"SCO puts the backwards into backwards compatible."
This used to be a real advantage... we used to run Xenix-286 software from 1984 on SCO Unixware, and if you had a real need to run some program from the '80s it was the bomb. But this isn't something that's going to get you a lot of new customers... it's something that locks your existing customers in to you.
But they've dropped x286emul, so that's really not a good point for him to be bringing up any more. I'm still smarting over that.
8) SCO won't fork and they have a unified code that is really UNIX.
Unified?
Last time I looked at SCO, around 2000 or 2001, administering it still involved half a dozen different legacy user interfaces, a mix of command line, curses, and Motif/CDE tools. And the software behind them was equally fragmented. Old SCO did a lot of good stuff but that backwards compatibility made it very hard for them to really create an integrated system. It doesn't have the "lego with bits missing" feel of Linux, it's more a "held together by paint" feel, kind of like Windows...
Hey Peter, thanks for writing - check out http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/ on the left hand side is 'Shared Source Programs' link with links to all our programs. We also have over 600 various.NET components that are open off of gotdotnet.com.
Looking at that web page makes it clear that he's using the word "program" the way it is in "school lunch program"... some kind of ongoing business endeavour.
So in that context what I think he means is something like "99% of the projects distributed under these programs have...".
I've asked him for clarification of what particular programs count as freely redistributable in Microsoft's sense of the word, but he hasn't replaied yet.
Well, he's basically right on the distinction between open source and open standards. You can have open source software that is not an open standard... for example, the only practical way to interoperate with rsync is with another copy of rsync... the protocol itself is only documented in the source code. You can have closed-source software that implements open standards: UNIX itself fell into that category, and Microsoft has actually created a number of widely used open standards.
But I have a similar reaction to you. If Microsoft strongly supported the promotion of open standards the Samba folks wouldn't have had to reverse-engineer SMB, you would never have needed to sign anything to get the skinny on any of their published protocols and interfaces, and so on.
Microsoft's support for OpenGL has always been poor. The interface they provide for OpenGL apps originally only allowed you to accelerate one screen on a multi-monitor box. I think this is still the case, despite the fact that Apple and others handle multiple OpenGL cards with no problems. They basically forced the flight simulator crowd to switch to DirectX just by doing that.
What surprises most people when I tell them about our Shared Source program is that 99% of the >70 programs have full redistribution and modification rights.
That would surprise me too. I'd like to see the licenses on the >69.3 programs (if my calculation is correct) he's referring to.
4200 RPM laptop drive. Going to an external drive, even with firewire overhead, improves disk benchmarks by 75%. Since it's a crippled unexpandable box, that's the best you can do without fabricating a new case and extending the IDE cable.
The video ports are low-power, leading to problems driving standard DVI and VGA displays.
The USB ports are low-power. You can't even charge an iPod Shuffle reliabily without an external powered hub.
The $500 version doesn't have a wireless card.
I already accounted for the video card and firewire in my calculations. The Mac mini has a 32M Radeon 9200: a 64M Radeon 9200 costs $30. A firewire card is $5.
Norton Antivirus is $40 + $10/year after the first year.
My Mac mini along with two external firewire cases, a powered USB hub, and the associated four power supplies is getting up to the size of a small PC, and is a lot more cumbersome to manage.
My Zire 31 does everything the original did, plus color and MP3s.
How about being able to go a month on a pair of AAAs?
Palm started out doing a pretty good job with the ARM processor, but they've totally dropped the ball on it since. Today your ARM CPU is still running all your apps in 68000 emulation, and the native ARM OS seems further away than ever now they're talking Linux. And there's nothing that I want to do on a PDA that a 68000 won't do as well as an ARM, which is why I went back to the Sony SJ22 - decent battery life, ample RAM, and a thumb control so I can comfortably read a document that's more than a page long without holding it at some weird angle.
You forgot to factor in your time to source the replacements, and install the parts [...]
You forgot to factor in your time to fabricate a larger case for the Mac mini so you can install a 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive instead of the low-power laptop drive it's using.
Besides, someone else already beat you to the goalpost.
I really like my Mac mini, but I'd rather have it in a bit more expandible form factor.
It's not perfect, but from a pragmatic POV it's rarely a problem for me.
After a quarter of a century waiting for and working for an operating system that didn't suck that actually had quality polished applications, well, I'm not so pragmatic about going backwards as I used to be.
If there was something really nifty about Linux, to counter the things that aren't, like a genuinely interesting design, that'd be one thing. But it's no AmigaDOS, it's not even an NT kernel (whcih is an interesting system, and it's a shame that you can't get it without all the Win32 crap).
So there isn't anything to really like about Linux except that there's up-to-date Java. And since Java itself has negative value for me, too, there's no contest.
If I were in the market for a box like that I'd probably get one, but everything about the mini is too slow or too small for my needs.
And are you sure the Powermac G5 has that much of a "Mac Tax"? It's a pretty speedy machine, and when I was looking at comparable Athlon64 boxes it was closer to 50% than 100%...
Its merely that XP Home is a deliberately limited piece of software that would have many users chafing at the boundarys.
In that it's only marginally different from XP Professional, but that's beside the point. The same thing is true of the Mac mini hardware, and I know for a fact that the crippled video and low performance hard drive has cost it sales as a result. Neither the Mac mini not the Walmart Economy PC are anything but entry-level computers.
We're not talking about Atlon 64s or G5s. You can easily pay more just for an AMD or Intel CPU than for the whole Mac mini. We're talking about low end entry level machines, and in that realm the Mac mini is about 50% more expensive than an entry level PC... and it's remarkable that Apple's been willing to reduce the Mac Tax that much.
But the Mac Tax is still there. It's real. It's what's allowed Apple to produce the software and hardware that makes the Mac attractive, and no matter what the processor inside it's not going away.
I guess I just don't assign that much negative value to Linux.
That's because you haven't been using BSD for a quarter of a century.
The difference between a complete operating system and a kernel is immense, and the way Linux bridges the gap by abandoning the very idea of a core and leaving it up to the distros has led to the same kind of fragmentation that almost destroyed UNIX in far less time.
FreeBSD is pretty good, but there's less commercial software than there is for Linux.
I do that shit for a living. I want a computer that just works, even if I have to work pretty hard to get it... once I got it, it's pretty good. Well, except for Applescript. Applescript is kind of like what Larry Wall would come up with if he had to reinvent COBOL.
BeOS was pre-doomed.
AmigaOS is just resting, honest.
VMS... no, no more DCL for me, thanks.
I do have a PDP-11, I could run RT-11 or RSX on that...
How would putting "blocks of color" over the buildings, like the ones over the white house, help CSIRO? The resolution of the CSIRO images are pretty low, and things like the layout of the fences are probably more important for them.
Or, depending on the performance you need, a used G4 might cut it.
But one way or another you'll have to compromise. I switched from a 1.7 GHz P4 motherboard clone I'd put together to an unsupported Mac with a G3/400 upgrade, and it was worth it to me. You can now get a used G4/500, maybe a dual, for what I ended up putting into it.
The people using Netscape 4 are probably still using Windows 98 as well. Maybe NT4 if they're in an office situation. Or maybe Mac OS 9 or some non-free UNIX variant, but those are real outliers these days. And they all have alternatives, even if it's only iCab.
I suspect there's more people using IE5 than Netscape 4, because if you're using Netscape 4 you at least at some point installed a browser. If you installed a browser once it's at least conceivable you'll install another one.
If this stuff has problems on IE5, that's a much bigger problem, because anyone using IE5 has not only never installed a new browser, they aren't running software update either.
Thank you for playing the "I'm not going to compare entry level PCs with entry level Macs, I'm going to sit there and insist that you load the PC with everything you get on the Mac, and I'm not going to insist you load the Mac with everything you get on the PC" game.
I've already been more than generous there. I upgraded the video and added firewire and didn't add a USB floppy drive and an iMic so you could get the audio in that's missing from the Mac mini.
But if you're going to play the "but the PC doesn't have..." game, I'll play along:
I'll add $200 for XP Pro, but only if you add 3 PCI slots and an AGP slot to the Mac mini. Then I'll spring for software to compete with iLife, but you have to add an extra IDE bus, 3 3.5" internal bays, 2 5.25" external bays.
Or we could go back to the start, because by the time you finished your Mac mini would be a Powermac G5.
If the OpenGL implementation you're using on a windows machine is hardware accelerated, you aren't using Microsoft's implemenatation of OpenGL; you are using your hardware vendor's implemenation.
I'm sorry, but I completely fail to see what your point is.
I didn't say "Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is broken".
I said "Microsoft's support for OpenGL is broken".
It doesn't matter whose implementation of OpenGL is being used, when you're communicating with it using an operating system that doesn't support it properly.
If I stuck two OpenGL cards in a Mac, or an SGI or Sun workstation, I could get OpenGL accelerated graphics on both cards. If I stuck them in a Windows box, I couldn't. Why? Because Microsoft decided I couldn't. It wasn't ATI or nVidia who thought it was a great idea for DirectX to work on multiple monitors, it was Microsoft.
You might as well say all Fords are defective because they don't use Chevy engines.
If Ford came out with a new engine that required a different kind of gasoline, not because they worked any better than Chevy or Chrysler or Toyota or Volkswagen engines, but because Ford wanted to make it harder for Chevy or Chrysler or Toyota or Volkswagen owners to get gas unless they traded their car in for one with a Chevy engine... maybe.
I bet you stay awake at night complaining about how Panasonic VCRs are broken because they don't use your beta tapes.
Beta vs VHS, maybe, except Microsoft is in the position of actually having succeeded at what Sony only tried to do with Beta.
You say that like you think I don't agree. I just said that the problem isn't OpenGL, it's Windows. Windows is broken because it doesn't use OpenGL as the basis of its graphics acceleration. The effect is that software writers are discouraged from using OpenGL.
It's like when Microsoft deliberately refused to support OpenGL on multiple monitors, to force flight simulators to use DirectX. OpenGL wasn't broken: Apple supported OpenGL on multiple monitors just fine.
XP era vendor provided OpenGL ICD's force Windows to fall back into a compositing mode compatible with non LMMD drivers.
If Windows was using OpenGL compositing, instead of their proprietary graphics architecture, this wouldn't be a problem.
OSX doesn't need to, because it's not using a graphics subsystem designed to break the open graphics standard everyone was already using and lock developers into Windows.
Don't blame the graphics card vendors for this, it's Microsoft that's responsible for the problem. They've been working assiduously for years to set things up so that problems like this arise.
XP era vendor supplied OpenGL implementations don't support virtualization of the graphics hardware. This isn't a problem when you don't have to share the 3d hardware, but it is a problem when you've got a multi-tasking operating system that uses the 3d to render content for every application running.
Funny, Mac OS X doesn't seem to have a problem with the same vendor-supplied OpenGL all the way back to the Radeon 7000 and whatever the corresponding nVidia software is.
Cheap PC with Windows Home Edition and monitor included - $400 (they have stacks of boxes like this at Walmart) Subtract cost of cheap monitor - $300 Add Radeon 9200 - $330 (since they usually have some generic Intel graphics) Add firewire - $335
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5) SCO is more backwards compatible.
"SCO puts the backwards into backwards compatible."
This used to be a real advantage... we used to run Xenix-286 software from 1984 on SCO Unixware, and if you had a real need to run some program from the '80s it was the bomb. But this isn't something that's going to get you a lot of new customers... it's something that locks your existing customers in to you.
But they've dropped x286emul, so that's really not a good point for him to be bringing up any more. I'm still smarting over that.
8) SCO won't fork and they have a unified code that is really UNIX.
Unified?
Last time I looked at SCO, around 2000 or 2001, administering it still involved half a dozen different legacy user interfaces, a mix of command line, curses, and Motif/CDE tools. And the software behind them was equally fragmented. Old SCO did a lot of good stuff but that backwards compatibility made it very hard for them to really create an integrated system. It doesn't have the "lego with bits missing" feel of Linux, it's more a "held together by paint" feel, kind of like Windows...
I just asked Bill about this and he responded:
.NET components that are open off of gotdotnet.com.
Hey Peter, thanks for writing - check out http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/ on the left hand side is 'Shared Source Programs' link with links to all our programs. We also have over 600 various
Looking at that web page makes it clear that he's using the word "program" the way it is in "school lunch program"... some kind of ongoing business endeavour.
So in that context what I think he means is something like "99% of the projects distributed under these programs have...".
I've asked him for clarification of what particular programs count as freely redistributable in Microsoft's sense of the word, but he hasn't replaied yet.
Well, he's basically right on the distinction between open source and open standards. You can have open source software that is not an open standard... for example, the only practical way to interoperate with rsync is with another copy of rsync... the protocol itself is only documented in the source code. You can have closed-source software that implements open standards: UNIX itself fell into that category, and Microsoft has actually created a number of widely used open standards.
But I have a similar reaction to you. If Microsoft strongly supported the promotion of open standards the Samba folks wouldn't have had to reverse-engineer SMB, you would never have needed to sign anything to get the skinny on any of their published protocols and interfaces, and so on.
Look - they recently broke OpenGL [...]
Microsoft's support for OpenGL has always been poor. The interface they provide for OpenGL apps originally only allowed you to accelerate one screen on a multi-monitor box. I think this is still the case, despite the fact that Apple and others handle multiple OpenGL cards with no problems. They basically forced the flight simulator crowd to switch to DirectX just by doing that.
What surprises most people when I tell them about our Shared Source program is that 99% of the >70 programs have full redistribution and modification rights.
That would surprise me too. I'd like to see the licenses on the >69.3 programs (if my calculation is correct) he's referring to.
The mini is hardly cripled, is it?
4200 RPM laptop drive. Going to an external drive, even with firewire overhead, improves disk benchmarks by 75%. Since it's a crippled unexpandable box, that's the best you can do without fabricating a new case and extending the IDE cable.
The video ports are low-power, leading to problems driving standard DVI and VGA displays.
The USB ports are low-power. You can't even charge an iPod Shuffle reliabily without an external powered hub.
The $500 version doesn't have a wireless card.
I already accounted for the video card and firewire in my calculations. The Mac mini has a 32M Radeon 9200: a 64M Radeon 9200 costs $30. A firewire card is $5.
Norton Antivirus is $40 + $10/year after the first year.
My Mac mini along with two external firewire cases, a powered USB hub, and the associated four power supplies is getting up to the size of a small PC, and is a lot more cumbersome to manage.
Yes, I think "crippled" is the right word.
My Zire 31 does everything the original did, plus color and MP3s.
How about being able to go a month on a pair of AAAs?
Palm started out doing a pretty good job with the ARM processor, but they've totally dropped the ball on it since. Today your ARM CPU is still running all your apps in 68000 emulation, and the native ARM OS seems further away than ever now they're talking Linux. And there's nothing that I want to do on a PDA that a 68000 won't do as well as an ARM, which is why I went back to the Sony SJ22 - decent battery life, ample RAM, and a thumb control so I can comfortably read a document that's more than a page long without holding it at some weird angle.
You forgot to factor in your time to source the replacements, and install the parts [...]
You forgot to factor in your time to fabricate a larger case for the Mac mini so you can install a 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive instead of the low-power laptop drive it's using.
Besides, someone else already beat you to the goalpost.
I really like my Mac mini, but I'd rather have it in a bit more expandible form factor.
Powermac G5 dual 2GHz - US$2000.
HP d4100 with dual-core - US$1500 with rebate.
That's less of a difference than I expected.
The problem, again, is that Apple has a realy funky product line. Not that the Mac Tax is outrageous for what they do have.
It's not perfect, but from a pragmatic POV it's rarely a problem for me.
After a quarter of a century waiting for and working for an operating system that didn't suck that actually had quality polished applications, well, I'm not so pragmatic about going backwards as I used to be.
If there was something really nifty about Linux, to counter the things that aren't, like a genuinely interesting design, that'd be one thing. But it's no AmigaDOS, it's not even an NT kernel (whcih is an interesting system, and it's a shame that you can't get it without all the Win32 crap).
So there isn't anything to really like about Linux except that there's up-to-date Java. And since Java itself has negative value for me, too, there's no contest.
If I were in the market for a box like that I'd probably get one, but everything about the mini is too slow or too small for my needs.
And are you sure the Powermac G5 has that much of a "Mac Tax"? It's a pretty speedy machine, and when I was looking at comparable Athlon64 boxes it was closer to 50% than 100%...
Its merely that XP Home is a deliberately limited piece of software that would have many users chafing at the boundarys.
In that it's only marginally different from XP Professional, but that's beside the point. The same thing is true of the Mac mini hardware, and I know for a fact that the crippled video and low performance hard drive has cost it sales as a result. Neither the Mac mini not the Walmart Economy PC are anything but entry-level computers.
We're not talking about Atlon 64s or G5s. You can easily pay more just for an AMD or Intel CPU than for the whole Mac mini. We're talking about low end entry level machines, and in that realm the Mac mini is about 50% more expensive than an entry level PC... and it's remarkable that Apple's been willing to reduce the Mac Tax that much.
But the Mac Tax is still there. It's real. It's what's allowed Apple to produce the software and hardware that makes the Mac attractive, and no matter what the processor inside it's not going away.
I guess I just don't assign that much negative value to Linux.
That's because you haven't been using BSD for a quarter of a century.
The difference between a complete operating system and a kernel is immense, and the way Linux bridges the gap by abandoning the very idea of a core and leaving it up to the distros has led to the same kind of fragmentation that almost destroyed UNIX in far less time.
I'd use OS X up to about a 50% premium.
With the Mac mini, it about hit that point.
Then again maybe they'd allow Pix to get ported over to the appliances?
Um, the PIX pretty much started as a PC running a custom OS. Porting that to the Nokia boxes would be pointless.
Boy would I laugh if Cisco bought Nokia and trashed the Checkpoint-based firewalls.
Who said anything about Windows? :)
Linux has a pretty high negative value, too.
FreeBSD is pretty good, but there's less commercial software than there is for Linux.
I do that shit for a living. I want a computer that just works, even if I have to work pretty hard to get it... once I got it, it's pretty good. Well, except for Applescript. Applescript is kind of like what Larry Wall would come up with if he had to reinvent COBOL.
BeOS was pre-doomed.
AmigaOS is just resting, honest.
VMS... no, no more DCL for me, thanks.
I do have a PDP-11, I could run RT-11 or RSX on that...
It's not that I place an infinite value on OSX, it's that I place a significant negative value on Windows.
How would putting "blocks of color" over the buildings, like the ones over the white house, help CSIRO? The resolution of the CSIRO images are pretty low, and things like the layout of the fences are probably more important for them.
A dual-G4 may have cut it, but all else being I prefer to avoid eBay and I prefer to get a machine that's under warranty.
:)
I don't do eBay either, I've had enough problems with personal sales when I've known the guy who I'm dealing with.
I'm talking about places like Powermax.
a dual-G4 would be significantly slower than the Athlon64 I got
You think my G3/400 wasn't?
You can actually get dual display from an eMac using Screen Spanning Doctor.
Or, depending on the performance you need, a used G4 might cut it.
But one way or another you'll have to compromise. I switched from a 1.7 GHz P4 motherboard clone I'd put together to an unsupported Mac with a G3/400 upgrade, and it was worth it to me. You can now get a used G4/500, maybe a dual, for what I ended up putting into it.
The people using Netscape 4 are probably still using Windows 98 as well. Maybe NT4 if they're in an office situation. Or maybe Mac OS 9 or some non-free UNIX variant, but those are real outliers these days. And they all have alternatives, even if it's only iCab.
I suspect there's more people using IE5 than Netscape 4, because if you're using Netscape 4 you at least at some point installed a browser. If you installed a browser once it's at least conceivable you'll install another one.
If this stuff has problems on IE5, that's a much bigger problem, because anyone using IE5 has not only never installed a new browser, they aren't running software update either.
Thank you for playing the "I'm not going to compare entry level PCs with entry level Macs, I'm going to sit there and insist that you load the PC with everything you get on the Mac, and I'm not going to insist you load the Mac with everything you get on the PC" game.
I've already been more than generous there. I upgraded the video and added firewire and didn't add a USB floppy drive and an iMic so you could get the audio in that's missing from the Mac mini.
But if you're going to play the "but the PC doesn't have..." game, I'll play along:
I'll add $200 for XP Pro, but only if you add 3 PCI slots and an AGP slot to the Mac mini. Then I'll spring for software to compete with iLife, but you have to add an extra IDE bus, 3 3.5" internal bays, 2 5.25" external bays.
Or we could go back to the start, because by the time you finished your Mac mini would be a Powermac G5.
If the OpenGL implementation you're using on a windows machine is hardware accelerated, you aren't using Microsoft's implemenatation of OpenGL; you are using your hardware vendor's implemenation.
I'm sorry, but I completely fail to see what your point is.
I didn't say "Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL is broken".
I said "Microsoft's support for OpenGL is broken".
It doesn't matter whose implementation of OpenGL is being used, when you're communicating with it using an operating system that doesn't support it properly.
If I stuck two OpenGL cards in a Mac, or an SGI or Sun workstation, I could get OpenGL accelerated graphics on both cards. If I stuck them in a Windows box, I couldn't. Why? Because Microsoft decided I couldn't. It wasn't ATI or nVidia who thought it was a great idea for DirectX to work on multiple monitors, it was Microsoft.
You might as well say all Fords are defective because they don't use Chevy engines.
If Ford came out with a new engine that required a different kind of gasoline, not because they worked any better than Chevy or Chrysler or Toyota or Volkswagen engines, but because Ford wanted to make it harder for Chevy or Chrysler or Toyota or Volkswagen owners to get gas unless they traded their car in for one with a Chevy engine... maybe.
I bet you stay awake at night complaining about how Panasonic VCRs are broken because they don't use your beta tapes.
Beta vs VHS, maybe, except Microsoft is in the position of actually having succeeded at what Sony only tried to do with Beta.
OpenGL on windows is not broken.
You say that like you think I don't agree. I just said that the problem isn't OpenGL, it's Windows. Windows is broken because it doesn't use OpenGL as the basis of its graphics acceleration. The effect is that software writers are discouraged from using OpenGL.
It's like when Microsoft deliberately refused to support OpenGL on multiple monitors, to force flight simulators to use DirectX. OpenGL wasn't broken: Apple supported OpenGL on multiple monitors just fine.
XP era vendor provided OpenGL ICD's force Windows to fall back into a compositing mode compatible with non LMMD drivers.
If Windows was using OpenGL compositing, instead of their proprietary graphics architecture, this wouldn't be a problem.
OSX doesn't virtualize the 3d hardware.
OSX doesn't need to, because it's not using a graphics subsystem designed to break the open graphics standard everyone was already using and lock developers into Windows.
Don't blame the graphics card vendors for this, it's Microsoft that's responsible for the problem. They've been working assiduously for years to set things up so that problems like this arise.
XP era vendor supplied OpenGL implementations don't support virtualization of the graphics hardware. This isn't a problem when you don't have to share the 3d hardware, but it is a problem when you've got a multi-tasking operating system that uses the 3d to render content for every application running.
Funny, Mac OS X doesn't seem to have a problem with the same vendor-supplied OpenGL all the way back to the Radeon 7000 and whatever the corresponding nVidia software is.
Yes, that includes the OS in both cases.
Mac mini, including OSX - $500
Cheap PC with Windows Home Edition and monitor included - $400 (they have stacks of boxes like this at Walmart)
Subtract cost of cheap monitor - $300
Add Radeon 9200 - $330 (since they usually have some generic Intel graphics)
Add firewire - $335
Difference - $165