A Mac doesn't make a good HTPC unless it can properly drive a widescreen TV.
I've been looking for a way to get a Mac to output a 16:9 desktop via any Mac-supported video card which has TV out. It's easy to get a 4:3 image sent to the TV, but even the high-end ATI and nVidia cards don't offer 800x450 or 1024x576 as a resolution option on the Mac. (And they don't even support component video; the best they do is S-video. Even my Playstation 2 supports my home theater display better than my Mac does.)
So as a result, when I hook it up to my home theater display, the Mac gives me a desktop that ignores the sides of the widescreen, unless I stretch the image horizontally, which of course makes everything look squashed. There aren't any utilities to tweak the output resolution on the Mac like there are on Linux and Windows.
If someone can tell me exactly how to get a Mac to display a 16:9 desktop on a TV, I'd be very grateful.
(there's not supposed to be a space in 'flo od', I don't know why Slashdot is putting one there, but the link works)
The guy in the striped shirt is a mime, but his face is too blurry to see that it's painted white. And yes, that's Jar Jar back there, and a guy in a tree stump, and an unfortunate sheep...
Why don't supermarkets make deals with food companies to not sell any competing products? Your local grocery store would only sell Wonder breads, and Tyson meats, and Kraft cheeses, and Ragu spaghetti sauce, and Pepsi sodas. I'm sure the food companies would give the grocery store a discount for this exclusivity, and in turn the food companies could save a bundle on advertising and product development -- they'd only have to make their products good enough and cheap enough to prevent you from deciding to go to a further-away grocery store. And this would be a lot easier on consumers, too; have you looked at all the different brands of American cheese available? A person only needs one kind of cheese; they shouldn't have to care which one they buy.
The answer, of course, is that having open competition in a free market is crucial to how capitalism works. Give a product an exclusive market, make it that much harder for other products to enter the market, and that product doesn't have to be good or cheap.
How much better has IE become since Netscape died off? What are the major differences between IE 5 and IE 6? Where's the buzz about what IE 7 is going to provide? How much less expensive has Windows become in the past five years?
So, I fail to see how IE is an issue in anybody's book. You can STILL install Netscape, you can STILL use other messengers, and you can STILL disassociate all your pictures, sounds, HTM/TXT, and video files to other applications other than those Microsoft provides for you. You don't HAVE to use Explorer, you don't HAVE to use Outlook Express, and you don't HAVE to use Windows Media Player.
Go try to explain to your mother or your grandmother using a PC with a dialup net connection how to replace IE/OE/WMP/MSN with third-party equivalents. Even better, try to make them understand why they should care.
You're a clueful user. You're in the minority. Most users don't have the patience or the reason to download a 13MB Mozilla browser over a modem and install it.
That's true, since it's absolutely crucial to Microsoft's business model to avoid giving any ground to any of Microsoft's competitors.
Microsoft will *not* release a version of Windows that's stripped-down with the browser removed. Period.
They will assert to the end that it's simply not possible for them to do. Eventually the government will require them to, but then they'll do like they did during the court case in 1999 and make a version of Windows which simply doesn't work, and they'll point to this as proof that they were right all along.
When the government continues to require Microsoft to release a version of Windows that doesn't have IE bundled in, Microsoft will continue to not offer such a product. The court case will drag on for another seven years. If eventually Microsoft is backed into a corner and somehow *forced* to offer a stripped-down version of Windows, then it'll be more expensive than the standard version, have more bugs, and PC makers will face stiff penalties from Microsoft if they use it. And then *that* court case will drag on for seven more years.
Meanwhile, Microsoft will misrepresent this to the public as 'the government is trying to get us to remove useful software from Windows and not let you have it for free!'
The real problem is that Joe Sixpack doesn't understand the big deal. He gets Windows with his PC, and it comes with a web browser and an instant messager built in, and any great new killer apps to appear in the future will have a workalike clone also built into Windows so that he doesn't have to go figure out how to download and install it. He doesn't understand that he's paying for these 'freebies' in the cost of Windows, which is part of the cost of his PC. He doesn't understand that without competition these handy utilities won't be any better than they need to be, as long as they're not so bad that he is driven to figure out how to download/install other companies' software.
You're fighting an entity who simply doesn't care. It's like trying to annoy your PC by thumbing your nose at its error messages.
A telemarketer is a computer script with a human interface. All the telemarketer does is read a computer screen telling him exactly what to say and press buttons indicating your responses. There's absolutely no thought involved on his part, and so he doesn't care whether you try to annoy him.
The best way to deal with a telemarketer is, as soon as you're sure it's a telemarketer:
(1) Ask, 'Does your company have a don't-call list?'
(2) Ask, 'Would you please put my name and phone number on that list?'
I have never had a telemarketer say 'no' to either of those questions, and I hardly ever get a telemarketing call any more.
There's something fishy with the pictures. Many of them are just *too* picturesque to be believable. Look at pictures 613 and 614, for example; they're both ends of the same service station! The same jeep is even in both pictures! Is this service station really a mile long?
New Version 10.2 To Be Available For Macintosh And Pentium 4 Computers
CUPERTINO, California--April 1, 2002-Apple® today announced Mac® OS X version 10.2, the second major upgrade to Apple's UNIX-based operating system. Mac OS X v10.2 will deliver significant performance improvements and new features and will add support for Intel® Pentium® 4 computers. Mac OS X v10.2 will be available at the Macworld Expo San Francisco during the week of July 15, 2002.
Mac OS X v10.2 is the ultimate digital hub, with the ability to create a music library and burn music CDs with iTunes, burn data CDs from the Finder, make movies with iMovie(TM) 2, watch DVDs with the DVD Player and create DVDs with iDVD.
Throughout the operating system, Apple has ensured that Mac OS X v10.2 fully leverages its UNIX-based design, significantly increases performance and provides new features. The groundwork for Pentium 4 compatibility was laid two years ago when Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was made available for PowerPC and Intel platforms under an open development model. Since then, Darwin customers and developers have helped make it a powerful and efficient operating system. Because Mac OS X v10.2 is identical on Macintosh and Pentium 4 computers, applications written for one can be made to run on both with little or no additional development effort.
"With this new version of Mac OS X, Apple brings the most advanced operating system on the market to computers using Intel Pentium 4 processors," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Mac OS X v10.2 includes the Aqua(TM) interface and allows users of Intel-based computers to experience the performance and the ease of use which Macintosh users have enjoyed for years."
Availability & Requirements Mac OS X v10.2 will ship this July and will be available as a full retail package through The Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple's retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US). Mac OS X v10.2 will be available for current Mac OS X users as an upgrade package through Apple's Mac OS Up-to-Date program for $19.95 (US).
Using Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac(TM), iBook(TM), Power Macintosh® G3, Power Mac(TM) G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and any PowerBook introduced after May 1998. Using Mac OS X on an Intel Pentium 4 computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory. Refer to http://www.apple.com/macosx for a complete list of hardware compatibility.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.
Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Apple Store, Aqua, iBook, iMac, iMovie, Power Macintosh, Power Mac and PowerBook are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Intel and Pentium are trademarks of Intel Corporation. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
As long as Slashdot is taking advertisements, here's an interesting press release I got from apple.com this morning.
Apple Announces Next Version of Mac OS X
New Version 10.2 To Be Available For Macintosh And Pentium 4 Computers
CUPERTINO, California--April 1, 2002-Apple® today announced Mac® OS X version 10.2, the second major upgrade to Apple's UNIX-based operating system. Mac OS X v10.2 will deliver significant performance improvements and new features and will add support for Intel® Pentium® 4 computers. Mac OS X v10.2 will be available at the Macworld Expo San Francisco during the week of July 15, 2002.
Mac OS X v10.2 is the ultimate digital hub, with the ability to create a music library and burn music CDs with iTunes, burn data CDs from the Finder, make movies with iMovie(TM) 2, watch DVDs with the DVD Player and create DVDs with iDVD.
Throughout the operating system, Apple has ensured that Mac OS X v10.2 fully leverages its UNIX-based design, significantly increases performance and provides new features. The groundwork for Pentium 4 compatibility was laid two years ago when Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was made available for PowerPC and Intel platforms under an open development model. Since then, Darwin customers and developers have helped make it a powerful and efficient operating system. Because Mac OS X v10.2 is identical on Macintosh and Pentium 4 computers, applications written for one can be made to run on both with little or no additional development effort.
"With this new version of Mac OS X, Apple brings the most advanced operating system on the market to computers using Intel Pentium 4 processors," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Mac OS X v10.2 includes the Aqua(TM) interface and allows users of Intel-based computers to experience the performance and the ease of use which Macintosh users have enjoyed for years."
Availability & Requirements Mac OS X v10.2 will ship this July and will be available as a full retail package through The Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple's retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US). Mac OS X v10.2 will be available for current Mac OS X users as an upgrade package through Apple's Mac OS Up-to-Date program for $19.95 (US).
Using Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac(TM), iBook(TM), Power Macintosh® G3, Power Mac(TM) G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and any PowerBook introduced after May 1998. Using Mac OS X on an Intel Pentium 4 computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory. Refer to http://www.apple.com/macosx for a complete list of hardware compatibility.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.
Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Apple Store, Aqua, iBook, iMac, iMovie, Power Macintosh, Power Mac and PowerBook are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Intel and Pentium are trademarks of Intel Corporation. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Microsoft is making you pay through the nose for these high-end features. You think they're free, but MS is recouping the cost by keeping the price of Windows artificially high and gouging users on the cost of support (often for problems that are Microsoft's fault to begin with). The cost of every PC component has fallen dramatically over the past decade, except the price of Windows.
Analogy: All the rides at Disneyland are free... but that doesn't make it a cheap park, once you realize just how much the entrance fee is.
Microsoft can keep the cost of Windows high because there's no serious competition out there for the desktop market. Introduce some serious operating system competition, and that'll bring the price of Windows down. Break out IE into a separate product, and it can compete with other web browsers on price and features and stability, and the fittest product will win.
Navigator (and consequently Communicator) should have been available on everything that was not Windows. Netscape should have made Navigator the best browser for Macintosh, Amiga, BeOS, Linux, Unix, Sega Saturn, any semi-modern (at the time) system with an internet connection.
Are you serious?
Here, let's put you in the role of CEO. Because Microsoft is copying your flagship product and giving it away for free, you've got just enough manpower and money left to make Netscape for Windows half as good as it needs to be in twice the length of time you actually have.
Tell me how you're going to compete with Microsoft while you make a good product on a half-dozen operating systems which don't even make up ten percent of the market.
Any DLL's which are part of Windows should be usable by any Windows applications I write.
If Internet Explorer is nothing than a 64K file which uses all the underlying Windows technology, then I should be allowed to make my own 64K application which is just as effective at surfing the web. Maybe I'll call it Brian's Browser. Since the bookmarks editor it uses is built into Windows, as is the web page 'subscription' service and the Auction Manager, it'll have basically the same feature set as IE and look/work very much the same, too.
I can then add on a few more features (maybe tabbed browsing or something) and sell it for $5 per copy, and make a little money off it, because Windows is so nice as to provide all the advanced web browsing funcionality as part of the base operating system.
Or, more to the point: Compaq should be able to bundle 'The Compaq Web Browser' with every PC it sells. The application would be only 64K large; it would use all the same built-in Windows code that IE uses for all its advanced functionality, except that the Compaq browser would have the Compaq logo at the top and default to a set of bookmarks which led to Compaq web pages. And the icon for this would be preinstalled on the Windows desktop, instead of the IE icon.
This would be fine with me. How nice of Microsoft to put all the time and effort into developing a state-of-the-art web browser, then making it part of Windows so that third-party applications can mix-and-match its technology at will!
The United States economy is built on capitalism. The point of capitalism is 'survival of the fittest.'
Netscape didn't have the first web browser -- they had the second. The first was NCSA Mosaic. Many web browsers came after Netscape, including several derivatives based on the Mosaic code (such as Spyglass and Internet Explorer), and custom browsers by Apple (Cyberdog) and Oracle, among others.
But Netscape thrived because they were able to build strategic relationships with large companies, advertise their product and market it to a wide user base on many different platforms, and add features and fix bugs on a timely basis. Because it was a better browser, it sold well; and because it sold well, more resources could be put into making it a better browser. (Yes, it was free to individuals, but large corporations paid a lot of money for Netscape site licenses and support commitments.)
Now, enter Microsoft. Microsoft didn't have to make a better product. They only had to do three things:
(1) Give their product away for free with every copy of Windows. This guaranteed that every Windows user had IE, and this was fine for most people; many wouldn't bother to download any competing product over a modem.
(2) Pour their Windows revenues into IE development and marketing. IE never had to make any money at all. It could have sucked so badly that no one would buy it -- it did, and they didn't -- but still it had a huge budget. Fighting this is like trying to play Quake against someone with an 'infinite health' cheat code: even if the guy can't aim, there's no possible way you're ever going to beat him, and eventually he's going to wear you down and kill you off.
(3) 'Cut off Netscape's air supply' (as said by a Microsoft exec in testimony). By severely penalizing Netscape's customers who depended on Microsoft more, Microsoft could force them to abandon Netscape and use IE, even though it was vastly inferior until version 3 or so.
This is how Netscape was crushed by Microsoft. Netscape didn't do everything right -- in fact, they made their share of wrong decisions -- but they were truly doomed from the very start. Even if Netscape had a crystal ball and knew the future and did everything perfectly right, they'd still have been buried by Microsoft.
With Microsoft using tactics such as I've described above, there is absolutely no way to successfully compete against them.
The fundamental mistake people are making is that people are still listening to Microsoft's complaints about how oppressed it is.
There's a lesson that everyone should have learned by now: Microsoft tells lies. Often. They also ignore the law, since they've learned that making the government curb their behavior is much better than behaving well on their own -- especially since the government's been completely ineffective in slowing the Microsoft juggernaut so far. Beat up kids on the playground for their lunch money today and you might get punished next year, if at all... so why bother holding back?
Microsoft isn't going to release a stripped-down version of Windows, not in the sense that you think of a stripped-down version of Linux. Remember two years ago when Microsoft showed that removing the DLL's with IE code in them cripped Windows? This was because Microsoft went to a whole lot of trouble to take the IE code and scatter it all over the operating system, sticking subroutines in DLL's which had nothing to do with IE. The Windows code is made as difficult as it has to be to foil the government's attempts to separate out the parts which violate the 1995 consent decree. (Never mind for now that the videotape they used to show the Windows slowdown was revealed to be fabricated. Never mind for now that Professor Felton successfully removed IE from Windows early in the court case, then when he tried it again later he found that Microsoft had scattered the code throughout the operating system to thwart him.)
In the Linux world, a stripped-down version of the operating system is easy to support, since it's much less complicated than integrating lots of modules and applications. But in the Windows world, Microsoft is going to make absolutely certain that a stripped-down version of Windows will not work well. They'll follow the letter of any judgement handed down to them, but they'll ignore the spirit and exploit any loopholes: they'll introduce as many bugs as they can in order to make sure that people won't want to use it, and when the government challenges them on this, they'll cry 'oppressed!' and another seven-year cycle of courtroom appearances will begin. Who knows, maybe they'll even consider the TCP/IP stack to be part of Internet Explorer, so their stripped-down Windows won't have networking support?
The real solution is to require Microsoft to bundle only bare-bones applications with Windows, and sell their high-end applications on store shelves. They bundle Microsoft Write and sell Microsoft Word at a premium; they can do this with IE and Media Player. This would go a long way towards restoring competition.
But Microsoft has learned that the government is completely ineffective against them. They've also learned that by misrepresenting the case to the American public ('freedom to innovate,' indeed), they can garner a whole lot of support and put a lot of pressure on state and federal government to settle the case against them. They're going to continue doing this while at the same time they continue underselling anyone in markets they want to own.
In a few years someone's going to have a great idea for the Next Big Thing, some simple yet powerful advance which will revolutionize computing as we know it. That person is going to follow the American dream and go into business for himself capitalizing on his idea. Then Microsoft is going to copy his ideas and bundle them into Windows, and the guy is going to go out of business, and this will spawn another seven years of the DOJ trying to curb Microsoft's power and Microsoft viciously defending its right to give its customers great things for free.
It happened with Netscape. It's going to happen again.
Scroll down to the section titled 'Courtly Hatred and Windows in Mud Huts,' and start reading.
If Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist last time, it can get away with a slap on the wrist again. It's going to take someone with a lot of backbone to make sure this doesn't happen.
I've got a question about that 'Pac-Man perfect score' thing...
How is it *possible* to eat all four monsters every time on every board? On some of the boards, the monsters only turn blue for half a second. The *only* way to eat all four of them when they're blue is to have all four of them on top of each other and right in front of you when you eat the blinking dot. That happens so rarely that I have trouble believing some kid got it to happen four times on every higher-level board...
Besides, there is no 'end' to Pac-Man; the right half of board 255 is garbled but it's still playable, and board 256 is fine again.
That's true. I guess the average business end user knows a little more than I do about recompiling a kernel to enable support for serial communications and audio DMA.
Last year I tried really hard to get RedHat (LinuxPPC) to work on a Mac. It didn't recognize the Ethernet card I was using, so I had to download the kernel sources, figure out what configuration options I needed to turn on, recompile, reboot, then repeat until I managed to figure out how to enable the right Ethernet support.
And then it so happened that the new kernel didn't support my display properly -- in order to use anything more than unaccelerated 8-bit video, my display required kernel patches which hadn't been rolled into the main distribution yet -- so I had to figure out what was different in the code between the kernel I had been using and the kernel I was using now, and patch my new kernel source with the display diffs, recompile, swap out kernels, reboot... (here's evidence of my pain)
And the latest kernel also didn't support audio or my serial modem. I never could get those working. I still don't know if the latest Linux kernel on a Mac properly supports audio.
In the end, I finally gave up on trying to use Linux on a Mac.
The interface, Aqua, isn't open-source because Apple wants to retain control of it.
I wouldn't call OS X 'largely untested.' It's directly based on NeXT's OPENSTEP operating system, which was known for being very stable and having great developer tools (the game 'Doom' was written on NeXT systems because of this), and OPENSTEP has lineage back to 4.3 BSD.
What's especially interesting is that Darwin runs on Intel PC's. This means that if Apple wanted to make Mac OS X available as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, all it would theoretically take is a recompile for the x86 architecture...
Linux decides it wants to own the OS market, so they copy your OS and give it away for free on the net, while refusing to sell MS products. How is MS going to compete, or even stay in business?
By providing software and services just good enough to keep people from migrating to Linux.
They *have* been playing that card, in a way -- remember the falsified videotape at the trial, where Microsoft tried to show that removing IE would make Windows run so much more slowly?
There's another interesting aspect to Ballmer's recent claims. According to an article on CNN, it would be "too expensive to build a version of Java to package with Windows." Does this mean that porting a development environment to Windows is expensive? And that writing cross-platform applications on Windows is cost-prohibitive? People used to think that Windows was a good development platform; in light of these comments from the CEO, maybe they should revise their thinking?
There are two possible responses to the threat of Microsoft pulling Windows form the marketplace:
(1) "Oh my god! Windows is far too important, losing it would ruin the American economy!"
... which would be proof that Windows *is* too powerful, and that this extreme dependence on one operating system and one vendor who provides it must be broken -- for the same reason that America can't rely solely on one country for its oil, and the same reason that American farmers can't all grow the same identical strain of corn lest one virus wipe it all out.
(2) "Who cares? Linux can easily fill the void left by the loss of Windows."
... which is a thought Microsoft doesn't want to have cross *anyone's* mind. Can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft pulled Windows and the fallout lasted for a few months and then it was over and people found alternatives and nobody cared any more?
So I really have no idea what Ballmer hopes to achieve by threatening to pull Windows from the market.
MS will prevail because of its momentum. Windows perpetuates itself: nine out of ten people with computers use Windows, and therefore software vendors have to support Windows before anything else, and therefore you need a Windows PC if you need interoperability with other people.
So what if Linux is free? There aren't any 'For Dummies' books which tell a manager how to get Microsoft Word working on Linux -- and he's familiar with Word, that's what he's used all his life, so unless Linux offers a word processor that looks and acts exactly like Word, he won't be interested in Linux. He's not interested in having to learn a new program.
You can't walk into a store and buy The Sims or Microsoft Flight Simulator for Linux. If you use Linux, your selection of games is very narrow compared to if you use Windows.
If Linux and Windows were both starting from ground zero, if no one were using either right now, then Linux would clearly win -- but that's not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
A Mac doesn't make a good HTPC unless it can properly drive a widescreen TV.
I've been looking for a way to get a Mac to output a 16:9 desktop via any Mac-supported video card which has TV out. It's easy to get a 4:3 image sent to the TV, but even the high-end ATI and nVidia cards don't offer 800x450 or 1024x576 as a resolution option on the Mac. (And they don't even support component video; the best they do is S-video. Even my Playstation 2 supports my home theater display better than my Mac does.)
So as a result, when I hook it up to my home theater display, the Mac gives me a desktop that ignores the sides of the widescreen, unless I stretch the image horizontally, which of course makes everything look squashed. There aren't any utilities to tweak the output resolution on the Mac like there are on Linux and Windows.
If someone can tell me exactly how to get a Mac to display a 16:9 desktop on a TV, I'd be very grateful.
If you want irreverent, look closely at the figures in the background of the first image in the Flood story.
o od/gn06_11.html
http://www.thereverend.com/brick_testament/the_fl
(there's not supposed to be a space in 'flo od', I don't know why Slashdot is putting one there, but the link works)
The guy in the striped shirt is a mime, but his face is too blurry to see that it's painted white. And yes, that's Jar Jar back there, and a guy in a tree stump, and an unfortunate sheep...
Why don't supermarkets make deals with food companies to not sell any competing products? Your local grocery store would only sell Wonder breads, and Tyson meats, and Kraft cheeses, and Ragu spaghetti sauce, and Pepsi sodas. I'm sure the food companies would give the grocery store a discount for this exclusivity, and in turn the food companies could save a bundle on advertising and product development -- they'd only have to make their products good enough and cheap enough to prevent you from deciding to go to a further-away grocery store. And this would be a lot easier on consumers, too; have you looked at all the different brands of American cheese available? A person only needs one kind of cheese; they shouldn't have to care which one they buy.
The answer, of course, is that having open competition in a free market is crucial to how capitalism works. Give a product an exclusive market, make it that much harder for other products to enter the market, and that product doesn't have to be good or cheap.
How much better has IE become since Netscape died off? What are the major differences between IE 5 and IE 6? Where's the buzz about what IE 7 is going to provide? How much less expensive has Windows become in the past five years?
So, I fail to see how IE is an issue in anybody's book. You can STILL install Netscape, you can STILL use other messengers, and you can STILL disassociate all your pictures, sounds, HTM/TXT, and video files to other applications other than those Microsoft provides for you. You don't HAVE to use Explorer, you don't HAVE to use Outlook Express, and you don't HAVE to use Windows Media Player.
Go try to explain to your mother or your grandmother using a PC with a dialup net connection how to replace IE/OE/WMP/MSN with third-party equivalents. Even better, try to make them understand why they should care.
You're a clueful user. You're in the minority. Most users don't have the patience or the reason to download a 13MB Mozilla browser over a modem and install it.
That's true, since it's absolutely crucial to Microsoft's business model to avoid giving any ground to any of Microsoft's competitors.
Microsoft will *not* release a version of Windows that's stripped-down with the browser removed. Period.
They will assert to the end that it's simply not possible for them to do. Eventually the government will require them to, but then they'll do like they did during the court case in 1999 and make a version of Windows which simply doesn't work, and they'll point to this as proof that they were right all along.
When the government continues to require Microsoft to release a version of Windows that doesn't have IE bundled in, Microsoft will continue to not offer such a product. The court case will drag on for another seven years. If eventually Microsoft is backed into a corner and somehow *forced* to offer a stripped-down version of Windows, then it'll be more expensive than the standard version, have more bugs, and PC makers will face stiff penalties from Microsoft if they use it. And then *that* court case will drag on for seven more years.
Meanwhile, Microsoft will misrepresent this to the public as 'the government is trying to get us to remove useful software from Windows and not let you have it for free!'
The real problem is that Joe Sixpack doesn't understand the big deal. He gets Windows with his PC, and it comes with a web browser and an instant messager built in, and any great new killer apps to appear in the future will have a workalike clone also built into Windows so that he doesn't have to go figure out how to download and install it. He doesn't understand that he's paying for these 'freebies' in the cost of Windows, which is part of the cost of his PC. He doesn't understand that without competition these handy utilities won't be any better than they need to be, as long as they're not so bad that he is driven to figure out how to download/install other companies' software.
You're fighting an entity who simply doesn't care. It's like trying to annoy your PC by thumbing your nose at its error messages.
A telemarketer is a computer script with a human interface. All the telemarketer does is read a computer screen telling him exactly what to say and press buttons indicating your responses. There's absolutely no thought involved on his part, and so he doesn't care whether you try to annoy him.
The best way to deal with a telemarketer is, as soon as you're sure it's a telemarketer:
(1) Ask, 'Does your company have a don't-call list?'
(2) Ask, 'Would you please put my name and phone number on that list?'
I have never had a telemarketer say 'no' to either of those questions, and I hardly ever get a telemarketing call any more.
For more information, see JunkBusters at 'http://www.junkbusters.com/'.
Those two frames in the high-res QuickTime movie on the site are numbered 613 and 614.
I wonder where the extra hundred frames came from?
Huh. Look at the hi-res QuickTime movie on the site. Each frame is numbered; the pictures I meant are in fact 613 and 614.
So maybe there's a conspiracy going on...
There's something fishy with the pictures. Many of them are just *too* picturesque to be believable. Look at pictures 613 and 614, for example; they're both ends of the same service station! The same jeep is even in both pictures! Is this service station really a mile long?
Apple Announces Next Version of Mac OS X
New Version 10.2 To Be Available For Macintosh And Pentium 4 Computers
CUPERTINO, California--April 1, 2002-Apple® today announced Mac® OS X version
10.2, the second major upgrade to Apple's UNIX-based operating system. Mac
OS X v10.2 will deliver significant performance improvements and new
features and will add support for Intel® Pentium® 4 computers. Mac OS X
v10.2 will be available at the Macworld Expo San Francisco during the week
of July 15, 2002.
Mac OS X v10.2 is the ultimate digital hub, with the ability to create a
music library and burn music CDs with iTunes, burn data CDs from the Finder,
make movies with iMovie(TM) 2, watch DVDs with the DVD Player and create DVDs
with iDVD.
Throughout the operating system, Apple has ensured that Mac OS X v10.2 fully
leverages its UNIX-based design, significantly increases performance and
provides new features. The groundwork for Pentium 4 compatibility was laid
two years ago when Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was made available for
PowerPC and Intel platforms under an open development model. Since then,
Darwin customers and developers have helped make it a powerful and efficient
operating system. Because Mac OS X v10.2 is identical on Macintosh and
Pentium 4 computers, applications written for one can be made to run on both
with little or no additional development effort.
"With this new version of Mac OS X, Apple brings the most advanced operating
system on the market to computers using Intel Pentium 4 processors," said
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Mac OS X v10.2 includes the Aqua(TM) interface and
allows users of Intel-based computers to experience the performance and the
ease of use which Macintosh users have enjoyed for years."
Availability & Requirements
Mac OS X v10.2 will ship this July and will be available as a full retail
package through The Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple's retail stores
and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129
(US). Mac OS X v10.2 will be available for current Mac OS X users as an
upgrade package through Apple's Mac OS Up-to-Date program for $19.95 (US).
Using Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory
and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac(TM), iBook(TM), Power
Macintosh® G3, Power Mac(TM) G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and any PowerBook introduced
after May 1998. Using Mac OS X on an Intel Pentium 4 computer requires a
minimum of 128MB of memory. Refer to http://www.apple.com/macosx for a
complete list of hardware compatibility.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple
II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the
Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing
experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers
around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet
offerings.
Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Apple Store, Aqua, iBook,
iMac, iMovie, Power Macintosh, Power Mac and PowerBook are trademarks of
Apple Computer, Inc. Intel and Pentium are trademarks of Intel
Corporation. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their
respective owners.
As long as Slashdot is taking advertisements, here's an interesting press release I got from apple.com this morning.
Apple Announces Next Version of Mac OS X
New Version 10.2 To Be Available For Macintosh And Pentium 4 Computers
CUPERTINO, California--April 1, 2002-Apple® today announced Mac® OS X version
10.2, the second major upgrade to Apple's UNIX-based operating system. Mac
OS X v10.2 will deliver significant performance improvements and new
features and will add support for Intel® Pentium® 4 computers. Mac OS X
v10.2 will be available at the Macworld Expo San Francisco during the week
of July 15, 2002.
Mac OS X v10.2 is the ultimate digital hub, with the ability to create a
music library and burn music CDs with iTunes, burn data CDs from the Finder,
make movies with iMovie(TM) 2, watch DVDs with the DVD Player and create DVDs
with iDVD.
Throughout the operating system, Apple has ensured that Mac OS X v10.2 fully
leverages its UNIX-based design, significantly increases performance and
provides new features. The groundwork for Pentium 4 compatibility was laid
two years ago when Darwin, the core of Mac OS X, was made available for
PowerPC and Intel platforms under an open development model. Since then,
Darwin customers and developers have helped make it a powerful and efficient
operating system. Because Mac OS X v10.2 is identical on Macintosh and
Pentium 4 computers, applications written for one can be made to run on both
with little or no additional development effort.
"With this new version of Mac OS X, Apple brings the most advanced operating
system on the market to computers using Intel Pentium 4 processors," said
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "Mac OS X v10.2 includes the Aqua(TM) interface and
allows users of Intel-based computers to experience the performance and the
ease of use which Macintosh users have enjoyed for years."
Availability & Requirements
Mac OS X v10.2 will ship this July and will be available as a full retail
package through The Apple Store® (www.apple.com), at Apple's retail stores
and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129
(US). Mac OS X v10.2 will be available for current Mac OS X users as an
upgrade package through Apple's Mac OS Up-to-Date program for $19.95 (US).
Using Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer requires a minimum of 128MB of memory
and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac(TM), iBook(TM), Power
Macintosh® G3, Power Mac(TM) G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and any PowerBook introduced
after May 1998. Using Mac OS X on an Intel Pentium 4 computer requires a
minimum of 128MB of memory. Refer to http://www.apple.com/macosx for a
complete list of hardware compatibility.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple
II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the
Macintosh. Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing
experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers
around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet
offerings.
Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Apple Store, Aqua, iBook,
iMac, iMovie, Power Macintosh, Power Mac and PowerBook are trademarks of
Apple Computer, Inc. Intel and Pentium are trademarks of Intel
Corporation. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their
respective owners.
Easy.
Microsoft is making you pay through the nose for these high-end features. You think they're free, but MS is recouping the cost by keeping the price of Windows artificially high and gouging users on the cost of support (often for problems that are Microsoft's fault to begin with). The cost of every PC component has fallen dramatically over the past decade, except the price of Windows.
Analogy: All the rides at Disneyland are free... but that doesn't make it a cheap park, once you realize just how much the entrance fee is.
Microsoft can keep the cost of Windows high because there's no serious competition out there for the desktop market. Introduce some serious operating system competition, and that'll bring the price of Windows down. Break out IE into a separate product, and it can compete with other web browsers on price and features and stability, and the fittest product will win.
Navigator (and consequently Communicator) should have been available on everything that was not Windows. Netscape should have made Navigator the best browser for Macintosh, Amiga, BeOS, Linux, Unix, Sega Saturn, any semi-modern (at the time) system with an internet connection.
Are you serious?
Here, let's put you in the role of CEO. Because Microsoft is copying your flagship product and giving it away for free, you've got just enough manpower and money left to make Netscape for Windows half as good as it needs to be in twice the length of time you actually have.
Tell me how you're going to compete with Microsoft while you make a good product on a half-dozen operating systems which don't even make up ten percent of the market.
Any DLL's which are part of Windows should be usable by any Windows applications I write.
If Internet Explorer is nothing than a 64K file which uses all the underlying Windows technology, then I should be allowed to make my own 64K application which is just as effective at surfing the web. Maybe I'll call it Brian's Browser. Since the bookmarks editor it uses is built into Windows, as is the web page 'subscription' service and the Auction Manager, it'll have basically the same feature set as IE and look/work very much the same, too.
I can then add on a few more features (maybe tabbed browsing or something) and sell it for $5 per copy, and make a little money off it, because Windows is so nice as to provide all the advanced web browsing funcionality as part of the base operating system.
Or, more to the point: Compaq should be able to bundle 'The Compaq Web Browser' with every PC it sells. The application would be only 64K large; it would use all the same built-in Windows code that IE uses for all its advanced functionality, except that the Compaq browser would have the Compaq logo at the top and default to a set of bookmarks which led to Compaq web pages. And the icon for this would be preinstalled on the Windows desktop, instead of the IE icon.
This would be fine with me. How nice of Microsoft to put all the time and effort into developing a state-of-the-art web browser, then making it part of Windows so that third-party applications can mix-and-match its technology at will!
You misunderstand me.
The United States economy is built on capitalism. The point of capitalism is 'survival of the fittest.'
Netscape didn't have the first web browser -- they had the second. The first was NCSA Mosaic. Many web browsers came after Netscape, including several derivatives based on the Mosaic code (such as Spyglass and Internet Explorer), and custom browsers by Apple (Cyberdog) and Oracle, among others.
But Netscape thrived because they were able to build strategic relationships with large companies, advertise their product and market it to a wide user base on many different platforms, and add features and fix bugs on a timely basis. Because it was a better browser, it sold well; and because it sold well, more resources could be put into making it a better browser. (Yes, it was free to individuals, but large corporations paid a lot of money for Netscape site licenses and support commitments.)
Now, enter Microsoft. Microsoft didn't have to make a better product. They only had to do three things:
(1) Give their product away for free with every copy of Windows. This guaranteed that every Windows user had IE, and this was fine for most people; many wouldn't bother to download any competing product over a modem.
(2) Pour their Windows revenues into IE development and marketing. IE never had to make any money at all. It could have sucked so badly that no one would buy it -- it did, and they didn't -- but still it had a huge budget. Fighting this is like trying to play Quake against someone with an 'infinite health' cheat code: even if the guy can't aim, there's no possible way you're ever going to beat him, and eventually he's going to wear you down and kill you off.
(3) 'Cut off Netscape's air supply' (as said by a Microsoft exec in testimony). By severely penalizing Netscape's customers who depended on Microsoft more, Microsoft could force them to abandon Netscape and use IE, even though it was vastly inferior until version 3 or so.
This is how Netscape was crushed by Microsoft. Netscape didn't do everything right -- in fact, they made their share of wrong decisions -- but they were truly doomed from the very start. Even if Netscape had a crystal ball and knew the future and did everything perfectly right, they'd still have been buried by Microsoft.
With Microsoft using tactics such as I've described above, there is absolutely no way to successfully compete against them.
Period.
Will anything really change?
No.
The fundamental mistake people are making is that people are still listening to Microsoft's complaints about how oppressed it is.
There's a lesson that everyone should have learned by now: Microsoft tells lies. Often. They also ignore the law, since they've learned that making the government curb their behavior is much better than behaving well on their own -- especially since the government's been completely ineffective in slowing the Microsoft juggernaut so far. Beat up kids on the playground for their lunch money today and you might get punished next year, if at all... so why bother holding back?
Microsoft isn't going to release a stripped-down version of Windows, not in the sense that you think of a stripped-down version of Linux. Remember two years ago when Microsoft showed that removing the DLL's with IE code in them cripped Windows? This was because Microsoft went to a whole lot of trouble to take the IE code and scatter it all over the operating system, sticking subroutines in DLL's which had nothing to do with IE. The Windows code is made as difficult as it has to be to foil the government's attempts to separate out the parts which violate the 1995 consent decree. (Never mind for now that the videotape they used to show the Windows slowdown was revealed to be fabricated. Never mind for now that Professor Felton successfully removed IE from Windows early in the court case, then when he tried it again later he found that Microsoft had scattered the code throughout the operating system to thwart him.)
In the Linux world, a stripped-down version of the operating system is easy to support, since it's much less complicated than integrating lots of modules and applications. But in the Windows world, Microsoft is going to make absolutely certain that a stripped-down version of Windows will not work well. They'll follow the letter of any judgement handed down to them, but they'll ignore the spirit and exploit any loopholes: they'll introduce as many bugs as they can in order to make sure that people won't want to use it, and when the government challenges them on this, they'll cry 'oppressed!' and another seven-year cycle of courtroom appearances will begin. Who knows, maybe they'll even consider the TCP/IP stack to be part of Internet Explorer, so their stripped-down Windows won't have networking support?
The real solution is to require Microsoft to bundle only bare-bones applications with Windows, and sell their high-end applications on store shelves. They bundle Microsoft Write and sell Microsoft Word at a premium; they can do this with IE and Media Player. This would go a long way towards restoring competition.
But Microsoft has learned that the government is completely ineffective against them. They've also learned that by misrepresenting the case to the American public ('freedom to innovate,' indeed), they can garner a whole lot of support and put a lot of pressure on state and federal government to settle the case against them. They're going to continue doing this while at the same time they continue underselling anyone in markets they want to own.
In a few years someone's going to have a great idea for the Next Big Thing, some simple yet powerful advance which will revolutionize computing as we know it. That person is going to follow the American dream and go into business for himself capitalizing on his idea. Then Microsoft is going to copy his ideas and bundle them into Windows, and the guy is going to go out of business, and this will spawn another seven years of the DOJ trying to curb Microsoft's power and Microsoft viciously defending its right to give its customers great things for free.
It happened with Netscape. It's going to happen again.
If there's any question left in anyone's mind about whether or not Microsoft is guilty, and how far any ruling against them needs to go...
Look at the Slashdot story preceding this one, 'The Sad Parable of OS/2'. Specifically, read the article in Linux And Main it links to.
Scroll down to the section titled 'Courtly Hatred and Windows in Mud Huts,' and start reading.
If Microsoft got away with a slap on the wrist last time, it can get away with a slap on the wrist again. It's going to take someone with a lot of backbone to make sure this doesn't happen.
I've got a question about that 'Pac-Man perfect score' thing...
How is it *possible* to eat all four monsters every time on every board? On some of the boards, the monsters only turn blue for half a second. The *only* way to eat all four of them when they're blue is to have all four of them on top of each other and right in front of you when you eat the blinking dot. That happens so rarely that I have trouble believing some kid got it to happen four times on every higher-level board...
Besides, there is no 'end' to Pac-Man; the right half of board 255 is garbled but it's still playable, and board 256 is fine again.
That's true. I guess the average business end user knows a little more than I do about recompiling a kernel to enable support for serial communications and audio DMA.
Last year I tried really hard to get RedHat (LinuxPPC) to work on a Mac. It didn't recognize the Ethernet card I was using, so I had to download the kernel sources, figure out what configuration options I needed to turn on, recompile, reboot, then repeat until I managed to figure out how to enable the right Ethernet support.
And then it so happened that the new kernel didn't support my display properly -- in order to use anything more than unaccelerated 8-bit video, my display required kernel patches which hadn't been rolled into the main distribution yet -- so I had to figure out what was different in the code between the kernel I had been using and the kernel I was using now, and patch my new kernel source with the display diffs, recompile, swap out kernels, reboot... (here's evidence of my pain)
And the latest kernel also didn't support audio or my serial modem. I never could get those working. I still don't know if the latest Linux kernel on a Mac properly supports audio.
In the end, I finally gave up on trying to use Linux on a Mac.
'Darwin,' the FreeBSD-based core of OS X, is open source:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
The interface, Aqua, isn't open-source because Apple wants to retain control of it.
I wouldn't call OS X 'largely untested.' It's directly based on NeXT's OPENSTEP operating system, which was known for being very stable and having great developer tools (the game 'Doom' was written on NeXT systems because of this), and OPENSTEP has lineage back to 4.3 BSD.
What's especially interesting is that Darwin runs on Intel PC's. This means that if Apple wanted to make Mac OS X available as an alternative to Microsoft Windows, all it would theoretically take is a recompile for the x86 architecture...
Okay, here, I'll answer it.
Linux decides it wants to own the OS market, so they copy your OS and give it away for free on the net, while refusing to sell MS products. How is MS going to compete, or even stay in business?
By providing software and services just good enough to keep people from migrating to Linux.
They *have* been playing that card, in a way -- remember the falsified videotape at the trial, where Microsoft tried to show that removing IE would make Windows run so much more slowly?
There's another interesting aspect to Ballmer's recent claims. According to an article on CNN, it would be "too expensive to build a version of Java to package with Windows." Does this mean that porting a development environment to Windows is expensive? And that writing cross-platform applications on Windows is cost-prohibitive? People used to think that Windows was a good development platform; in light of these comments from the CEO, maybe they should revise their thinking?
Ballmer may just have flubbed up.
There are two possible responses to the threat of Microsoft pulling Windows form the marketplace:
(1) "Oh my god! Windows is far too important, losing it would ruin the American economy!"
... which would be proof that Windows *is* too powerful, and that this extreme dependence on one operating system and one vendor who provides it must be broken -- for the same reason that America can't rely solely on one country for its oil, and the same reason that American farmers can't all grow the same identical strain of corn lest one virus wipe it all out.
(2) "Who cares? Linux can easily fill the void left by the loss of Windows."
... which is a thought Microsoft doesn't want to have cross *anyone's* mind. Can you imagine what would happen if Microsoft pulled Windows and the fallout lasted for a few months and then it was over and people found alternatives and nobody cared any more?
So I really have no idea what Ballmer hopes to achieve by threatening to pull Windows from the market.
MS will prevail because of its momentum. Windows perpetuates itself: nine out of ten people with computers use Windows, and therefore software vendors have to support Windows before anything else, and therefore you need a Windows PC if you need interoperability with other people.
So what if Linux is free? There aren't any 'For Dummies' books which tell a manager how to get Microsoft Word working on Linux -- and he's familiar with Word, that's what he's used all his life, so unless Linux offers a word processor that looks and acts exactly like Word, he won't be interested in Linux. He's not interested in having to learn a new program.
You can't walk into a store and buy The Sims or Microsoft Flight Simulator for Linux. If you use Linux, your selection of games is very narrow compared to if you use Windows.
If Linux and Windows were both starting from ground zero, if no one were using either right now, then Linux would clearly win -- but that's not the case.