In 1995, Microsoft came back to Netscape with another proposal: dividing the market. If Netscape would stop developing its browser for Windows, then Microsoft would leave the Mac and Unix markets entirely to Netscape.
Netscape declined, of course, and so in 1996 came the first release of Internet Explorer for Mac and the announcement of Internet Explorer for Unix.
It seems crazy today to think that Microsoft would have been interested in something so blatantly antitrust as dividing the market, but that's the kind of company they were back then.
For all of you who are pointing out, with some rightness, that Netscape Communicator 4 had quality issues - let me remind you of something.
This was the time period when Microsoft had decided to, as a Microsoft executive stated during the antitrust trial, "cut off [Netscape's] air supply". For each product Netscape was trying to make money on - web servers, proxy servers, ecommerce solutions - Microsoft was giving away a workalike product for free, funded with the earnings from Microsoft Windows.
And, at the same time, Microsoft was forcing its OEM partners to keep Netscape Communicator off the computers they sold. Any company that refused would no longer get volume licensing discounts on Windows, which would then price their computers out of the market.
So Netscape was starved for cash at the same time as it had to put in a lot of effort to keep up with the extremely-well-funded Internet Explorer. There was no way that Netscape could have survived, much less competed, against this.
There's a graphic novel titled "Tron: Betrayal" that helps bridge the gap between the two films. I read it before I saw Tron Legacy; I think it helped me enjoy the movie a lot more.
The graphic novel goes into more depth about Flynn being split between his responsibilities in the real world and in the computer world, his creation of Clu to help him achieve a perfect society in the computer world, and Clu's frustration at Flynn's increasing absence. Eventually Clu decides to take a more active role in realizing the perfection he believes Flynn wants. This makes him more of a sympathetic villain; instead of just being a generic "bad guy", he is genuinely trying to do what he sees as right and he resents Flynn for having a problem with it.
The graphic novel also goes into more of an explanation of the "Isos". In the novel they're interesting; I felt disappointed that the movie does away with them quickly and plays the whole "last of your kind" card.
Ten bucks from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tron-Betrayal-Jai-Nitz/dp/142313463X
Meanwhile, among the Top Free Apps in the iTunes App Store right now are "Sex Positions Game - 18+ Free" (#5), "69 Positions Lite - Sex Positions" (#8), and "Adult Sex Trick" (#25). What was this about Apple removing all sexual content from the App Store?
RationalWiki is a site that exists to poke fun at Conservapedia and the anti-science movement. (I particularly like its WIGO page, "What Is Going On At CP?".) Conservapedia forbids any mention of RationalWiki, going so far as to ban members who make oblique references to it. In fact, the part of Lenski's letter that was censored on Conservapedia as "Ed.: citation omitted due to spam filter" was, originally, a reference to RationalWiki; this is explained at "Censoring of Lensku's RW ref".
When I'm doing web development (HTML, JavaScript, XSLT), I use the free version of Aptana Studio Professional, which essentially is a bundle of the Eclipse editor plus the Aptana plugins. I add the free AnyEdit Tools plugin so that it tabifies and deletes trailing spaces for me.
Correct - they note that their statistics are likely to be skewed because most of their visitors are interested in using alternative browsers. This is probably why they show a 44% share for Firefox. However, it's still telling that 20% of their visitors are using IE6.
Right now, according to MarketShare, IE6 and Firefox 2/3 are roughly tied for market share (about 20% to each). TheCounter says that IE6 has 34% of the market while Firefox has 17%, and even W3Schools says that IE6 still has about 20% of users.
The moral of this story is: lots of people don't upgrade. They don't even run Windows Update. They use the browser they got when they installed XP, and they probably don't even know anything else is out there.
This is why, whenever Microsoft ties an application to the operating system, the market suffers. It becomes really hard to compete in that space. Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows. This is the way it's been for more than a decade now. The antitrust action against Microsoft was nothing more than a slap on the wrist; it did nothing to restore competition.
If Microsoft is so interested in bundling high-quality apps with the operating system for the good of its users, then why haven't they bundled Microsoft Word?
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."
I believe that DSi games will play just fine on the DS. Even if they take advantage of the new DSi features, I'm betting these will be optional, and will still play just fine on the DS.
Why do I think this? First off, a game maker would much rather sell to DSi + DS owners rather than just the DSi crowd. Also, the DS and the DSi look practically identical and have nearly identical names - it's too easy (especially for the uninitiated) to get them confused, and it would generate a lot of bad sentiment if people bought DSi games and were unable to play them on a DS.
Plus, if the chip specs were upgraded, I'd think Nintendo would be making a lot of noise about this.
The only thing they haven't talked about which would shock me if it were omitted is 802.11g/WPA support. WEP is so ancient by now that it's hard to find a network for my DS to connect to.
"Concrete Mathematics" annoyed the heck out of me. The subject matter was dense enough; but then they 'spiced it up' by adding pre-printed margin notes to the pages, places where people much smarter than I am rubbed my nose in the fact that they're much smarter than I am by making obscure, incomprehensible jokes about the material.
I still have my copy of that book as a trophy of having barely survived the course. Occasionally I take it down off the shelf to scare children. Someday I'll have it bronzed.
Where can I find the high contrast version? Apparently it's available as a toggle for vim, but I want to see the color definitions or a screenshot of it so I can match the colors in the various IDEs I use.
I'll second the opinion of AVG being awesome. For years I've been seeing people whose PCs have been eaten alive by Norton Anti-Virus's obnoxious intrusiveness and painful memory requirements, so as soon as the footprint of NAV starts slowing them down, I recommend they switch to AVG Free. Neither I nor anyone I've helped has ever had a problem with AVG.
Granted, it seems that AVG Free 8 is a bit noisier than AVG Free 7 (version 8 seems to pitch the hard sell approach a little too often), but still, there's no other solution I'd go with.
How is the "Customizer 104/105" keyboard for a Mac power user?
Can the Windows and Alt keys be popped off and swapped (and the Windows logo erased!) to more closely match the Mac's Alt/Option and Command keys? Can Esc and Backquote be swapped, and Caps Lock and the left Control swapped, to more closely resemble the Linux keyboard?
(The key mappings, of course, can all be altered through System Preferences.)
I imagine that greylisting is such a rare thing that spammers don't bother making a bot that's capable of retrying its spam fifteen minutes later. It's a lot simpler to just ignore the greylisted account, and move on to the next ten million accounts instead.
The reason tarpits work is that many spambots follow the SMTP protocol, at least nominally. According to RFC 821, as long as the server continues sending lines whose reply codes are followed with hyphens, the client is not supposed to disconnect - and very many spambots don't disconnect. And as long as the tarpit keeps sending these lines frequently enough that the connection doesn't time out, it can hold the connection open indefinitely. If the client's not set to force a disconnect, and it hits more tarpits than its kernel is configured to allow outgoing connections, then voila, dead spambot.
Yes, a smart spammer could program a spambot to force a disconnect after some period of time and move on to the next host; but most spammers aren't smart.
Even with a single email address, if you determine that an inbound message is spam, you can keep the spammer's connection open. I'm running Exim with SpamAssassin, connected with SA-Exim, and while I had it in tarpit mode I held some spammers' inbound email connections open for four days. (It would have been longer, but I set 100 hours as an arbitrary limit.) Imagine enough tarpits out there not letting go of the spammer's connections, and eventually the computer being used to send out the spam will start to have some serious trouble.
Tarpitting isn't about reducing spam (not immediately, at least). You only tarpit a connection after you've determined that the message being given to you is spam. The difference between tarpitting and greylisting is that greylisting tells the spammer to come back later, whereas tarpitting never lets the spammer go away in the first place.
My favorite Vista travesty is that it takes several minutes to move a folder containing several gigabytes of files.
Let me reiterate: I'm dragging one folder icon into a different folder. An operation which, for Mac or Linux, merely involves rewriting an inode. But for Windows Vista, a dialog box comes up which shows the computer recursively going through every file and directory in the folder I'm moving, as if a file or folder somehow needs its location updated independently of the folder it's in. Several minutes later, my drag has finished being processed.
I've heard that Vista SP1 improves file handling, so two weeks ago I obtained Vista Service Pack 1 through the MSDN membership at my workplace. But a few minutes into the install, it fails with error 0x8007000d and points me to a tech note which advises me to turn off antivirus (done), run a disk check (done), and then run 'sfc/scannow' which tells me there's some sort of corruption in a system file and that I should look at cbs.log, which I do, and it contains several thousands of lines of messages I can't understand, much less figure out whether they're errors. Near as I can figure, the culprit is that the SP1 installer can't delete a file named windir\ehome\ehres.dll, so I try moving that out of the way by hand, but no combination of things I try can get it to move - Windows keeps telling me I don't have permission to move it, even if I try renaming it from a command shell run as administrator, even if I boot into safe mode.
I have a feeling, come tomorrow when Vista SP1 is released to the masses, there's going to be more headscratching than celebrating.
Home computers today can generate special effects that outclass anything that computers from thirty years ago could do. I expect the same thing will be true thirty years from now.
In 2037, some fan with a home computer will redo the Star Wars prequel trilogy correctly - remove all the stupid stuff, emphasize all the cool stuff, make it all look like it was supposed to be this way to begin with - and then the long nightmare will be over.
The fact that Mac OS X has only one look-and-feel is one of the biggest reasons why I like and use Mac OS X.
I am not a graphic designer. If I have the ability to tweak the colors and sizes of window decorations and the fonts and icons they use, then I will waste copious amounts of time coming up with something too ugly to put up with. I want somebody *else* to come up with a neutral-but-pleasant appearance for my desktop and my windows.
Another reason why I prefer Mac OS X - and something which I hope Linux gets someday - is that on my Mac I don't *have* to run an installer to install software; I just drag it onto my hard drive. And on my Mac, I can put the application icon anywhere I want, whether in the Applications folder or on my desktop or in my Dock or anyplace else. Ubuntu insists on making me run applications from the Applications menu. I hate the Applications menu just as much as I hate the Start menu.
Darwin is open source. Safari is based on Konqueror, which is open source. Xcode is an awesome development environment, and it's free (as in free beer).
Slashdot Mirror
In 1995, Microsoft came back to Netscape with another proposal: dividing the market. If Netscape would stop developing its browser for Windows, then Microsoft would leave the Mac and Unix markets entirely to Netscape.
Netscape declined, of course, and so in 1996 came the first release of Internet Explorer for Mac and the announcement of Internet Explorer for Unix.
It seems crazy today to think that Microsoft would have been interested in something so blatantly antitrust as dividing the market, but that's the kind of company they were back then.
For all of you who are pointing out, with some rightness, that Netscape Communicator 4 had quality issues - let me remind you of something.
This was the time period when Microsoft had decided to, as a Microsoft executive stated during the antitrust trial, "cut off [Netscape's] air supply". For each product Netscape was trying to make money on - web servers, proxy servers, ecommerce solutions - Microsoft was giving away a workalike product for free, funded with the earnings from Microsoft Windows.
And, at the same time, Microsoft was forcing its OEM partners to keep Netscape Communicator off the computers they sold. Any company that refused would no longer get volume licensing discounts on Windows, which would then price their computers out of the market.
So Netscape was starved for cash at the same time as it had to put in a lot of effort to keep up with the extremely-well-funded Internet Explorer. There was no way that Netscape could have survived, much less competed, against this.
There's a graphic novel titled "Tron: Betrayal" that helps bridge the gap between the two films. I read it before I saw Tron Legacy; I think it helped me enjoy the movie a lot more.
The graphic novel goes into more depth about Flynn being split between his responsibilities in the real world and in the computer world, his creation of Clu to help him achieve a perfect society in the computer world, and Clu's frustration at Flynn's increasing absence. Eventually Clu decides to take a more active role in realizing the perfection he believes Flynn wants. This makes him more of a sympathetic villain; instead of just being a generic "bad guy", he is genuinely trying to do what he sees as right and he resents Flynn for having a problem with it.
The graphic novel also goes into more of an explanation of the "Isos". In the novel they're interesting; I felt disappointed that the movie does away with them quickly and plays the whole "last of your kind" card.
Ten bucks from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Tron-Betrayal-Jai-Nitz/dp/142313463X
Meanwhile, among the Top Free Apps in the iTunes App Store right now are "Sex Positions Game - 18+ Free" (#5), "69 Positions Lite - Sex Positions" (#8), and "Adult Sex Trick" (#25). What was this about Apple removing all sexual content from the App Store?
Another account of the story is at RationalWiki: http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_affair
RationalWiki is a site that exists to poke fun at Conservapedia and the anti-science movement. (I particularly like its WIGO page, "What Is Going On At CP?".) Conservapedia forbids any mention of RationalWiki, going so far as to ban members who make oblique references to it. In fact, the part of Lenski's letter that was censored on Conservapedia as "Ed.: citation omitted due to spam filter" was, originally, a reference to RationalWiki; this is explained at "Censoring of Lensku's RW ref".
When I'm doing web development (HTML, JavaScript, XSLT), I use the free version of Aptana Studio Professional, which essentially is a bundle of the Eclipse editor plus the Aptana plugins. I add the free AnyEdit Tools plugin so that it tabifies and deletes trailing spaces for me.
Of course Microsoft charges for IE. This cost is hidden by being part of the cost of Windows.
Correct - they note that their statistics are likely to be skewed because most of their visitors are interested in using alternative browsers. This is probably why they show a 44% share for Firefox. However, it's still telling that 20% of their visitors are using IE6.
Right now, according to MarketShare, IE6 and Firefox 2/3 are roughly tied for market share (about 20% to each). TheCounter says that IE6 has 34% of the market while Firefox has 17%, and even W3Schools says that IE6 still has about 20% of users.
The moral of this story is: lots of people don't upgrade. They don't even run Windows Update. They use the browser they got when they installed XP, and they probably don't even know anything else is out there.
This is why, whenever Microsoft ties an application to the operating system, the market suffers. It becomes really hard to compete in that space. Right now, nobody's making money selling a web browser that competes with the one that comes with Windows. This is the way it's been for more than a decade now. The antitrust action against Microsoft was nothing more than a slap on the wrist; it did nothing to restore competition.
If Microsoft is so interested in bundling high-quality apps with the operating system for the good of its users, then why haven't they bundled Microsoft Word?
It's from a Douglas Adams speech in 1998, which was quoted by Richard Dawkins in his 2001 eulogy at Adams's funeral. The original speech is here:
http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise."
I believe that DSi games will play just fine on the DS. Even if they take advantage of the new DSi features, I'm betting these will be optional, and will still play just fine on the DS.
Why do I think this? First off, a game maker would much rather sell to DSi + DS owners rather than just the DSi crowd. Also, the DS and the DSi look practically identical and have nearly identical names - it's too easy (especially for the uninitiated) to get them confused, and it would generate a lot of bad sentiment if people bought DSi games and were unable to play them on a DS.
Plus, if the chip specs were upgraded, I'd think Nintendo would be making a lot of noise about this.
The only thing they haven't talked about which would shock me if it were omitted is 802.11g/WPA support. WEP is so ancient by now that it's hard to find a network for my DS to connect to.
What happens if you don't agree to a non-disclosure agreement on the rejection notice you receive?
Usually NDAs have to be signed before you get access to see cool secret stuff. But what if the only thing you're agreeing to is to be rejected?
"Concrete Mathematics" annoyed the heck out of me. The subject matter was dense enough; but then they 'spiced it up' by adding pre-printed margin notes to the pages, places where people much smarter than I am rubbed my nose in the fact that they're much smarter than I am by making obscure, incomprehensible jokes about the material.
I still have my copy of that book as a trophy of having barely survived the course. Occasionally I take it down off the shelf to scare children. Someday I'll have it bronzed.
Where can I find the high contrast version? Apparently it's available as a toggle for vim, but I want to see the color definitions or a screenshot of it so I can match the colors in the various IDEs I use.
I'll second the opinion of AVG being awesome. For years I've been seeing people whose PCs have been eaten alive by Norton Anti-Virus's obnoxious intrusiveness and painful memory requirements, so as soon as the footprint of NAV starts slowing them down, I recommend they switch to AVG Free. Neither I nor anyone I've helped has ever had a problem with AVG.
Granted, it seems that AVG Free 8 is a bit noisier than AVG Free 7 (version 8 seems to pitch the hard sell approach a little too often), but still, there's no other solution I'd go with.
How is the "Customizer 104/105" keyboard for a Mac power user?
Can the Windows and Alt keys be popped off and swapped (and the Windows logo erased!) to more closely match the Mac's Alt/Option and Command keys? Can Esc and Backquote be swapped, and Caps Lock and the left Control swapped, to more closely resemble the Linux keyboard?
(The key mappings, of course, can all be altered through System Preferences.)
I imagine that greylisting is such a rare thing that spammers don't bother making a bot that's capable of retrying its spam fifteen minutes later. It's a lot simpler to just ignore the greylisted account, and move on to the next ten million accounts instead.
The reason tarpits work is that many spambots follow the SMTP protocol, at least nominally. According to RFC 821, as long as the server continues sending lines whose reply codes are followed with hyphens, the client is not supposed to disconnect - and very many spambots don't disconnect. And as long as the tarpit keeps sending these lines frequently enough that the connection doesn't time out, it can hold the connection open indefinitely. If the client's not set to force a disconnect, and it hits more tarpits than its kernel is configured to allow outgoing connections, then voila, dead spambot.
Yes, a smart spammer could program a spambot to force a disconnect after some period of time and move on to the next host; but most spammers aren't smart.
I think you're misunderstanding tarpits.
Even with a single email address, if you determine that an inbound message is spam, you can keep the spammer's connection open. I'm running Exim with SpamAssassin, connected with SA-Exim, and while I had it in tarpit mode I held some spammers' inbound email connections open for four days. (It would have been longer, but I set 100 hours as an arbitrary limit.) Imagine enough tarpits out there not letting go of the spammer's connections, and eventually the computer being used to send out the spam will start to have some serious trouble.
Tarpitting isn't about reducing spam (not immediately, at least). You only tarpit a connection after you've determined that the message being given to you is spam. The difference between tarpitting and greylisting is that greylisting tells the spammer to come back later, whereas tarpitting never lets the spammer go away in the first place.
You know, I think I'll turn my tarpit on again.
Is anyone out there running a tarpit?
I have the ability to turn my mail server into a tarpit, but it won't do much good unless there are a lot of other tarpits out there too.
My favorite Vista travesty is that it takes several minutes to move a folder containing several gigabytes of files.
/scannow' which tells me there's some sort of corruption in a system file and that I should look at cbs.log, which I do, and it contains several thousands of lines of messages I can't understand, much less figure out whether they're errors. Near as I can figure, the culprit is that the SP1 installer can't delete a file named windir\ehome\ehres.dll, so I try moving that out of the way by hand, but no combination of things I try can get it to move - Windows keeps telling me I don't have permission to move it, even if I try renaming it from a command shell run as administrator, even if I boot into safe mode.
Let me reiterate: I'm dragging one folder icon into a different folder. An operation which, for Mac or Linux, merely involves rewriting an inode. But for Windows Vista, a dialog box comes up which shows the computer recursively going through every file and directory in the folder I'm moving, as if a file or folder somehow needs its location updated independently of the folder it's in. Several minutes later, my drag has finished being processed.
I've heard that Vista SP1 improves file handling, so two weeks ago I obtained Vista Service Pack 1 through the MSDN membership at my workplace. But a few minutes into the install, it fails with error 0x8007000d and points me to a tech note which advises me to turn off antivirus (done), run a disk check (done), and then run 'sfc
I have a feeling, come tomorrow when Vista SP1 is released to the masses, there's going to be more headscratching than celebrating.
Email spam gets smarter, yet email servers remain stupid.
The sheer amount of bounced spam that I get makes me want to surrender my email account and move to a mountaintop in Nepal and herd goats.
I believe in Intelligent Falling, you insensitive clod!
Home computers today can generate special effects that outclass anything that computers from thirty years ago could do. I expect the same thing will be true thirty years from now.
In 2037, some fan with a home computer will redo the Star Wars prequel trilogy correctly - remove all the stupid stuff, emphasize all the cool stuff, make it all look like it was supposed to be this way to begin with - and then the long nightmare will be over.
The fact that Mac OS X has only one look-and-feel is one of the biggest reasons why I like and use Mac OS X.
I am not a graphic designer. If I have the ability to tweak the colors and sizes of window decorations and the fonts and icons they use, then I will waste copious amounts of time coming up with something too ugly to put up with. I want somebody *else* to come up with a neutral-but-pleasant appearance for my desktop and my windows.
Another reason why I prefer Mac OS X - and something which I hope Linux gets someday - is that on my Mac I don't *have* to run an installer to install software; I just drag it onto my hard drive. And on my Mac, I can put the application icon anywhere I want, whether in the Applications folder or on my desktop or in my Dock or anyplace else. Ubuntu insists on making me run applications from the Applications menu. I hate the Applications menu just as much as I hate the Start menu.
Darwin is open source. Safari is based on Konqueror, which is open source. Xcode is an awesome development environment, and it's free (as in free beer).