I think there's still some DOS compatibility relics in Windows Millenium Edition (I refuse to call it "Windows Me".)
Microsoft would love to port all of their code to a new processor, and charge their millions of users a tasty sum in the process. Microsoft would probably charge hundreds just for recompiled apps, so maintaining backward compatibility is probably good for the end user.
First of all, Beta tapes were smaller. Second of all, it "won" not because of anything remotely similar to technological issues. It won because of licensing. Sony owned betamax technology and wanted to license it (for a fee) to anyone who wanted to use it. A consortium of movie studios formed to quickly hack together a more open standard that they could use for free. It still sucks compared to beta, but that's why we have it.
You never justify your subject line in this comment. Where is the "flaw"? You do point out a major inconsistency among slashdotters, though, that being the microsoft situation. I for one, support microsoft's right to continue. I'd also say the political party to which I most nearly identify with is the Libertarians.
Also, I'm no expert on libertarianism, but I would think libertarians would be in favour of some sort of restriction on corporate polluting, provided it could be proven to be effective, because pollution denies everyone else a basic freedom to a live in a clean world.
Right now, I am trying very hard to not comment on your statements about the US and capitalism.
How can you say that libertarianism is another word for apathy? There is no evidence to support that. Most people would call the Libertarians extremists.
Your comment starts with a very contestable thesis and does nothing to justify it. It is just a rant.
Do you pronounce "USia"/yoo-ess-ee-ah/ or/oozhya/?
I do this a lot too. A couple times a week I'd say I end up heading down to the local coffee shop with a pencil and a big pad of graph paper. Helps me a lot. Sometimes, even the walk there is enough.
There are a lot of other interesting articles about intellectual property issues, especially those relating to music, at Negativland's intellectual property page. I don't know if you know the story of Negativland, but it's really long, fsck'd up, and reprinted in more detail than you'd ever want at their site. That's where I originally found the albini piece.
If you read most accounts, non-multi-platinum artists don't really make much money from album sales at all. The reasons are many.
For one, when a band signs a record deal, they are starving, love playing, and will do anything to keep doing it. Consequently, they get some crap deals. A lot of times, a band's contract will basically say that they get 5% of royalties, after recouping all recording and promotion costs, and only on full price sales. That sucks even worse than it sounds.
When a big record label gets behind a band, they often spend over $1million on promotion alone, in the form of sponsored radio give aways, program director schmoozing, etc. Also, recording in a big studio with a big name producer costs a fortune.
So before the band makes a cent, they have to pay all that back out of their 5%, which is probably less than a buck a record, maybe less than $.50. So they gotta sell a lot of records to even make a cent. I heard a pair of NY radio dj's say the other day that they get $.37 cents out of each copy sold. And that's only on full price sales. As soon as it gets marked down to super-saver or whatever, they get nothing.
There's a lot of other really bad stuff about this set up. Say it's a three record deal and the first record doesn't do too well. The record label won't want to invest a million bucks in another record they are not confident in, so they won't pay for you to record another record or tour (plus you have nothing to tour behind). But you're stuck in a contract so you can't go anywhere else. This is the kind of thing that leads to "The Artist" instead of Prince, or AFX, Polygon Window, etc., instead of Aphex Twin. There's a really good article by Steve Albini called The Problem With Music. This is mirrored all over the place if there's any problem with that link. It has actual numbers, is a lot more thorough, and comes from someone with a whole lot more experience than I have. The punchline is, they work out numbers for a band that sells 250,000 copies of the record and then tours. Each band member ends up netting 4,031.25, owes the record company three more albums and $14,000 in royalties, and the music biz ends up ahead by 3 million dollars. I strongly suggest reading this article.
There are other fscked things about the biz and what they do to bands. A kid I know's band was signed by I think Capitol. At first, everything was fine. They were psyched. "Hey, we get to be in a band as our job!" But then, the record company decided that this band should be more like the Foo Fighters, since they were selling a lot of records. They made the band wear different clothes, talk differently. They had producers change their sound. They could refuse, but then the record company will cut them off from touring/recording capital, and they are still locked in the contract. What are they supposed to do?
What a lot of people don't realize is that bands make a huge proportion of their income from touring and merchandise. Take a band like Phish. They've had basically no radio success at all. They've released something like 12 albums, and only one has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, but due to their liberal "give your friends our tapes" policy, they have a huge following, because a lot of people were exposed to the band at no cost to them. They made something like $34 million touring last year.
Frankly, I believe the increased exposure of network distributed free music will dramatically help a lot of bands, since they will be freed from being screwed by labels and will gain a huge amount of exposure (if they are good). This will lead to better tour attendance and more merchandise sales. This will ultimately help bands stay alive if they embrace it.
I grew up on windows, ran freeBSD for a while (though never attained guru status with it), and use solaris a lot at school. If OS X comes out (I have my doubts), and works the way they are saying it will, I'm buying a macintosh.
There are a few tasks I use my computer for. The main, day to day tasks are email, web browsing, stuff like that. Frankly, you can use most any system to do that (though linux is crippled in the browser department). I also write code (mostly for work or school) and music. The mac kicks anything's ass for music production. Code, well, that depends on the system it has to be run on. So there's a slight total tendency with these tasks to go to Mac, but that's not the whole reason.
When I look at Apple now, I see a company that is consistently looking at the paradigm of computing, of what we hold to be required or necessary, and is saying, "Does that annoying thing have to be that way?" A lot of times, the answer is "no", and they change it.
One example that comes to mind is the G4 flip-out case design. That is genius. I've done a lot of work fixing people's home computers and configuring systems in offices. It sucks. Working inside a PC case is an exercise in trying to do a very simple thing, like hook an IDE cable to a mboard the right way, while being inhibited in a million pointless ways, like having all the drive cages hanging over the mboard's IDE header. When I first saw that case, I was so impressed: "Why hasn't anyone done that before? It's so obvious. It's such a better way to do the same task, and it looks so cool. That is an object I want on my desk everyday."
There are other examples. The PowerPC is a better processor architecture than x86, Apple embraced it.
When it became apparent that Unix had some things to offer to the rest of the world, Apple integrated the interesting components into a still easy to use OS (I hope at least). This is a lot more appealing to me than using linux.
In Microsoft, I see a company that's basically just trying to figure out what immediate stopgap measure is needed to go on for another day (ASP, DOS, Win3.1, Win9x, VB). In linux, I see a community that basically borrowed a bunch of old, but good, ideas and is trying to play imitate-but-with-some-new-glitz in every market. There is nothing wrong with either of these approaches, I guess. I just don't want it on my desk.
Microsoft never dreamed of the anti-competition, monopolistic practices that Apple has implemented. The only difference is that Apple has been incompetent at becoming a monopoly. Can you imagine the world we would have if Apple had won?
As a quick aside, allow me to just remind you that it is not illegal to act like you have a monopoly, to seek a monopoly, or to behave in ways that would eliminate your competition, so long as you do not have a monopoly. In fact, that process is the foundation of capitalism, like it or not. What Microsoft did was continue this behavior (and other illegal behaviors) after they attained a monopoly.
Honestly, I don't know a whole lot about Kernel architecture, but i read somewhere that Linus got a lot of his design principles from Tannenbaum's book. Unfortunately, I can't cite a reference, so I'll give you that. I am just not equipped to argue it. I *do* know, however, that Linux is not known in the OS architecture community as an innovative system. Far from it, actually, a lot people I talk to who are far more knowledgable about such things (college OS professors, Sun engineers) say that linux, architecture-wise, is sort of laughable, a bad imitation of a real unix.
Either way, that's one small point. The rest still stand. Saying that GUI is "an easy target" doesn't make it any less of a fair target. Every commercial GUI has used some PARC ideas, but linux has taked these imitations to new heights. Further more, the imitations are usually crappier than the originals. Further, my original criticism was not only about the GUI as a whole, but about the specific apps for the gui. Plenty have folks, including MS, have innovated in this area. Linux has a lot of second rate imitations.
IP-masquerading is available on a lot of platforms. I don't know where it started, but I'd be surprised if it started on linux. I do like linux's implementation of the idea the best though and frequently use linux expressly for this purpose.
About the voltaire thing, yeah, I stand by your rephrased version of what I said. I think they do bad things. Illegal things? No. Immoral things, yes. Don't buy their stuff. As for calling me an idiot and a lout, if that's the way you argue, fine. I think that that is totally inappropriate in a discussion of this nature, disgusting, really. Kind of like Microsoft. However, I'll defend your right to behave that way till I die as well.
One could call "making normal useable software" an innovation in this market, and microsoft is the clear leader.
Let's look at some real basic ones here. How about web browsing? Microsoft was the first to come out with a useable browser that actually met the CSS-1 standard (IE5/Mac). What's more, it's remarkably stable! Today, web-browser stability is a true innovation. Try to read/. running Netscape under FreeBSD. It crashes so much that I switched back to windows for browsing. Under Solaris, I actually use the most recent version of IE available rather than crash-happy netscape or mozilla. That's an innovation I'd like to see protected.
How about decent email readers? Have any of you used outlook or are you all lumbering along with Mutt/Pine/early crippled versions of Evolution? Outlook kicks all of there asses. In some sense, it's truly innovative.
How about office software? StarOffice/Applix is a *joke* compared to MS Office. It's not even in the same league. And far from being innovative, it's a bad clone of MS's Office. As I recall, MS basically set the standard, innovatively, in Office software, and everyone else is still trying to play catchup. OLE was a great technology for office software when it came out, and I've yet to see another vendor match even that old thing.
In a lot of ways, the/. crowd is worse than microsoft. The knee-jerk reaction to any microsoft news is so puerile in general that it need not be read. I think we need a little less playground-style "M$ SUX LINUX RUL3Z D00DZ!!" and a little more argument-with-supporting-evidence-type discussion.
First of all, what the "network" has done for the "american people" is allow more developers to produce more stuff of value.
When MS makes a powerful, easy to use dev tool available to a guy like John Murdoch cheaply, he is able to provide a solution to a user cheaply as well. Where is the mystery in that?
As for your issues with ex-MS people, I don't know the people you've had to deal with, but some of the most capable, intelligent people I know work at microsoft. They pretty much come into college CS depts. and find out who the best kids are. Then, they offer them unbeatable freedom and benefits. Not surprisingly, a lot of them go there. None of the people I know who have gone there have anything negative to say about the experience. I know a kid who's interning there now. He's working on a neat problem, all by himself, he gets paid very well, and he writes his code in emacs. How can you beat that deal?
That's not what he said at all. He said all his hits were free. Where did you get this from? All the stuff he needs to buy is cheap. They gain from the fact that when he uses their tools to create something of value, the value of their other goods is increased. Your rephrasing is invalid. jeb.
I go to Brown, so I see what's going on there. Not a whole lot, but there are people doing GUI research.
I remember one project involved adding some sort of tactile feedback via phantom haptics to WIMP systems. Doesn't strike me as that cool but there no less. Also, a lot of gui research is being done on (3d)sketching/gestural systems and widgets for 3d manipulation.
You could call a lot of the recent palm stuff gui research. It's pretty different than anything I've ever seen.
A lot of people have made posts to the effect that microsoft is only trying to protect its "freedom to imitate". This is coming from the *linux community*? Linux is based solely on imitation. The kernel is imitation of older, better unices. Linus would say so, he (famously) was imitating Tannenbaum. The gnu tools are all copies of older tools. Worst of all, though, is the modern "uniquely linux" stuff, like KDE, Gnome, etc. Miguel himself said (quoting best as I can here from memory) that when designing gnome tools, he had no idea what to do and instead just copied whatever Microsoft had already done! Everything these new tools are made of existed on MS first. Evolution is (possibly) and evolution of Outlook. KDE is a crappier (albeit more customizable) version of the windows shell. Linux has zero plans for development innovation, unless you count developing new ways of self-righteous ESR-style anti-microsoft whining. The leaders of the linux community consistently lament the lack of a long term linux "roadmap". Everything we've seen new and cool on linux has been a rehash of something from another platform. Even the basic look and feels of the GUIs! Half the window managers out there are based on NextStep. Half the themes out there are OS copies. Check out how many new Apple Aqua themes there are lately, talk about imitation. Personally, I do not support the breakup of microsoft. I hate the company, I use there products as little as possible, but when they are the best for the task, I use them. I have to develop for/under windows at work, but I use xemacs to code in. I certainly don't love MS. I think there business practices are reprehensible and I think a lot of there leadership lacks any sort of basic moral compass, but I will defend there right to act that way until I die. jeb.
Re:there are 3 regulons I can think of off hand
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 1
Is there really a difference between the thermal dynamics regulon and the memory density one?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft would love to port all of their code to a new processor, and charge their millions of users a tasty sum in the process. Microsoft would probably charge hundreds just for recompiled apps, so maintaining backward compatibility is probably good for the end user.
jeb.
jeb.
Also, I'm no expert on libertarianism, but I would think libertarians would be in favour of some sort of restriction on corporate polluting, provided it could be proven to be effective, because pollution denies everyone else a basic freedom to a live in a clean world.
Right now, I am trying very hard to not comment on your statements about the US and capitalism.
How can you say that libertarianism is another word for apathy? There is no evidence to support that. Most people would call the Libertarians extremists.
Your comment starts with a very contestable thesis and does nothing to justify it. It is just a rant.
Do you pronounce "USia" /yoo-ess-ee-ah/ or /oozhya/?
jeb.
jeb.
jeb
There are a lot of other interesting articles about intellectual property issues, especially those relating to music, at Negativland's intellectual property page. I don't know if you know the story of Negativland, but it's really long, fsck'd up, and reprinted in more detail than you'd ever want at their site. That's where I originally found the albini piece.
jeb.
For one, when a band signs a record deal, they are starving, love playing, and will do anything to keep doing it. Consequently, they get some crap deals. A lot of times, a band's contract will basically say that they get 5% of royalties, after recouping all recording and promotion costs, and only on full price sales. That sucks even worse than it sounds.
When a big record label gets behind a band, they often spend over $1million on promotion alone, in the form of sponsored radio give aways, program director schmoozing, etc. Also, recording in a big studio with a big name producer costs a fortune.
So before the band makes a cent, they have to pay all that back out of their 5%, which is probably less than a buck a record, maybe less than $.50. So they gotta sell a lot of records to even make a cent. I heard a pair of NY radio dj's say the other day that they get $.37 cents out of each copy sold. And that's only on full price sales. As soon as it gets marked down to super-saver or whatever, they get nothing.
There's a lot of other really bad stuff about this set up. Say it's a three record deal and the first record doesn't do too well. The record label won't want to invest a million bucks in another record they are not confident in, so they won't pay for you to record another record or tour (plus you have nothing to tour behind). But you're stuck in a contract so you can't go anywhere else. This is the kind of thing that leads to "The Artist" instead of Prince, or AFX, Polygon Window, etc., instead of Aphex Twin. There's a really good article by Steve Albini called The Problem With Music. This is mirrored all over the place if there's any problem with that link. It has actual numbers, is a lot more thorough, and comes from someone with a whole lot more experience than I have. The punchline is, they work out numbers for a band that sells 250,000 copies of the record and then tours. Each band member ends up netting 4,031.25, owes the record company three more albums and $14,000 in royalties, and the music biz ends up ahead by 3 million dollars. I strongly suggest reading this article.
There are other fscked things about the biz and what they do to bands. A kid I know's band was signed by I think Capitol. At first, everything was fine. They were psyched. "Hey, we get to be in a band as our job!" But then, the record company decided that this band should be more like the Foo Fighters, since they were selling a lot of records. They made the band wear different clothes, talk differently. They had producers change their sound. They could refuse, but then the record company will cut them off from touring/recording capital, and they are still locked in the contract. What are they supposed to do?
What a lot of people don't realize is that bands make a huge proportion of their income from touring and merchandise. Take a band like Phish. They've had basically no radio success at all. They've released something like 12 albums, and only one has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, but due to their liberal "give your friends our tapes" policy, they have a huge following, because a lot of people were exposed to the band at no cost to them. They made something like $34 million touring last year.
Frankly, I believe the increased exposure of network distributed free music will dramatically help a lot of bands, since they will be freed from being screwed by labels and will gain a huge amount of exposure (if they are good). This will lead to better tour attendance and more merchandise sales. This will ultimately help bands stay alive if they embrace it.
jeb
jboniakowski@nntllc.com
There are a few tasks I use my computer for. The main, day to day tasks are email, web browsing, stuff like that. Frankly, you can use most any system to do that (though linux is crippled in the browser department). I also write code (mostly for work or school) and music. The mac kicks anything's ass for music production. Code, well, that depends on the system it has to be run on. So there's a slight total tendency with these tasks to go to Mac, but that's not the whole reason.
When I look at Apple now, I see a company that is consistently looking at the paradigm of computing, of what we hold to be required or necessary, and is saying, "Does that annoying thing have to be that way?" A lot of times, the answer is "no", and they change it.
One example that comes to mind is the G4 flip-out case design. That is genius. I've done a lot of work fixing people's home computers and configuring systems in offices. It sucks. Working inside a PC case is an exercise in trying to do a very simple thing, like hook an IDE cable to a mboard the right way, while being inhibited in a million pointless ways, like having all the drive cages hanging over the mboard's IDE header. When I first saw that case, I was so impressed: "Why hasn't anyone done that before? It's so obvious. It's such a better way to do the same task, and it looks so cool. That is an object I want on my desk everyday."
There are other examples. The PowerPC is a better processor architecture than x86, Apple embraced it.
When it became apparent that Unix had some things to offer to the rest of the world, Apple integrated the interesting components into a still easy to use OS (I hope at least). This is a lot more appealing to me than using linux.
In Microsoft, I see a company that's basically just trying to figure out what immediate stopgap measure is needed to go on for another day (ASP, DOS, Win3.1, Win9x, VB). In linux, I see a community that basically borrowed a bunch of old, but good, ideas and is trying to play imitate-but-with-some-new-glitz in every market. There is nothing wrong with either of these approaches, I guess. I just don't want it on my desk.
jeb.
As a quick aside, allow me to just remind you that it is not illegal to act like you have a monopoly, to seek a monopoly, or to behave in ways that would eliminate your competition, so long as you do not have a monopoly. In fact, that process is the foundation of capitalism, like it or not. What Microsoft did was continue this behavior (and other illegal behaviors) after they attained a monopoly.
jeb.
Either way, that's one small point. The rest still stand. Saying that GUI is "an easy target" doesn't make it any less of a fair target. Every commercial GUI has used some PARC ideas, but linux has taked these imitations to new heights. Further more, the imitations are usually crappier than the originals. Further, my original criticism was not only about the GUI as a whole, but about the specific apps for the gui. Plenty have folks, including MS, have innovated in this area. Linux has a lot of second rate imitations.
IP-masquerading is available on a lot of platforms. I don't know where it started, but I'd be surprised if it started on linux. I do like linux's implementation of the idea the best though and frequently use linux expressly for this purpose.
About the voltaire thing, yeah, I stand by your rephrased version of what I said. I think they do bad things. Illegal things? No. Immoral things, yes. Don't buy their stuff. As for calling me an idiot and a lout, if that's the way you argue, fine. I think that that is totally inappropriate in a discussion of this nature, disgusting, really. Kind of like Microsoft. However, I'll defend your right to behave that way till I die as well.
jeb.
Let's look at some real basic ones here. How about web browsing? Microsoft was the first to come out with a useable browser that actually met the CSS-1 standard (IE5/Mac). What's more, it's remarkably stable! Today, web-browser stability is a true innovation. Try to read /. running Netscape under FreeBSD. It crashes so much that I switched back to windows for browsing. Under Solaris, I actually use the most recent version of IE available rather than crash-happy netscape or mozilla. That's an innovation I'd like to see protected.
How about decent email readers? Have any of you used outlook or are you all lumbering along with Mutt/Pine/early crippled versions of Evolution? Outlook kicks all of there asses. In some sense, it's truly innovative.
How about office software? StarOffice/Applix is a *joke* compared to MS Office. It's not even in the same league. And far from being innovative, it's a bad clone of MS's Office. As I recall, MS basically set the standard, innovatively, in Office software, and everyone else is still trying to play catchup. OLE was a great technology for office software when it came out, and I've yet to see another vendor match even that old thing.
In a lot of ways, the /. crowd is worse than microsoft. The knee-jerk reaction to any microsoft news is so puerile in general that it need not be read. I think we need a little less playground-style "M$ SUX LINUX RUL3Z D00DZ!!" and a little more argument-with-supporting-evidence-type discussion.
jeb.
jeb.
When MS makes a powerful, easy to use dev tool available to a guy like John Murdoch cheaply, he is able to provide a solution to a user cheaply as well. Where is the mystery in that?
As for your issues with ex-MS people, I don't know the people you've had to deal with, but some of the most capable, intelligent people I know work at microsoft. They pretty much come into college CS depts. and find out who the best kids are. Then, they offer them unbeatable freedom and benefits. Not surprisingly, a lot of them go there. None of the people I know who have gone there have anything negative to say about the experience. I know a kid who's interning there now. He's working on a neat problem, all by himself, he gets paid very well, and he writes his code in emacs. How can you beat that deal?
jeb.
That's not what he said at all. He said all his hits were free. Where did you get this from? All the stuff he needs to buy is cheap. They gain from the fact that when he uses their tools to create something of value, the value of their other goods is increased. Your rephrasing is invalid. jeb.
I remember one project involved adding some sort of tactile feedback via phantom haptics to WIMP systems. Doesn't strike me as that cool but there no less. Also, a lot of gui research is being done on (3d)sketching/gestural systems and widgets for 3d manipulation.
You could call a lot of the recent palm stuff gui research. It's pretty different than anything I've ever seen.
jeb
A lot of people have made posts to the effect that microsoft is only trying to protect its "freedom to imitate". This is coming from the *linux community*? Linux is based solely on imitation. The kernel is imitation of older, better unices. Linus would say so, he (famously) was imitating Tannenbaum. The gnu tools are all copies of older tools. Worst of all, though, is the modern "uniquely linux" stuff, like KDE, Gnome, etc. Miguel himself said (quoting best as I can here from memory) that when designing gnome tools, he had no idea what to do and instead just copied whatever Microsoft had already done! Everything these new tools are made of existed on MS first. Evolution is (possibly) and evolution of Outlook. KDE is a crappier (albeit more customizable) version of the windows shell. Linux has zero plans for development innovation, unless you count developing new ways of self-righteous ESR-style anti-microsoft whining. The leaders of the linux community consistently lament the lack of a long term linux "roadmap". Everything we've seen new and cool on linux has been a rehash of something from another platform. Even the basic look and feels of the GUIs! Half the window managers out there are based on NextStep. Half the themes out there are OS copies. Check out how many new Apple Aqua themes there are lately, talk about imitation. Personally, I do not support the breakup of microsoft. I hate the company, I use there products as little as possible, but when they are the best for the task, I use them. I have to develop for/under windows at work, but I use xemacs to code in. I certainly don't love MS. I think there business practices are reprehensible and I think a lot of there leadership lacks any sort of basic moral compass, but I will defend there right to act that way until I die. jeb.
jeb.
This should have been from the "can-jon-katz-be-killed" department. jeb.