Actually IBM's first PC was pretty cool: built in APL and/or BASIC, integrated CRT and keyboard, and digital tape cartridge backup. It also cost a small fortune and didn't sell real well. (I refer to the IBM 5100. The machine they first called a PC was the 5150, but few people knew it by that, it was the IBM PC.)
Even the 5150 wasn't that bad compared to the Apple II. It had more memory (up to 640K, although the first ones shipped with about 128K, vs 48K for the Apple II). It had similar built in BASIC (ignoring the math error in the first version:), slots, etc.
Comparing it to the Commodore 64 (which came some years later) is silly. Totally different market, for one. The C64 was a home machine, and so had hardware assists for games and entertainment software, but with virtually no support for business use. (Commodores PET-based CBM machines were targeted to business, not the C-64.)
There was a lot I didn't like about the IBM-PC, starting with the nameplate (I didn't like OS/360, either) and the choice of chip (too bad the 68008 wasn't available in time, IBM would have used it. They wanted a 16-bit chip with an 8-bit bus (to keep hardware costs down), but 68008 production wasn't up to the level of the 8088 then.) But lets be fair in our comparisons.
IBM was just the first distributor of the Microsoft platform.
What a joke.
IBM designed (or had designed for it) the open architecture hardware and specified the OS. Compaq opened it up by coming up with a reverse-engineered BIOS. That the OS was from Microsoft was a historical accident - and indeed before Windows there were some quite successful DOS clones.
The platform was unquestionably IBM's. Before the reverse-engineered BIOS's became available, there were a number of Intel-based, MS-DOS running machines that did miserably in the market (eg the DEC Rainbow) because, even though they ran MS-DOS, they weren't 100% IBM-compatible.
IBM made the platform, IBM's reputation (and marketing clout) made the market. Microsoft was lucky and clever enough to go along for the ride. (This changed when IBM made its mistakes with OS/2 and the PS/2 microchannel bus.)
Microsoft DOS -- called PC-DOS on IBM machines -- won because the IBM name was behind it. By itself it would have been yet another niche OS. (Well, actually it wouldn't have existed at all -- Microsoft only bought it to resell to IBM.)
Competitors to IBM in the PC market had to make them "IBM-compatible" to survive (as witness the failure of the IBM-incompatible DEC Rainbow, for example), which meant MS-DOS (as well as a degree of hardware compatibility). That says absolutely nothing about the relative merits of {MS,PC}-DOS as an OS, and everything about IBM's marketing muscle. IBM had gotten away before with selling less than technically brilliant OS's (eg, OS/360 vs, say, Burroughs MCP).
MS-DOS won by historical accident. If Kildall hadn't blown his initial meeting with IBM, we'd have all been using CP/M-86.
Microsoft got more people to view computers as a tool instead of a nerd-only piece of hardware.
No, sorry, that was Apple. Whatever else folks might think of Apple, it was unquestionably the Apple II that started the whole ball rolling beyond the 'toggle the front panel switches' S-100 bus hobby boxes, in no small part because of the appearance of VisiCalc (the first (?) spreadsheet program). Business folks bought "VisiCalc machines". That the Apple II could also interface to a color TV and had built-in BASIC led to lots of educational programs that the schools liked, and Apple has been strong in the education market ever since.
IBM borrowed heavily from the Apple II in designing the IBM-PC, in general concept (built in BASIC (originally), slots, 5-1/4" disk (vs older 8" still popular on some CP/M machines) open hardware architecture) if not hardware specifics. And it was IBM (not Microsoft) that encouraged further penetration into the business market. Businesses had heard of IBM, and it seemed a little more conservative than some weird fruit company. Nobody outside the small computer industry itself had heard of Microsoft then. The IBM-PC (itself a successor to IBM's earlier attempt at a desktop computer, the 5100) put the conservative big-business blessing on the whole concept of individual computers, rather than terminals tied to the corporate mainframe.
The next major shift in people viewing computers as a tool instead of a nerd-only piece of hardware came with the Macintosh, the less-expensive, friendlier version (OK, parallel development to) the Apple Lisa. That opened it up to the traditionally technophobic arts majors. Microsoft didn't catch up to that technology until Windows 95, 11 years after the Mac was introduced, and arguably still hasn't (inconsistent UI model).
So no, despite MS propaganda to the contrary, and despite what the younger folks who've only been fully concious for the last five years may think, Microsoft isn't the pioneer they like to pretend.
What has Microsoft done to destroy the computing world as we know it?
What have they done? Well, ignoring the implied oxymoron (obviously we know it as it is - perhaps you meant 'destroy... as it could have been'), they've got a number of sins on their hands.
We could start at the beginning, with Microsoft BASIC - which was never a full BASIC. If you believe Djikstra, BASIC causes brain damage, and there's certainly some truth to that if its the first computer language folks learn. We might have been better off if Gates and Allen had done Algol, or Pascal, or any of a variety of other small languages that they could have done. (Except that they didn't have an example of to rip off.)
Or we could take MS-DOS, with its inheritance of all the bad things that CP/M borrowed from RSX/RT-11, like 8.3 filenames, and its backward slash filename separators, and its drive letters, and its brain-damaged memory model ("640K should be enough for anybody").
We could mention Microsoft's dismal and unenthusiastic support for it's own Xenix, a real unix-derived OS light-years ahead of MS-DOS, which Microsoft effectively killed (slowing the growth of personal Unix systems by how many years?) because they didn't want the competition with their real cash-cow, DOS.
Then there's the "embrace and extend" (or "purloin and pervert") strategy of corrupting standards and inventing (repeatedly, each time a little different) their own proprietary "standards" (like Word.doc format), creating massive friction in the otherwise free flow of information between people. Or continually re-inventing the wheel, never quite right and always a little different, rather than building on an existing base, just so they can call it theirs.
Has Microsoft destroyed the computer industry? Obviously not -- it's here and they're here. But a good case could be made that the industry would be a lot farther along now if Microsoft was not what it is.
While bleeding edge games may need their own bleeding edge code, something like this is great for things like "edugames", educational software for kids that incorporates a lot of game and multimedia aspects. (Stuff like the "Jump Start" series, or "Sesame Street", or "Reader Rabbit").
There's already lots of this s/w for the Windows and Mac markets, but a cross-platform kit like this (when the Linux version becomes available) will, hopefully, encourage the development of such that will also run on Linux.
Availability of software like this for the kids is another factor (in addition to desktop GUIs and office software) in getting Linux accepted on the home desktop (and in elementary schools).
Of course, that requires a ball of hydrogen about a million miles in diameter, and shielding is a bit tricky unless you're about 93 million miles away...
You raise some good points. I've worked with some good testers, and yeah, they'll try stuff that the developer would never think of. Also that the target audience would never think of, just to see if they can break it.
However, a lot of those sorts of things (eg random input in a text field) can be and are caught by the openness of source, for example when a project coordinator review a submitted patch. Stuff gets looked at a lot more closely there (or should be, beware of Greeks bearing gifts) than in a commercial setting code walkthrough.
OTOH, free software is exposed to lots of beta (or alpha) testers along the way.
software companies spend a surprising fraction of their resources testing software, not writing it
And that explains the crap-masquerading-as-software coming out of Redmond (and a few other places).
Testing never added quality to anything, it just weeded out (maybe) the defects it found. Reliable, quality software is built by designing it correctly and writing in the quality, which (if you're doing it right) takes longer (and costs more, in a commercial environment) than you'll need to spend on testing.
It's all those endless "test, find a bug, try to fix it; test again, find a bug, try to fix it" cycles that run up the test time, since to do it right you have to rerun your whole test suite to ensure you didn't introduce a new bug.
handle programs as old as the first DOS applications
Ha! Windows doesn't even do that. I know, I've got some old DOS apps that have refused to run under Windows or DOS 6 or whatever. (I did, however, manage to run them on SoftPC on a Mac:-)
Linux will never do that
Double Ha! Ignoring that he probably meant DOS apps that old (as I said earlier, his writing style sucks), I've run apps older than DOS just fine under Linux (and that's not even counting the fact that most of the basic unix utilities are older than DOS). Recompile (although I had to dig for a Pascal compiler) and go.
I couldn't finish reading it. The guy's writing style is terrible, I've seen better stuff by schoolkids. At least this guy isn't working as a Microsoft tech writer.
OTOH, maybe his (lack of) style carries over into his code...
(As for the X Window System (nee Windex, before a certain manufacturer of cleaning products got upset), it was at version 10 when I first discovered it in 1986, so it may well have been around before MacOS (introduced in 1984)).
C++ peaked out somewhere around 1988, and has been suffering creeping featurism ever since.
(I prefer C++ over C, so long as the style is "C with classes". Call me neanderthal, see if I care.)
Extremely efficient allocation of resources
on
Harmony Rides Again
·
· Score: 2
"The open source community" doesn't insist on doing anything, because it has no single spokesperson, it's a bunch of individuals.
With a handful of noted exceptions who are paid for their time, open source software is developed by those who feel like it. Volunteers. Anyone who's ever had anything to do with managing volunteers knows that it's near impossible to get them to do something they don't want to do, and almost has hard to keep them from doing something they do want to do.
If software development were all centrally directed, then yes, it might make more sense to assign the folks who want to work on Harmony to working on something else. In the real world, that isn't going to happen - for them it may be Harmony or nothing, and so the most efficient allocation of resources is for them to work on whatever the hell they want to. They'll learn something from it, they'll generate code that may be useful in ways that Qt can't be, and the universe of free code will be that much larger than if they'd been "ordered" to, say, go work on a Microsoft Project clone for Linux (because they probably wouldn't have listened to those orders).
The folks who ran the former Soviet Union were no doubt convinced that a command economy was a far more efficient way to allocate resources than the chaos of free market capitalism, and at first glance it certainly appears so. But they were clearly wrong, as Adam Smith could have told them. Maybe Harmony is a "waste" of resources, but those resources belong only to those who volunteer to be involved.
It's not worth your time arguing with idiots like that.
Oh, you might point out that (until he was killed about a year ago) the richest man in the world was actually a Columbian dope dealer (I forget the name), or that two other of the top 5 or 10 richest are the founders of Amway (and while some folks might have a problem with Amway, I've never heard anything but praise for the high ethical standards and contributions to the community that De Vos and Van Andel have made, no jealousy there). Or that Steve Jobs (whatever else you may think of him) was doing a darn good job of expanding upon and bringing to the public the kind of work going on at Xerox PARC, while Bill Gates was still pushing CLI and DOS and saying 640K would be enough for anyone.
But I've gone through that sort of argument with people before, and if their heads are so far up where the information isn't getting that they believe what they've said in the first place, nothing is going to change their mind. They'll only hate you for causing them to doubt.
It is illegal (violation of anti trust acts) for a company to use its effective monopoly in one area (like desktop OSs, say) to leverage its position in another (like browsers, or dialup service provision). When Windows 95 was release, MS was sued because the prominent MSN icon on the desktop was viewed as illegal leveraging by the likes of AOL, Compuserve, etc. Microsoft settled, signing a consent decree saying that they'd never do anything like that again. They also agreed not to impose the "per processor" licenses for the OS on the hardware manufacturers (aka the Microsoft tax).
Then Microsoft discovered the Internet, and started bundling Internet Explorer with the OS.
Oops.
It isn't envy that causes a rich thief or con artist to be prosecuted.
(Of course, the degree of actual lawbreaking is up to the Judge to decide. But judgements have gone against MS in the past.)
They have the authority granted by Congress under various anti-trust acts. Microsoft is not a person, so has no natural rights. As a corporation it is granted certain rights (limited liability, right to issue stock, etc, etc) so long as it conforms to the law. One of the laws in question has to do with leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (like desktop OSs) into another area (like browsers).
Microsoft voluntarily signed an agreement (consent decree) some years ago that they would not engage in certain practises, so that the DOJ would drop proceedings against them at that time. The DOJ (among others) now feel that MS has reneged on that agreement (violated the consent decree).
It's the same right that gave/gives Judge Greene the authority to dictate (to a degree) the way AT&T and the Baby Bells do business.
Maybe Gates is deliberately lying, maybe he really is that stupid. Maybe both.
MacOS not a fair comparison of speed
on
iMac Linux
·
· Score: 1
The MacOS is not optimized for speed on a PPC. Have they even (with 8.5) got all of the low level 68000 code out of it yet? (MacOS for years has been using their original 68K code in some of the low level routines - toolkit, I/O, etc - which means it has to run through the MacOS's 68K emulation layer on PPC machines. Bleah!)
Even if all the code is now PPC native, the architecture of MacOS was originally optimized for speed on 68K-based machines, not todays machines.
It also depends how you're judging. Going by the "feel" of the speed of the GUI is not the way to do it, because the Mac's GUI is deliberately slowed down so as to be (in the Apple user interface designers' opinions) more friendly, especially to newbies.
With a pure native PPC OS, like Linux (or AIX, on IBM's PPC machines) or OS X or (at one time) BeOS, the PPC screams.
Good point about clustering them. Built in 100 Ethernet, too.
Not that you need all those CRTs in the cluster (hmm, put them together into a really big multi-headed X display...), but at $800 a pop for original iMacs or refurbs, the nodes are pretty cheap.
Lucas IS StarWars; whatever he edits out, doesn't need to be seen
Well, almost. There were a couple of scenes that never made it into the final cut of A New Hope, partly for financial reasons (it was the first, nobody knew if it'd make money) because they weren't completely filmed. (Luke watching the space battle from the ground, talking to Biggs in town, and the skyhopper race at Beggars Canyon -- and it looks like the latter will (in modified form) finally see the screen in Phantom Menace).
While not critical to the plot, they do explain some later scenes (where he knows Biggs from, that Luke really is a hot pilot, etc). (And the scenes do appear in the radio drama version).
HOwever, I agree about the 5-1/2 hours of roughcut. After I'd seen the finished product a couple of times I might be interested, but definitely not before.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually IBM's first PC was pretty cool: built in APL and/or BASIC, integrated CRT and keyboard, and digital tape cartridge backup. It also cost a small fortune and didn't sell real well. (I refer to the IBM 5100. The machine they first called a PC was the 5150, but few people knew it by that, it was the IBM PC.)
:), slots, etc.
Even the 5150 wasn't that bad compared to the Apple II. It had more memory (up to 640K, although the first ones shipped with about 128K, vs 48K for the Apple II). It had similar built in BASIC (ignoring the math error in the first version
Comparing it to the Commodore 64 (which came some years later) is silly. Totally different market, for one. The C64 was a home machine, and so had hardware assists for games and entertainment software, but with virtually no support for business use. (Commodores PET-based CBM machines were targeted to business, not the C-64.)
There was a lot I didn't like about the IBM-PC, starting with the nameplate (I didn't like OS/360, either) and the choice of chip (too bad the 68008 wasn't available in time, IBM would have used it. They wanted a 16-bit chip with an 8-bit bus (to keep hardware costs down), but 68008 production wasn't up to the level of the 8088 then.) But lets be fair in our comparisons.
IBM was just the first distributor of the Microsoft platform.
What a joke.
IBM designed (or had designed for it) the open architecture hardware and specified the OS. Compaq opened it up by coming up with a reverse-engineered BIOS. That the OS was from Microsoft was a historical accident - and indeed before Windows there were some quite successful DOS clones.
The platform was unquestionably IBM's. Before the reverse-engineered BIOS's became available, there were a number of Intel-based, MS-DOS running machines that did miserably in the market (eg the DEC Rainbow) because, even though they ran MS-DOS, they weren't 100% IBM-compatible.
IBM made the platform, IBM's reputation (and marketing clout) made the market. Microsoft was lucky and clever enough to go along for the ride.
(This changed when IBM made its mistakes with OS/2 and the PS/2 microchannel bus.)
Microsoft DOS -- called PC-DOS on IBM machines -- won because the IBM name was behind it. By itself it would have been yet another niche OS. (Well, actually it wouldn't have existed at all -- Microsoft only bought it to resell to IBM.)
Competitors to IBM in the PC market had to make them "IBM-compatible" to survive (as witness the failure of the IBM-incompatible DEC Rainbow, for example), which meant MS-DOS (as well as a degree of hardware compatibility). That says absolutely nothing about the relative merits of {MS,PC}-DOS as an OS, and everything about IBM's marketing muscle. IBM had gotten away before with selling less than technically brilliant OS's (eg, OS/360 vs, say, Burroughs MCP).
MS-DOS won by historical accident. If Kildall hadn't blown his initial meeting with IBM, we'd have all been using CP/M-86.
Microsoft got more people to view computers as a tool instead of a nerd-only piece of hardware.
... as it could have been'), they've got a number of sins on their hands.
.doc format), creating massive friction in the otherwise free flow of information between people. Or continually re-inventing the wheel, never quite right and always a little different, rather than building on an existing base, just so they can call it theirs.
No, sorry, that was Apple. Whatever else folks might think of Apple, it was unquestionably the Apple II that started the whole ball rolling beyond the 'toggle the front panel switches' S-100 bus hobby boxes, in no small part because of the appearance of VisiCalc (the first (?) spreadsheet program). Business folks bought "VisiCalc machines". That the Apple II could also interface to a color TV and had built-in BASIC led to lots of educational programs that the schools liked, and Apple has been strong in the education market ever since.
IBM borrowed heavily from the Apple II in designing the IBM-PC, in general concept (built in BASIC (originally), slots, 5-1/4" disk (vs older 8" still popular on some CP/M machines) open hardware architecture) if not hardware specifics. And it was IBM (not Microsoft) that encouraged further penetration into the business market. Businesses had heard of IBM, and it seemed a little more conservative than some weird fruit company. Nobody outside the small computer industry itself had heard of Microsoft then. The IBM-PC (itself a successor to IBM's earlier attempt at a desktop computer, the 5100) put the conservative big-business blessing on the whole concept of individual computers, rather than terminals tied to the corporate mainframe.
The next major shift in people viewing computers as a tool instead of a nerd-only piece of hardware came with the Macintosh, the less-expensive, friendlier version (OK, parallel development to) the Apple Lisa. That opened it up to the traditionally technophobic arts majors. Microsoft didn't catch up to that technology until Windows 95, 11 years after the Mac was introduced, and arguably still hasn't (inconsistent UI model).
So no, despite MS propaganda to the contrary, and despite what the younger folks who've only been fully concious for the last five years may think,
Microsoft isn't the pioneer they like to pretend.
What has Microsoft done to destroy the computing world as we know it?
What have they done? Well, ignoring the implied oxymoron (obviously we know it as it is - perhaps you meant 'destroy
We could start at the beginning, with Microsoft BASIC - which was never a full BASIC. If you believe Djikstra, BASIC causes brain damage, and there's certainly some truth to that if its the first computer language folks learn. We might have been better off if Gates and Allen had done Algol, or Pascal, or any of a variety of other small languages that they could have done. (Except that they didn't have an example of to rip off.)
Or we could take MS-DOS, with its inheritance of all the bad things that CP/M borrowed from RSX/RT-11, like 8.3 filenames, and its backward slash filename separators, and its drive letters, and its brain-damaged memory model ("640K should be enough for anybody").
We could mention Microsoft's dismal and unenthusiastic support for it's own Xenix, a real unix-derived OS light-years ahead of MS-DOS, which Microsoft effectively killed (slowing the growth of personal Unix systems by how many years?) because they didn't want the competition with their real cash-cow, DOS.
Then there's the "embrace and extend" (or "purloin and pervert") strategy of corrupting standards and inventing (repeatedly, each time a little different) their own proprietary "standards" (like Word
Has Microsoft destroyed the computer industry? Obviously not -- it's here and they're here. But a good case could be made that the industry would be a lot farther along now if Microsoft was not what it is.
While bleeding edge games may need their own bleeding edge code, something like this is great for things like "edugames", educational software for kids that incorporates a lot of game and multimedia aspects. (Stuff like the "Jump Start" series, or "Sesame Street", or "Reader Rabbit").
There's already lots of this s/w for the Windows and Mac markets, but a cross-platform kit like this (when the Linux version becomes available) will, hopefully, encourage the development of such that will also run on Linux.
Availability of software like this for the kids is another factor (in addition to desktop GUIs and office software) in getting Linux accepted on the home desktop (and in elementary schools).
It's just a dog license with the word "dog" crossed out and "cat" written in with a crayon.
Er, sorry, wrong sketch.
It's pretty much the Mozilla license with "1,$s/Mozilla/Metrowerks/g" performed on it.
Not quite GPL.
This is the same Vannevar Bush that said something about the ICBM being impossible, and that we should leave it out of our thinking?
three styles I know of
You left out gravitational confinement.
Of course, that requires a ball of hydrogen about a million miles in diameter, and shielding is a bit tricky unless you're about 93 million miles away...
You raise some good points. I've worked with some good testers, and yeah, they'll try stuff that the developer would never think of. Also that the target audience would never think of, just to see if they can break it.
However, a lot of those sorts of things (eg random input in a text field) can be and are caught by the openness of source, for example when a project coordinator review a submitted patch. Stuff gets looked at a lot more closely there (or should be, beware of Greeks bearing gifts) than in a commercial setting code walkthrough.
OTOH, free software is exposed to lots of beta (or alpha) testers along the way.
software companies spend a surprising fraction of their resources testing software, not writing it
And that explains the crap-masquerading-as-software coming out of Redmond (and a few other places).
Testing never added quality to anything, it just weeded out (maybe) the defects it found. Reliable, quality software is built by designing it correctly and writing in the quality, which (if you're doing it right) takes longer (and costs more, in a commercial environment) than you'll need to spend on testing.
It's all those endless "test, find a bug, try to fix it; test again, find a bug, try to fix it" cycles that run up the test time, since to do it right you have to rerun your whole test suite to ensure you didn't introduce a new bug.
handle programs as old as the first DOS applications
:-)
Ha! Windows doesn't even do that. I know, I've got some old DOS apps that have refused to run under Windows or DOS 6 or whatever. (I did, however, manage to run them on SoftPC on a Mac
Linux will never do that
Double Ha! Ignoring that he probably meant DOS apps that old (as I said earlier, his writing style sucks), I've run apps older than DOS just fine under Linux (and that's not even counting the fact that most of the basic unix utilities are older than DOS). Recompile (although I had to dig for a Pascal compiler) and go.
I couldn't finish reading it. The guy's writing style is terrible, I've seen better stuff by schoolkids. At least this guy isn't working as a Microsoft tech writer.
OTOH, maybe his (lack of) style carries over into his code...
(As for the X Window System (nee Windex, before a certain manufacturer of cleaning products got upset), it was at version 10 when I first discovered it in 1986, so it may well have been around before MacOS (introduced in 1984)).
Templates. Bah.
C++ peaked out somewhere around 1988, and has been suffering creeping featurism ever since.
(I prefer C++ over C, so long as the style is "C with classes". Call me neanderthal, see if I care.)
"The open source community" doesn't insist on doing anything, because it has no single spokesperson, it's a bunch of individuals.
With a handful of noted exceptions who are paid for their time, open source software is developed by those who feel like it. Volunteers. Anyone who's ever had anything to do with managing volunteers knows that it's near impossible to get them to do something they don't want to do, and almost has hard to keep them from doing something they do want to do.
If software development were all centrally directed, then yes, it might make more sense to assign the folks who want to work on Harmony to working on something else. In the real world, that isn't going to happen - for them it may be Harmony or nothing, and so the most efficient allocation of resources is for them to work on whatever the hell they want to. They'll learn something from it, they'll generate code that may be useful in ways that Qt can't be, and the universe of free code will be that much larger than if they'd been "ordered" to, say, go work on a Microsoft Project clone for Linux (because they probably wouldn't have listened to those orders).
The folks who ran the former Soviet Union were no doubt convinced that a command economy was a far more efficient way to allocate resources than the chaos of free market capitalism, and at first glance it certainly appears so. But they were clearly wrong, as Adam Smith could have told them.
Maybe Harmony is a "waste" of resources, but those resources belong only to those who volunteer to be involved.
It's not worth your time arguing with idiots like that.
Oh, you might point out that (until he was killed about a year ago) the richest man in the world was actually a Columbian dope dealer (I forget the name), or that two other of the top 5 or 10 richest are the founders of Amway (and while some folks might have a problem with Amway, I've never heard anything but praise for the high ethical standards and contributions to the community that De Vos and Van Andel have made, no jealousy there). Or that Steve Jobs (whatever else you may think of him) was doing a darn good job of expanding upon and bringing to the public the kind of work going on at Xerox PARC, while Bill Gates was still pushing CLI and DOS and saying 640K would be enough for anyone.
But I've gone through that sort of argument with people before, and if their heads are so far up where the information isn't getting that they believe what they've said in the first place, nothing is going to change their mind. They'll only hate you for causing them to doubt.
I've never seen anyone else who could lie so easily and so often
Oh, come on. What about the other Bill, in the other Washington (i.e. DC)?
(Sorry, I couldn't pass up a line like that. The rest of your comment is spot on.)
It is illegal (violation of anti trust acts) for a company to use its effective monopoly in one area (like desktop OSs, say) to leverage its position in another (like browsers, or dialup service provision).
When Windows 95 was release, MS was sued because the prominent MSN icon on the desktop was viewed as illegal leveraging by the likes of AOL, Compuserve, etc. Microsoft settled, signing a consent decree saying that they'd never do anything like that again. They also agreed not to impose the "per processor" licenses for the OS on the hardware manufacturers (aka the Microsoft tax).
Then Microsoft discovered the Internet, and started bundling Internet Explorer with the OS.
Oops.
It isn't envy that causes a rich thief or con artist to be prosecuted.
(Of course, the degree of actual lawbreaking is up to the Judge to decide. But judgements have gone against MS in the past.)
So what's X11, chopped liver? Or svgalib?
Right?
They have the authority granted by Congress under various anti-trust acts. Microsoft is not a person, so has no natural rights. As a corporation it is granted certain rights (limited liability, right to issue stock, etc, etc) so long as it conforms to the law.
One of the laws in question has to do with leveraging a virtual monopoly in one area (like desktop OSs) into another area (like browsers).
Microsoft voluntarily signed an agreement (consent decree) some years ago that they would not engage in certain practises, so that the DOJ would drop proceedings against them at that time. The DOJ (among others) now feel that MS has reneged on that agreement (violated the consent decree).
It's the same right that gave/gives Judge Greene the authority to dictate (to a degree) the way AT&T and the Baby Bells do business.
That which can be explained by stupidity.
Maybe Gates is deliberately lying, maybe he really is that stupid. Maybe both.
The MacOS is not optimized for speed on a PPC. Have they even (with 8.5) got all of the low level 68000 code out of it yet? (MacOS for years has been using their original 68K code in some of the low level routines - toolkit, I/O, etc - which means it has to run through the MacOS's 68K emulation layer on PPC machines. Bleah!)
Even if all the code is now PPC native, the architecture of MacOS was originally optimized for speed on 68K-based machines, not todays machines.
It also depends how you're judging. Going by the "feel" of the speed of the GUI is not the way to do it, because the Mac's GUI is deliberately slowed down so as to be (in the Apple user interface designers' opinions) more friendly, especially to newbies.
With a pure native PPC OS, like Linux (or AIX, on IBM's PPC machines) or OS X or (at one time) BeOS, the PPC screams.
(Hey, somebody had to say it).
Good point about clustering them. Built in 100 Ethernet, too.
Not that you need all those CRTs in the cluster (hmm, put them together into a really big multi-headed X display...), but at $800 a pop for original iMacs or refurbs, the nodes are pretty cheap.
Lucas IS StarWars; whatever he edits out, doesn't need to be seen
Well, almost. There were a couple of scenes that never made it into the final cut of A New Hope, partly for financial reasons (it was the first, nobody knew if it'd make money) because they weren't completely filmed. (Luke watching the space battle from the ground, talking to Biggs in town, and the skyhopper race at Beggars Canyon -- and it looks like the latter will (in modified form) finally see the screen in Phantom Menace).
While not critical to the plot, they do explain some later scenes (where he knows Biggs from, that Luke really is a hot pilot, etc). (And the scenes do appear in the radio drama version).
HOwever, I agree about the 5-1/2 hours of roughcut. After I'd seen the finished product a couple of times I might be interested, but definitely not before.
If I remember right, "Spymaker" was forbidden in England, not Canada.
So I picked up a copy at Toronto airport before going to visit my sister in England... (The ban on it was later dropped.)
So if there is protection for parody, and an adverse attorney knows this yet threatens legal action, has he opened his client to action by doing so?
Possibly.
Are there laws against barratry in this country?