Linux.
>
The flash file format is open and documented, there's no reason your platform shouldn't have a Flash player...
Let us see, a big, complex product is developed. Several years of develpment after, one gradually releases information about its formats. Interoperable implementations suddenly sprout everywhere, so no one is shut off and therefore all web designers can use it. Not!
>
that's your problem, not Macromedia's.
Neither of us have a problem, but the webdesigner that abuses the system by using nonstandard, immature formats.
Remember, nothing is a standard until it has at least two interoperable independent implementations. Until then it has not place in the public Web.
Agreed, but I would go further. Flash should be banned until there are useable free software implementations running in other platforms than Intel. I use testing Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC and Flash simply isn't useable for me.
I would also add:
Wrong Character Codification: MS Win-specific character codes, contents inconsistent with HTML declaration.
Fixed Linesize Text, too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.
Bad Use of Hyphens: character separation should use optional hyphens.
Content Proprietarily Encoded: MS WMA & Office, Real, recent versions of Apple Quicktime.
First, what he slams is not Linux, nor even GNU/Linux, but Gnome and KDE, that run on any reasonable clone of the C library and X Window System. That means GNU/Linux and Hurd, BSDs, even HP-UX and Solaris. And even so, guess what, you have choices. Command line, GNUStep, FLTk, I forget others.
Second, he compares to MS Windows. Should compare to Mac OS X and OS/2, perhaps Amiga.
Third, what he means by different? Appearance or functionality? In either case, it is more up to the particular distribution than a function of how Unix is. The key here, as so often, is simplicity and modularity. Unix and its clones are both. As simple as you may want it, able to run even on 80206s (ELKS), but one can add and configure modules to be as functional and as eye dazzling as anything.
The catch is, as always, in policy: getting developers and SysAdmins to code and configure consistently their UIs. Until the DWII (Desktop Wars II) settles down, and all of Gnome, KDE, and probably one or two others get stable and fully functional, including UI designer guidelines, this will not happen.
But it does not stop at development. There is distribution -- Red Hat nullifying is a step in the right direction, like taking Debian policies one step further; if and when Debian does the same it would be heaven, Debian currently does all the plumbing OK but fails miserably at the UI.
And there is SysAdministration, which begins at the distro but takes all the system life. Something along the original Homebrew Computer Club would be nice: a nice little server farm with two or three fat, multiprocessed servers in some basement in the building, block or neighborhood and people with cheap, silent, cool, visually dazzling, maintenance-free X terminals in each room. Only gamers and developers need their own systems, and perhaps not. With the Hurd, perhaps not even kernel (system) developers would need their own systems.
>
who, if not Philo Farnsworth, submitted a concept paper on the subject of television
Seldom concept papers, or even demonstrations, account for inventions if they are not followed up on, even because inventions are used as propaganda devices.
So a Brasilian priest, Francisco João de Azevedo, invented the typewriter, even producing a wooden prototype with his pocket knife in 1.861. But he never had the money to build it on iron and have a patent on it.
Another priest from Brasil, Roberto Landell de Moura, conceived the radiotransmission of telegraph, sound and images in the 1.880s, making a radiophony demonstration in 1.893, getting a Brasilian patent in 1.901 and US ones in 1.904. But again a Northerner, Marconi, was nearer to the sources of capital and publicity. The same priest invented the triode.
Speaking of telephony, it was invented by an Italian immigrant to NY, Antonio Meucci, in 1.855.
And there is the Portuguese priest in Brasil, Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, who created the hot air balloon before the Montgolfier brethren in 1.709. This time it was not obscurity, but Inquisition who cut the carreer of the inventor short.
Practical photography seems to be invented by a Frenchman in Brasil, Hércules Florence, in 1.832, but the first experiments were done in France itself in 1.826 by Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce.
>
Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor living in Paris, flew a heavier-than-air craft (the 14-Bis) years before the Wright Flyer left the ground.
In the case of Santos-Dumont, he did invented the dirigible, demonstrated the heavier-than-air flight publicly much earlier than the Wright brothers, and created the aileron and the ultralight aircraft. But the Wright brothers spoiled their earlier and more successful first flight by trying to make a patent and big bucks on it to the exclusion of everyone else. Santos-Dumont refused to patent anything, being altruistic to the point of diversion. He also gave his friend Cartier the idea for the wristwratch, among other inventions.
What cut short Santos-Dumont was not his obsession with dirigibles, which indeed dominated long-range air transport until the Hindenburg catastrophe, but illness and lack of ambitions of wealth. Even if his greatest achievements took place in the first years of the XX century, he was one of the last inventors of the old XIX century, whose work consumed their wealth instead of being devised to hoard more.
>
Think how few docs now use any sort of templates or employ style sheets.
Agreed about your point, but I want to point out a reason I consider to be partial explanation for the fact.
Templates and stylesheets in MS Office are difficult to use, do not work at all for complex stuff, and break from one version to another.
When I used MS Word for DOS and OS/2, from versions 3 to 5.5, we had stylesheets and templates as separate things. Templates were just documents set aside as documents. Stylesheets were separate files that contained only the style definitions and formatting. You could easily apply different stylesheets to any document, thus getting the desired output.
When MS Word for Windows, in its version 6 if memory does not fail me, merged templates and stylesheets, chaos ensued. I could not convert my old documents properly. I failed to reproduce the efficiency of the old work flow. I had been educating fellow users on the benefits of structuring and separating formatting onto stylesheets much before I heard of LaTe or SGML, but now even myself could not make it work. Even when I could structure complex documents, they would break in other systems. Never again I could separate content and formatting, and apply different stylesheets to the same document.
I have heard about Microsoft systems that they are a matter of luck. That some people (whom I never met) have bulletproof systems (I doubt) and some others have just bad luck. Even if it was true, which I doubt, it would still be a comment on the sad state of things that so much depends on sheer luck. As it is, the better explanation I find about these so different perceptions is that some people had knew Unix, DOS and mainframe systems (like I did), and so they find MS-W32 to be worthless; much more people have been reared on DOS and MS-W16, and so find MS-W32 to be the greatest thing on Earth.
>
In my experience (primarily in Europe and Asia), Alphas dominate telcos
I should have qualified. AFAIK Amdocs dominates wireless all over the world as volumes go (biggest customers) and wireline in the US. Wireline is mainframe, wireless HP-UX. It might be that Alpha dominates wireline out of the US, and smaller wireless, or that I am wrong. My experience is with the billing system Amdocs, but I know that operations do use Alphas a lot.
>
I know Apple is currently looking for an alternative to PPC that will allow them to compete with PCs.
First, CPU performance is important only for gamers and big servers, and neither is an important market for Apple. Second, most of performance these days is in building a balanced system, so Apple has to focus more on storage, memory, bus, video and the such. Third, the alternative for Apple may be IBM POWER4 or AMD Opteron or even UltraSPARC, but I cannot see Apple having enough clout to revive neither Alpha, nor MIPS, nor anything else.
>
I don't consider it Digital's mistake not getting Apple onboard, but Apple's mistake rather.
And why not? Legend has that Apple wanted the Alpha badly, and Digital went so far as to plan a notebook version of Alpha around 21264 time, but much before that the deal was dead on water because DEC insisted on Apple building the next Mac OS on OpenVMS, instead of insisting on Taligent, Pink and Copeland. Which probably would have been a good thing as timing goes as each of these projects got cancelled and Mac OS X came too late, but the result would have been a more closed Mac OS then the current one. It would probably have saved the Alpha.
So whom to blame, Apple for refusing to see that OpenVMS was far better then what they had at the time, or Digital for being too wise for its own good?
>
As for Novell, they can barely keep themselves afloat, let alone push the new users to Alpha.
You seem to be under the illusion that I am talking current events, but I am talking ancient History, around 1.99[0-2].
Actually this was the time when Novell was king of the (corporate office automation) PC networking, and wanted to get a scalable Netware. The stumbling block was also OpenVMS, which in retrospect would have been a good thing. Too bad Novell never got Caldera to fly, because that could have been a road to scalability, freedom and performance.
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You don't believe the highest end computer market is lucrative? I'd say NEC, Cray, IBM, and Sun would disagree completely.
I do not say I do not believe, but rather it ain't necessarily so. Cray has to do that, because it can do little else. The others can afford to do some stuff for PR reasons, but HP is in dire straits to justify this stupid blunder. It is putting in risk the cash cows by choosing to go along Intel instead of keeping PA-RISC, Alpha, Unix and its midrange systems as a focus. Itanium will give it no edge, but it may be forced to try to build some Itanium supercomputers to justify its decisions. Keeping the Alpha just for supercomputers is barely a proposition, specially when it is already killing lots of OpenVMS stuff.
Thanks for the info, even if I hoped for something a little bit more/juicy/!;)
OK, so the picture you paint is that the Alpha team was more stable than average, and now it is just the average. So, absent other considerations, it went from top to average, and that is not good in itself.
Moreover, now that Alpha is officially ended, after being all but dead for several years now as far as an architecture with a future goes, what will happen? I do not hope for any of these apple-in-the-sky scenarios of Intel having a change of heart after a Itanium fiasco, but I do think Itanium is already a technical fiasco and always will be, even if the market gobbles it up as it has been doing with everything Intel.
So even if the team is still good enough, while not top notch, I doubt it can make a difference. All this stuff from columnists about Alpha tech making its way into Itanium is but incremental improvements to a doomed enterprise in my view, since their basic philosophies are so opposed to each other. I may be wrong, but I still cherish that Alpha-vs-IA64 paper.
>
I find it hard to understand how intelligent reflective people can accept religion at face value.
Perhaps religion has much more than face value. Perhaps one of all these religions is actually true, historically and philosophically. Perhaps your rationalism cannot be taken at face value too. Perhaps rationalism is just a secular religion, and thus even more self-deceptive than most religions, or just as much as any.
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I understand the need for us as humans to have some rules to play by thereby enhancing our survivability as a specie, but I find the dogma intolerable.
Perhaps dogma exists before the rules, and actually fundament them. Perhaps the rules cannot be agreed upon in the absence of dogma.
In other words, perhaps there is really Something Out There, and perhaps there are really such stuff as Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Beautiful and Ugly, Truth and False..
>
If we want sacred texts the UN declaration of human rights [un.org], or the US Constitution are far better than some obnoxious books like the Bible or the Koran.
Perhaps the UN Declaration or the US Constitution are the byproducts of a semi- or post- or even plainly Christian culture. Perhaps the Bible has stood the test of time better than these pretty recent tests, and besides appeals to much more varied cultures that them.
Perhaps Man being autonomous from God is just a rationalistic Myth, and a bad one at that.
>
That is a widely spread fiction. Only a small handful out of several hundred engineers have left since the Compaq deal with Intel.
Maybe. I would like to see (1) numbers & (2) a qualitative analysis about this.
But yet, there were some high-profile defections, not only after but even before the Compaq deal. There were defections when Digital deteriorated, there were defections when Compaq bought Digital, there were defections when Compaq continued the deterioration trend Digital had started, then again when HP continued even lower, and finally when HP ditched the Alpha in a very high-mannered and questionable, both from technical and business perspectives, decision. Or so was reported at each point.
So I wouldn't discount this as a myth without further evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is there, I certainly missed it. In the book he is always sober and ponderous, if not so mature. Certainly your characterisation of him as a youngster seems overblown to me.
Even if they were like people, people are not reliable too. They might have been a little from Reformation & Counterreformation to, say, the Instant Gratification culture, but they are not now and were never in several other cultures, like most of the Islamic ones for example.
Were such promises ever made? Not doubting you, but I do not remember them being made.
Can you provide URLs about these things? I am not familiar with them.
Anyway, agreed about the other examples of broken promises. Just keep in mind some of these are changes of focus that were brough by failure of former plans, not necesssarily by an intention to deceive. Granted they could have fared better had they been more open from the start.
Wrong on both accounts.
Academy nowadays is involved on creating much more than simple information, but is actually very often a part of the product development cycle. This would not stop, because companies still need products. But if it did, it would be good, because this corrupts academy, as argued by Dijkstra.
Then, the value of information would not be reduced to the general public, but its price would be reduced to corporate interests. That would be as it should be: academy should produce information to everyone fit to use that information, no matter how much one can pay for it.
Sure some areas would suffer from the absence of patents, but then so many areas are suffering now by the absurd application of the absurd IP idea.
Remember, IP is just a propaganda term. What we do have is copy rights, trademarks and patents, and they are government-granted, not natural, monopolies.
I am not against copy rights, trademarks and patents. But I do believe they should be much more limited in scope and time extension than they are now.
Apple tries to woo MS W32 developers.
.Net, which Apple does not plan to support.
But it has already alienated lots of free software developers by not including an integrated X Window server, by a half-baked, half-hearted attempt of capitalising on the Open Source meme, and by repeatedly screwing their users in general -- think charging full price for 10.2, breaking the promise on iTools, etc.
Moreover MS W32 is being phased out by MS itself in favor of
It may be too late for Apple, with only 3% market share, no open platform to run on, no OEMs to lower costs, cater for niche markets or simply generally popularise the platform, no cross-platform strategy.
But what I think might yet save Apple is to make Mac OS X copyleft under the GNU GPL; adopt Mono and WINE; integrate a X Window server; sell proprietary licenses of Mac OS X and of the Macintosh unified common reference design to willing OEMs all over the world.
Just as everyone else, including MS. This at worst makes Sun as bad as MS, not worse. Anyway this was truer at the SunOS = 5, AKA Solaris >= 2, is based on AT&T Unix), and they also contributed a lot with NFS, NIS and other such stuff.
Never assign to ill faith what can be explained by incompetence (Napoleon). But what do you have in mind?
Without licensing Mac OS X they always get late or not at all to this kind of nice stuff, be it a breakthrough or just a niche product.
It is so late in the game now, with they holding only 3% of the market, that possibly their only chance now would be to release Mac OS X as free software (all of it, not only Darwin) and charge only for custom development, proprietary licensing and reference system design.
Does anyone have a list of past cases of MS screwing people and getting away with that?
Just for starters:
Apple: Rip-off
BeOS: Exclusive OEMs
IBM: OS/2
NeXT: Cairo hype
Orange: Smartphone cannon fodder
Sendo: Rip-off
Spyglass: Mosaic & MS IE
Sun: Java & C#
Sybase: SQL Server
Yet bad companies do get sued more often than ones that still try to do good. That is, they would if there were still companies trying to do good, which I do not rule out but seriously doubt.
This is not any Fortune 500 company, but a high-visibility one.
This is not only a high-visibility Fortune 500 company, but one with a bad enough history.
This is also a mean, high-profile big company that happens to be in direct, ruthless, dishonest competition with the main public of Slashdot, that is, free software hackers, users and friends.
People do not install Linux the kernel, they install a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
That said, the answer depends on what he wants to do. One of the nice things with free software is that you have alternatives geared to several ends.
It does crashes a lot, besides not installing unsigned apps, being slow and having several other problems.
Looks like MS took an unfinished product from Sendo and launched it thru other outlets. I would not be surprised if Sendo had left it unfinished on purpose, either that or MS did not let them have access to the source code to fix it and them they called it quits.
Not only small. IBM, Sybase, Orange... I think even Spyglass was not so small at the time.
This is not about computers, but culture in general and History in particular. History of computing, but bigger than computers and yet not technical at all.
BTW, has nothing to do with the Americas in general or the USNA in particular, as this is a Dutch site without even an English version.
He, he was not only the bootloader writer, he is the kernel writer and maintainer. The bootloaders are called LILO or GRUB, not Linux.
I miss both time and competence.
Nothing is a standard until it has at least two independent, interoperable implementations. And it need to be agreed upon by a standards body.
Let us see, a big, complex product is developed. Several years of develpment after, one gradually releases information about its formats. Interoperable implementations suddenly sprout everywhere, so no one is shut off and therefore all web designers can use it. Not!
Neither of us have a problem, but the webdesigner that abuses the system by using nonstandard, immature formats.
Remember, nothing is a standard until it has at least two interoperable independent implementations. Until then it has not place in the public Web.
It's still Intel only...
Agreed, but I would go further. Flash should be banned until there are useable free software implementations running in other platforms than Intel. I use testing Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC and Flash simply isn't useable for me.
I would also add:
Wrong Character Codification: MS Win-specific character codes, contents inconsistent with HTML declaration.
Fixed Linesize Text, too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.
Bad Use of Hyphens: character separation should use optional hyphens.
Content Proprietarily Encoded: MS WMA & Office, Real, recent versions of Apple Quicktime.
First, what he slams is not Linux, nor even GNU/Linux, but Gnome and KDE, that run on any reasonable clone of the C library and X Window System. That means GNU/Linux and Hurd, BSDs, even HP-UX and Solaris. And even so, guess what, you have choices. Command line, GNUStep, FLTk, I forget others.
Second, he compares to MS Windows. Should compare to Mac OS X and OS/2, perhaps Amiga.
Third, what he means by different? Appearance or functionality? In either case, it is more up to the particular distribution than a function of how Unix is. The key here, as so often, is simplicity and modularity. Unix and its clones are both. As simple as you may want it, able to run even on 80206s (ELKS), but one can add and configure modules to be as functional and as eye dazzling as anything.
The catch is, as always, in policy: getting developers and SysAdmins to code and configure consistently their UIs. Until the DWII (Desktop Wars II) settles down, and all of Gnome, KDE, and probably one or two others get stable and fully functional, including UI designer guidelines, this will not happen.
But it does not stop at development. There is distribution -- Red Hat nullifying is a step in the right direction, like taking Debian policies one step further; if and when Debian does the same it would be heaven, Debian currently does all the plumbing OK but fails miserably at the UI.
And there is SysAdministration, which begins at the distro but takes all the system life. Something along the original Homebrew Computer Club would be nice: a nice little server farm with two or three fat, multiprocessed servers in some basement in the building, block or neighborhood and people with cheap, silent, cool, visually dazzling, maintenance-free X terminals in each room. Only gamers and developers need their own systems, and perhaps not. With the Hurd, perhaps not even kernel (system) developers would need their own systems.
Seldom concept papers, or even demonstrations, account for inventions if they are not followed up on, even because inventions are used as propaganda devices.
So a Brasilian priest, Francisco João de Azevedo, invented the typewriter, even producing a wooden prototype with his pocket knife in 1.861. But he never had the money to build it on iron and have a patent on it.
Another priest from Brasil, Roberto Landell de Moura, conceived the radiotransmission of telegraph, sound and images in the 1.880s, making a radiophony demonstration in 1.893, getting a Brasilian patent in 1.901 and US ones in 1.904. But again a Northerner, Marconi, was nearer to the sources of capital and publicity. The same priest invented the triode.
Speaking of telephony, it was invented by an Italian immigrant to NY, Antonio Meucci, in 1.855.
And there is the Portuguese priest in Brasil, Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, who created the hot air balloon before the Montgolfier brethren in 1.709. This time it was not obscurity, but Inquisition who cut the carreer of the inventor short.
Practical photography seems to be invented by a Frenchman in Brasil, Hércules Florence, in 1.832, but the first experiments were done in France itself in 1.826 by Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce.
In the case of Santos-Dumont, he did invented the dirigible, demonstrated the heavier-than-air flight publicly much earlier than the Wright brothers, and created the aileron and the ultralight aircraft. But the Wright brothers spoiled their earlier and more successful first flight by trying to make a patent and big bucks on it to the exclusion of everyone else. Santos-Dumont refused to patent anything, being altruistic to the point of diversion. He also gave his friend Cartier the idea for the wristwratch, among other inventions.
What cut short Santos-Dumont was not his obsession with dirigibles, which indeed dominated long-range air transport until the Hindenburg catastrophe, but illness and lack of ambitions of wealth. Even if his greatest achievements took place in the first years of the XX century, he was one of the last inventors of the old XIX century, whose work consumed their wealth instead of being devised to hoard more.
Agreed about your point, but I want to point out a reason I consider to be partial explanation for the fact.
Templates and stylesheets in MS Office are difficult to use, do not work at all for complex stuff, and break from one version to another.
When I used MS Word for DOS and OS/2, from versions 3 to 5.5, we had stylesheets and templates as separate things. Templates were just documents set aside as documents. Stylesheets were separate files that contained only the style definitions and formatting. You could easily apply different stylesheets to any document, thus getting the desired output.
When MS Word for Windows, in its version 6 if memory does not fail me, merged templates and stylesheets, chaos ensued. I could not convert my old documents properly. I failed to reproduce the efficiency of the old work flow. I had been educating fellow users on the benefits of structuring and separating formatting onto stylesheets much before I heard of LaTe or SGML, but now even myself could not make it work. Even when I could structure complex documents, they would break in other systems. Never again I could separate content and formatting, and apply different stylesheets to the same document.
I have heard about Microsoft systems that they are a matter of luck. That some people (whom I never met) have bulletproof systems (I doubt) and some others have just bad luck. Even if it was true, which I doubt, it would still be a comment on the sad state of things that so much depends on sheer luck. As it is, the better explanation I find about these so different perceptions is that some people had knew Unix, DOS and mainframe systems (like I did), and so they find MS-W32 to be worthless; much more people have been reared on DOS and MS-W16, and so find MS-W32 to be the greatest thing on Earth.
Might well be. I once worked at a CDMA operator who had at least to Alphas, but they were running Digital Unix.
I should have qualified. AFAIK Amdocs dominates wireless all over the world as volumes go (biggest customers) and wireline in the US. Wireline is mainframe, wireless HP-UX. It might be that Alpha dominates wireline out of the US, and smaller wireless, or that I am wrong. My experience is with the billing system Amdocs, but I know that operations do use Alphas a lot.
First, CPU performance is important only for gamers and big servers, and neither is an important market for Apple. Second, most of performance these days is in building a balanced system, so Apple has to focus more on storage, memory, bus, video and the such. Third, the alternative for Apple may be IBM POWER4 or AMD Opteron or even UltraSPARC, but I cannot see Apple having enough clout to revive neither Alpha, nor MIPS, nor anything else.
And why not? Legend has that Apple wanted the Alpha badly, and Digital went so far as to plan a notebook version of Alpha around 21264 time, but much before that the deal was dead on water because DEC insisted on Apple building the next Mac OS on OpenVMS, instead of insisting on Taligent, Pink and Copeland. Which probably would have been a good thing as timing goes as each of these projects got cancelled and Mac OS X came too late, but the result would have been a more closed Mac OS then the current one. It would probably have saved the Alpha.
So whom to blame, Apple for refusing to see that OpenVMS was far better then what they had at the time, or Digital for being too wise for its own good?
You seem to be under the illusion that I am talking current events, but I am talking ancient History, around 1.99[0-2].
Actually this was the time when Novell was king of the (corporate office automation) PC networking, and wanted to get a scalable Netware. The stumbling block was also OpenVMS, which in retrospect would have been a good thing. Too bad Novell never got Caldera to fly, because that could have been a road to scalability, freedom and performance.
I do not say I do not believe, but rather it ain't necessarily so. Cray has to do that, because it can do little else. The others can afford to do some stuff for PR reasons, but HP is in dire straits to justify this stupid blunder. It is putting in risk the cash cows by choosing to go along Intel instead of keeping PA-RISC, Alpha, Unix and its midrange systems as a focus. Itanium will give it no edge, but it may be forced to try to build some Itanium supercomputers to justify its decisions. Keeping the Alpha just for supercomputers is barely a proposition, specially when it is already killing lots of OpenVMS stuff.
Thanks for the info, even if I hoped for something a little bit more /juicy/! ;)
OK, so the picture you paint is that the Alpha team was more stable than average, and now it is just the average. So, absent other considerations, it went from top to average, and that is not good in itself.
Moreover, now that Alpha is officially ended, after being all but dead for several years now as far as an architecture with a future goes, what will happen? I do not hope for any of these apple-in-the-sky scenarios of Intel having a change of heart after a Itanium fiasco, but I do think Itanium is already a technical fiasco and always will be, even if the market gobbles it up as it has been doing with everything Intel.
So even if the team is still good enough, while not top notch, I doubt it can make a difference. All this stuff from columnists about Alpha tech making its way into Itanium is but incremental improvements to a doomed enterprise in my view, since their basic philosophies are so opposed to each other. I may be wrong, but I still cherish that Alpha-vs-IA64 paper.
Perhaps religion has much more than face value. Perhaps one of all these religions is actually true, historically and philosophically. Perhaps your rationalism cannot be taken at face value too. Perhaps rationalism is just a secular religion, and thus even more self-deceptive than most religions, or just as much as any.
Perhaps dogma exists before the rules, and actually fundament them. Perhaps the rules cannot be agreed upon in the absence of dogma.
In other words, perhaps there is really Something Out There, and perhaps there are really such stuff as Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Beautiful and Ugly, Truth and False..
Perhaps the UN Declaration or the US Constitution are the byproducts of a semi- or post- or even plainly Christian culture. Perhaps the Bible has stood the test of time better than these pretty recent tests, and besides appeals to much more varied cultures that them.
Perhaps Man being autonomous from God is just a rationalistic Myth, and a bad one at that.
Perhaps.