BetaMax lost because it deserved to lose. Until relatively late in the game, BetaMax tapes weren't long enough to store a normal length movie, with 30 and 60 minute cartridges being the standard. There were no other major differences between the two - the tapes were widely available, the visual quality level was approximately the same (yes, it was), all the urban myths about how BetaMax failed, from quality to Sony clamping down on porn (uh, right, because Sony could do that, y'know, without stopping selling blanks altogether), are just that: myths.
The public made the right choice with VHS. They probably erred in the OS/2 vs Windows 95 war, but the VHS vs BetaMax one was decided logically and reasonably.
Every SEGA Dreamcast game out has been copied and distributed, but you had to download the game (1+ Gigabyte) through a serial cable first.
Conversely though, the proprietary route does seem to be working on the GameCube which has seen little (if any) piracy.
The major issue with the Dreamcast, I guess, is that it was semi-open, still supporting a number of backdoors, including the ability to read from regular CDs in hardware.
Why would adding BitTorrent support to Firefox mean you'll get sued by the RIAA? File Sharing isn't always illegal, BT is widely used to redistribute Linux distributions, game updates, and other large, legal, software downloads; and the bulk of illegal use actually appears to concern movies rather than music, with the MPAA going after the trackers and Bram Cohen, BT's inventor, being careful to cooperate with them and disuade people from using it illegally.
Re:GTK is alright...but no raves
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 1
Fortunately, in C, C++, Java, and C#, you can put your entire program on a single line if that's what you want.
Maybe you should have added something like a limit of 80 characters or something, though I don't think your example works for that either.
Ever had a call to one of those functions/methods where there are so many parameters, and the parameters so non-trivial, that you've had to spread the call out over several lines?
I think it'd help there too. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to go through one of those and try to work out which line is which parameter. The RGB example everyone keeps giving really isn't that good. I think it's a good idea.
The AmigaOS used to have a cool thing with the more complicated C calls which was intended to solve another problem (that of having to make way for future extensions) but, as a side-effect, made code more reliable too. I've used it a lot in both C and, surprisingly, JavaScript. You would make certain functions variadic, and then have named constants preceed each parameter, like so:
Meta-meta widget toolkits? It doesn't sound right to me somehow. Surely SWT should be hitting the metal (that is, X11) directly? What's gained by having it go via an intermediary whose API almost certainly isn't a one-to-one match?
Re:Interestingly...
on
Why Use GTK+?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But when Qt is using GPL, suddenly the GNU zealots turn around and say, hey that's bad, you can't write proprietary software with it
I'm trying to work out why you'd assume that someone criticising a product for not letting you produce proprietary software that uses it is a "GNU zealot". Is the GP known to you and always ranting on about GNU and how wonderful the GPL, or are you just making an assumption?
If the GP is genuinely against a license because it means a library cannot be linked against a proprietary program, then they're not a "GNU" (or FSF, or GPL) zealot. They may be a zealot, but they're not a GNU one.
Many Free Software people, which is a diverse group encompassing many opinions, eschew the GPL for precisely this reason and consider themselves active opponents of it. One example would be the OpenBSD team, and Theo DeRaadt in particular, who is strongly against the GPL because he wants his work to be freely available even to those who'd not make public the source of their released changes.
These are legitimate opinions. Your characterization is as bad as someone who sees, say, Bush criticised for not proposing a clearly religiously-motivated supreme court nominee, and then Bush criticised for reversing his position, withdrawing the nominee, and making an apparently religiously-inspired one, as "Christian Conservative Zealots not letting Bush win". They're different critics.
I seem to recall Rupert Murdoch gained his American citizenship specifically so he could own FOX, as the rules on media ownership here (in the US) were very opposed to foreign ownership. Is this an example of the kind of thing you mean?
Most countries, the US included, heavily regulate radio broadcast media (such as audio radio and television), including ownership and content. This is because there's limited spectrum, so it seems reasonable to ensure it's used "for the public good".
Every time this subject comes up, people make statements about "IE only" sites that Mac IE can access, and Firefox can't.
Ok, here's the thing: IE-only sites are IE-only for one of two reasons: they've either got stuff on them that only works under Windows Internet Explorer, or they deliberately look for IE in the version string.
Of the former, relatively few happen to work on IE for Mac. This is because IE for Mac is unrelated to IE for Windows. It's a different code base, written by (apparently) different people, and doesn't work in the same way. (It's possible IE for Mac supports VBScript, that's about the only extra-level-of-compatability I can think of it would have that would help here. Now, how hard could it be to add VBScript compatability to Firefox?)
Of the latter, many also look for information reporting the browser as working on Windows. And, yes, as you say, it's a lot simpler to fake and/or emulate IE's responses in Firefox than to bring Mac IE up to date.
Well, yeah, but it's not when JIT is applied. That was essentially the point - the GGP was dismissing JIT compiled code as "interpreted", which by definition it isn't.
I know people can and do interpret Java (early versions of Java, for one, only came in that form.) But technically one can do the same with C++ (relatively easily, just run Bochs;), so that's not "the problem" with Java. That's all I was trying to address.
C#, for all of the claims of performance, is a a JIT based interpretive language. Ditto Java.
There's an error message appropriate here, something like "Object type mismatch: JIT has "compiled" type output, expected "interpretive" from sentence" or something. Anyway, my debugger says your sentence should have been
C#, for all of the claims of performance, is a a JIT based compiled language. Ditto Java.
...which takes the wind out of your sails for the remaining part of the argument, because it relies upon Java and C# being interpreted. Which they're not.
C# is a compiled language, as is Java. You can't call something that's "JIT" compiled "interpreted". It isn't. It's compiled. It's distributed in semi-compiled form, and (with most, if not all, current implementations) stored on the user's PC as semi-compiled, but it's actually fully compiled before the CPU runs it.
Neither language's performance problems, in any case, have anything to do with byte-code intermediate representations. The major problem is that Java (especially, I can't speak for C#) is distributed in a form that effectively means the entire thing has to be linked at run-time. That's slow, and means most Java programs have a painfully slow start-up time. Once running, they pretty much all run at a decent speed, and the benchmarks, repeated ad-nausium, generally show comparable performance to C++, largely because automatic garbage collection is fractionally more efficient than malloc() based manual memory management.
The slow start-up times though have done a lot to discredit anything connected with Java, be it JIT, byte-code, platform independence, or C#. But let's be clear why the problem exists - it has nothing to do with the fact that Java and.NET apps are distributed using platform independent byte-codes.
The DMCA passed with bi-partisan support. Congress was one thing, the Senate was another, as far as control by each party went at the time. The President was a Democrat, but was wasting an enormous amount of time fighting utterly ridiculous claims of "sexual harassment", "Whitewater fraud", and finally "Lying about something that was irrelevent to the first case but was brought up in that court anyway in order to create embarassment." I think it's sad he didn't stand up on the job, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about it having anything to do with cozying up to Hollywood.
It is false to use a lack of Democratic opposition to the DMCA to pretend that a claim Republicans support this shit is false. It is 100% true that Republicans support extreme copyright laws. Both the DMCA and the Sonny Bono (R) Copyright Act were Republican proposals, with bi-partisan support.
If you used a copy, you used the developer-only pre-release because a finished version of Copland was never actually released to the public. It was cancelled largely because:
In terms of design, it was never the next generation operating system. It was supposed to be a stepping-stone to a future OS (codenamed Gershwin, which allegedly never had a single line of code written for it.)
Aside from anything else, memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking was only provided for applications that weren't visible to the user (ie all interactive apps had to sit in the same memory space and they had to cooperatively multitask.) You could, obviously, structure your app with an interactive stub that communicated with a protected program that contained the meat of your application, but that's convoluted, and still puts the user at risk of one bad piece of code upsetting the rest of the operating system.
It's questionable that this "design" even constituted a stepping stone, and if it does, it's only to an OS/2-like "Next generation OS" - pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection for processes only, not the multiuser-style security that we see in NT and Unix. Copland would have been a stepping stone to an operating system competitive with Windows 95, with everyone at Apple aware that Windows NT was already on sale and being touted as the eventual successor to anything Microsoft did with the original DOS/Windows codebase. In October of 1995, after Windows 95 had been released, the target date for Copland (not Gershwin) was moved to "some time in 1997". You can imagine the panic that must have occurred at Apple at this point - this meant Apple wouldn't have something "as good as" Windows 95 until sometime well after 1997.
The requirements list was changing daily, and the OS was taking longer and longer to produce. One infamous legend has it that Amelio did a presentation on the OS and was immediately slapped down by developers who wanted to know why it didn't support multi-threading. Amelio, who possibly had no idea what any of this actually meant, promptly announced that it was going to support multi=threading. Copland's spec was so crude that adding multithreading was seen as essentially something that could only be done if that part of the OS hadn't been written yet - eg it necessitated a rewrite.
As you yourself saw, it was extremely unstable in '95. Allegedly, cleaning the code base up so it just worked was taking too long by itself.
The fact that Copland just plain wasn't the next generation OS it was being presented as is the unwritten reason why, I suspect, it was eventually cancelled. Users who got it would have ended up with an environment just as unstable in practice as Mac OS 7. Rogue apps would have still crashed the entire system, as developers would have almost certainly ignored the requests to break up their application into back-end and front-end code, because there was no real incentive for them to do so. It would take real signs that Gershwin was a real OS before anything moved forward.
I reread the specs recently, and I have to admit, I wondered what the hell Apple had thought it was doing. Gershwin should have been Apple's focus from the start. I assume they thought they were under pressure to release something that showed progress, but I doubt Copland would have done anything to help Apple's credibility, and as it was, it did a lot to harm it, as part of a pattern that lasted until, perhaps, the last three or four years, where developers were told one thing, and then promptly told to ignore it.
Imagine your old, analog, circuit-switched PSTN service sniffed out modem and fax traffic, blocking it so you'd have to buy ISDN service, which would then place a per-page/KB surcharge, even though you were using the _exact_ same amount of resources operating your modems over that network as if simply making a voice call and even though you had no need or use for all the extra equipment you'd need to buy for ISDN, you'd be forced to buy it and the company would have the force of law behind them. GREAT.
And if the FCC didn't regulate the PSTN, that's what would have happened. Of course, people are coming to all sorts of conclusions about VoIP and the FCC's role in it, but long term, I think the bottom line is that the FCC will not regulate VoIP as much as raw, packet-based, Internet access. VoIP as it relates and interconnects to the PSTN will be, but then it probably should be. No, it should be. Come on, people are selling it as PSTN phone service. Vonage is, for one. You just plug in your regular analog phone and "everything works".
Vonage. Right. Everything works. Like 911. Which works now because the FCC called "Bullshit" on the whole deal. But, six months ago, didn't, not properly anyway, and Vonage actually had the cheek to advertise "911 dialing" as a standard feature, which happened to be a link which, if you were anal-retentive enough to click (because 911 dialing means 911 dialing? Right? Why click, you already know what 911 does?), you found yourself transported to a document explaining that, erm, actually, no Vonage doesn't do regular 911 dialing, but, like, it's almost the same, because your call gets routed to an EOC, which isn't a 911 call center but it's like one, except when it's closed, as it is during certain times of day in certain parts of the country.
Gah. So the FCC, rightly in my view, said "You fuckers are advertising PSTN phone service. You're saying 'My service is a replacement for BellWhatever, just plug in and go, dial numbers like you always did', and it's all bullshit, so we're going to clean this up, and we'll start by fixing 911".
I don't want to over-criticise Vonage here, because while the case is arguable that they were two-faced lying bullshit artists, the fact was, until the FCC's intervention, they couldn't provide real 911 service, because the ILECs had a habit of making it difficult for them to access real 911 call centers. But, nonetheless, they needed a good kicking.
Even Vonage is annoying like this. You can do VOIP without any more equipment than your computer already has, but you need to buy their blackbox appliance in order for their proprietary "soft-phone" to work, giving the illusion that the product is far more complex than it really is. It's not even their software--it's F!#%ING FREEWARE--yet they have the cajones to charge $10/month more for the privilege of using it, but they've crippled it so you need their blackbox. Yeah, we need more behavior like that. Worse, we need to codify it in law.
Absolutely. I've seen, not with Vonage but certain other PSTN-VoIP operators, EULAs that read like they're using the language of the DMCA. Because, y'know, someone using Asterisk is obviously out to screw AT&T (or whomever.)
If there's any regulation it should be that they be mandated to provide that bandwidth at a specified rate regardless of the arrangement of the bits you throw down the pipe. That wouldn't preclude them from offering you value-added services, but it would force them to actually add value.
That's what needs to be done, and it's pretty much what the FCC has been doing with the PSTN. I can't see how the FCC can do this if it limits the scope of regulation to VoIP only.
I have just one piece of advice for the record, TV and movie industries. Ask yourselves why, when there is a photocopier in many newsagents' shops, do people still buy newspapers, magazines and books, instead of copying them? Then try applying the same principle to other forms of content.
Well, at a guess, I'd say it's because a newspaper costs 25c, whereas a photocopied newspaper probably costs close to that in dollars. Even if we just photocopy the articles we want, at 10c each, assuming none are split over several pages and the guy at the newsagent has no problem with us doing this, we're probably looking at 50c-$1. And what you're left with isn't as managable as a newspaper either.
Endorphins are generally released in response to pain BTW, and most releases are related in some way to pain (the only counter example I can think of right now is that there's some research out there that proposes video games can cause the release of endorphins, which is bizarre but possibly the result of the brain believing it should be in pain.) Hunter-Gathering is certainly an unlikely cause for release of the compound.
I agree that I don't believe there were ever Amiga branded PCs.
However, Commodore branded PCs certainly were the creation of CBM, and they're part of what lead Commodore to its bankruptsy. They basicly dabbled in the commodity PC market, putting a large amount of investment in the area, neglecting the Amiga which they saw as too proprietary to have much of a future.
After CBM went under, it was bought by Escom who hoped the existing cache of the Commodore PC brand would help it sell more PCs. This seems bizarre to many, but Escom was a German company, and CBM's Commodore's PCs sold relatively well in Germany. Escom also tried to revive Amiga, albeit half-heartedly, but went bust before anything good could come out of it.
Finally, Gateway and Tulip bought Amiga and the Commodore brand respectively (I'm fuzzy on whether they were bought directly from the liquidators or if one bought both and then sold on the other.) Tulip, a Dutch PC manufacturer, presumably also planned to use Commodore's northern-European PC associations to sell PCs. At this point, the two brands split properly. I'm not sure what happened to CBM's other assets, such as the 6502 manufacturer Mostek.
I'm probably stepping somewhere I shouldn't, but that's kind of the baggage that comes with OSS in the "Open Source vs Free Software" battle, there's an enormous emphasis on the notion that OSS is a cooperative, community-based, development model, not just a set of freedoms.
Isn't Mozilla largely a Netscape thing? There are probably examples of people working on it outside of Netscape/Ex-Netscape, but the same is true of OpenOffice.org, albeit the major example I can think of is external-but-cooperative with the project - NeoOffice.org, the port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac.
I have to agree. And given the FCC has done nothing to get rid of phone porn (1-900 numbers), I find it a tad unlikely they're going to regulate Internet content, especially as there'd be constitutional issues in them doing so.
The PSTN "is regulated by" the FCC. The PSTN exists throughout the world too.
In practice, the Internet will receive the same type of regulation as the PSTN. That is, the component of it that exists in the US will be under the FCC's "thumb", who will generally have a largely hands-off approach as far as users go, but some regulation aimed at ensuring interoperability, competition, basic service provision, and universal service, from the infrastructure providers.
And people will talk about it as if that's a bad thing, but quite honestly, I don't think it is. There's nothing really wrong with how the PSTN is regulated, and I can't see any problem with the Internet being dealt with the same way. As the Internet becomes more of a critical component of the modern economy, and as provision becomes more and more consolidated, we'll need to see some oversight to prevent wholesale abuses by the powerful.
To put it another way: All work and no play makes BellSouth's CEO a dull boy.
Well, there's probably some truth to that, but with all the money he's getting for his magazine column, not to mention the copyright royalties he gets from his symphonies, maybe it's time Dvorak thought about letting his 80-90 year old keyboard design patents lapse for the good of mankind?
At a guess, it's because Michigan is home to most of the US automotive industry and therefore where most of the expertise in mobile air conditioning is likely to be located.
Believe it or not, sometimes the hubs of research of development are on the supply end rather than the consumer end.
The dig at IE is not in italics, which means it's CmdrTaco not the author who came up with this.
In any case, it's only a dupe for those people who haven't checked Zonk off their front page stories. This probably means that 90% of long-time Slashdot readers will be seeing this for the first time here. I have to assume CmdrTaco is one of them...
I could start a search engine company tomorrow. It's not expensive. The tricky bit is coming up with an original and effective way of searching, but money isn't the object. A search engine company is not an ISP, not a provider of infrastructure.
I'd find starting a telecommunications network, with its own infrastructure, of any useful kind pretty close to impossible. So, unless you're actually Bill Gates et al, would you.
And trust me, I'd love to do that. I'd love to just start a mobile phone company. I mean, I have some great ideas about how mobile phones should work. I can pretty much work out how the things could be funded too so the business makes a profit. But, you know what? It's a little expensive. I need a huge amount of money up front, before I can get it back from the customers.
Creating a website, and writing a program to crawl the Internet is cheap.
Building towers every few miles, and linking them with some form of high-bandwidth telecommunications link, is phenominally expensive. Out of the range of the vast majority of us.
That's mobile phones. Of course, if we're talking land-based telecommunications (copper, fiber optic), then competition actually makes the costs more expensive. Let's suppose I decide I'm going to compete against BellSouth in my city. With my own infrastructure, because, remember, you're proposing total deregulation.
Suppose I get half their old customers. Does this mean:
1. BellSouth's costs just halved, meaning they can charge their existing customers the same amount.
2. BellSouth's costs, for maintaining a network that still covers the same area but with half the number of paying customers, just, for the most part, stayed about the same?
Not difficult to answer that one, and it's actually part of what made early AT&T leaders actually support the notion of monopolies in telecommunications to begin with.
Can you see me actually getting half of BellSouth's customers? I'd have to build out a network that costs as much to maintain as their's does for the same group of potential customers, yet survive on a fraction of that group. I'd have to be nuts to even try.
Here's what happens if you deregulate:
Competition dies completely. Companies work out that it's in their best interests to combine, for two reasons: The first is, as in the infrastructure example above, it's cheaper to build and maintain one network than two. Two companies mean supporting two networks for the same group of potential customers. The second is that control over the market means control over the customer - as long as the product isn't unusable, the customer will pay through the nose and no market will open for exceptionally expensive alternatives that might otherwise eventually come down in price once enough people move to it and compete.
Most of us want regulation. We want the big guys to play fair. We either want competition, or we want services that are reasonably priced, high quality, flexible, and non-discriminatory. What we don't want are monopolies that kill any chance of real competition and force us to use an inferior product. We know that BellSouth doesn't need to come to our doors with guns to put us in a position that we can only use their internet service, it just has to own its own wires, and not make any exceptionally stupid errors.
Slashdot Mirror
The public made the right choice with VHS. They probably erred in the OS/2 vs Windows 95 war, but the VHS vs BetaMax one was decided logically and reasonably.
The major issue with the Dreamcast, I guess, is that it was semi-open, still supporting a number of backdoors, including the ability to read from regular CDs in hardware.
Why would adding BitTorrent support to Firefox mean you'll get sued by the RIAA? File Sharing isn't always illegal, BT is widely used to redistribute Linux distributions, game updates, and other large, legal, software downloads; and the bulk of illegal use actually appears to concern movies rather than music, with the MPAA going after the trackers and Bram Cohen, BT's inventor, being careful to cooperate with them and disuade people from using it illegally.
Maybe you should have added something like a limit of 80 characters or something, though I don't think your example works for that either.
I think it'd help there too. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to go through one of those and try to work out which line is which parameter. The RGB example everyone keeps giving really isn't that good. I think it's a good idea.
The AmigaOS used to have a cool thing with the more complicated C calls which was intended to solve another problem (that of having to make way for future extensions) but, as a side-effect, made code more reliable too. I've used it a lot in both C and, surprisingly, JavaScript. You would make certain functions variadic, and then have named constants preceed each parameter, like so:
(that's probably not working codeVery easy to implement, though a little inefficient for oft-called functions.
Meta-meta widget toolkits? It doesn't sound right to me somehow. Surely SWT should be hitting the metal (that is, X11) directly? What's gained by having it go via an intermediary whose API almost certainly isn't a one-to-one match?
If the GP is genuinely against a license because it means a library cannot be linked against a proprietary program, then they're not a "GNU" (or FSF, or GPL) zealot. They may be a zealot, but they're not a GNU one.
Many Free Software people, which is a diverse group encompassing many opinions, eschew the GPL for precisely this reason and consider themselves active opponents of it. One example would be the OpenBSD team, and Theo DeRaadt in particular, who is strongly against the GPL because he wants his work to be freely available even to those who'd not make public the source of their released changes.
These are legitimate opinions. Your characterization is as bad as someone who sees, say, Bush criticised for not proposing a clearly religiously-motivated supreme court nominee, and then Bush criticised for reversing his position, withdrawing the nominee, and making an apparently religiously-inspired one, as "Christian Conservative Zealots not letting Bush win". They're different critics.
Most countries, the US included, heavily regulate radio broadcast media (such as audio radio and television), including ownership and content. This is because there's limited spectrum, so it seems reasonable to ensure it's used "for the public good".
Ok, here's the thing: IE-only sites are IE-only for one of two reasons: they've either got stuff on them that only works under Windows Internet Explorer, or they deliberately look for IE in the version string.
Of the former, relatively few happen to work on IE for Mac. This is because IE for Mac is unrelated to IE for Windows. It's a different code base, written by (apparently) different people, and doesn't work in the same way. (It's possible IE for Mac supports VBScript, that's about the only extra-level-of-compatability I can think of it would have that would help here. Now, how hard could it be to add VBScript compatability to Firefox?)
Of the latter, many also look for information reporting the browser as working on Windows. And, yes, as you say, it's a lot simpler to fake and/or emulate IE's responses in Firefox than to bring Mac IE up to date.
I know people can and do interpret Java (early versions of Java, for one, only came in that form.) But technically one can do the same with C++ (relatively easily, just run Bochs ;), so that's not "the problem" with Java. That's all I was trying to address.
C# is a compiled language, as is Java. You can't call something that's "JIT" compiled "interpreted". It isn't. It's compiled. It's distributed in semi-compiled form, and (with most, if not all, current implementations) stored on the user's PC as semi-compiled, but it's actually fully compiled before the CPU runs it.
Neither language's performance problems, in any case, have anything to do with byte-code intermediate representations. The major problem is that Java (especially, I can't speak for C#) is distributed in a form that effectively means the entire thing has to be linked at run-time. That's slow, and means most Java programs have a painfully slow start-up time. Once running, they pretty much all run at a decent speed, and the benchmarks, repeated ad-nausium, generally show comparable performance to C++, largely because automatic garbage collection is fractionally more efficient than malloc() based manual memory management.
The slow start-up times though have done a lot to discredit anything connected with Java, be it JIT, byte-code, platform independence, or C#. But let's be clear why the problem exists - it has nothing to do with the fact that Java and .NET apps are distributed using platform independent byte-codes.
Bear in mind, also, that nothing stops you from compiling your Java program from the get-go right to assembler, distributing the code as a platform specific, machine code, fully linked executable. Nothing at all.
The DMCA passed with bi-partisan support. Congress was one thing, the Senate was another, as far as control by each party went at the time. The President was a Democrat, but was wasting an enormous amount of time fighting utterly ridiculous claims of "sexual harassment", "Whitewater fraud", and finally "Lying about something that was irrelevent to the first case but was brought up in that court anyway in order to create embarassment." I think it's sad he didn't stand up on the job, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions about it having anything to do with cozying up to Hollywood.
It is false to use a lack of Democratic opposition to the DMCA to pretend that a claim Republicans support this shit is false. It is 100% true that Republicans support extreme copyright laws. Both the DMCA and the Sonny Bono (R) Copyright Act were Republican proposals, with bi-partisan support.
Aside from anything else, memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking was only provided for applications that weren't visible to the user (ie all interactive apps had to sit in the same memory space and they had to cooperatively multitask.) You could, obviously, structure your app with an interactive stub that communicated with a protected program that contained the meat of your application, but that's convoluted, and still puts the user at risk of one bad piece of code upsetting the rest of the operating system.
It's questionable that this "design" even constituted a stepping stone, and if it does, it's only to an OS/2-like "Next generation OS" - pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection for processes only, not the multiuser-style security that we see in NT and Unix. Copland would have been a stepping stone to an operating system competitive with Windows 95, with everyone at Apple aware that Windows NT was already on sale and being touted as the eventual successor to anything Microsoft did with the original DOS/Windows codebase. In October of 1995, after Windows 95 had been released, the target date for Copland (not Gershwin) was moved to "some time in 1997". You can imagine the panic that must have occurred at Apple at this point - this meant Apple wouldn't have something "as good as" Windows 95 until sometime well after 1997.
The fact that Copland just plain wasn't the next generation OS it was being presented as is the unwritten reason why, I suspect, it was eventually cancelled. Users who got it would have ended up with an environment just as unstable in practice as Mac OS 7. Rogue apps would have still crashed the entire system, as developers would have almost certainly ignored the requests to break up their application into back-end and front-end code, because there was no real incentive for them to do so. It would take real signs that Gershwin was a real OS before anything moved forward.
I reread the specs recently, and I have to admit, I wondered what the hell Apple had thought it was doing. Gershwin should have been Apple's focus from the start. I assume they thought they were under pressure to release something that showed progress, but I doubt Copland would have done anything to help Apple's credibility, and as it was, it did a lot to harm it, as part of a pattern that lasted until, perhaps, the last three or four years, where developers were told one thing, and then promptly told to ignore it.
Vonage. Right. Everything works. Like 911. Which works now because the FCC called "Bullshit" on the whole deal. But, six months ago, didn't, not properly anyway, and Vonage actually had the cheek to advertise "911 dialing" as a standard feature, which happened to be a link which, if you were anal-retentive enough to click (because 911 dialing means 911 dialing? Right? Why click, you already know what 911 does?), you found yourself transported to a document explaining that, erm, actually, no Vonage doesn't do regular 911 dialing, but, like, it's almost the same, because your call gets routed to an EOC, which isn't a 911 call center but it's like one, except when it's closed, as it is during certain times of day in certain parts of the country.
Gah. So the FCC, rightly in my view, said "You fuckers are advertising PSTN phone service. You're saying 'My service is a replacement for BellWhatever, just plug in and go, dial numbers like you always did', and it's all bullshit, so we're going to clean this up, and we'll start by fixing 911".
I don't want to over-criticise Vonage here, because while the case is arguable that they were two-faced lying bullshit artists, the fact was, until the FCC's intervention, they couldn't provide real 911 service, because the ILECs had a habit of making it difficult for them to access real 911 call centers. But, nonetheless, they needed a good kicking.
Absolutely. I've seen, not with Vonage but certain other PSTN-VoIP operators, EULAs that read like they're using the language of the DMCA. Because, y'know, someone using Asterisk is obviously out to screw AT&T (or whomever.) That's what needs to be done, and it's pretty much what the FCC has been doing with the PSTN. I can't see how the FCC can do this if it limits the scope of regulation to VoIP only.Endorphins are generally released in response to pain BTW, and most releases are related in some way to pain (the only counter example I can think of right now is that there's some research out there that proposes video games can cause the release of endorphins, which is bizarre but possibly the result of the brain believing it should be in pain.) Hunter-Gathering is certainly an unlikely cause for release of the compound.
Welcome to my friends list. Excellent post.
However, Commodore branded PCs certainly were the creation of CBM, and they're part of what lead Commodore to its bankruptsy. They basicly dabbled in the commodity PC market, putting a large amount of investment in the area, neglecting the Amiga which they saw as too proprietary to have much of a future.
After CBM went under, it was bought by Escom who hoped the existing cache of the Commodore PC brand would help it sell more PCs. This seems bizarre to many, but Escom was a German company, and CBM's Commodore's PCs sold relatively well in Germany. Escom also tried to revive Amiga, albeit half-heartedly, but went bust before anything good could come out of it.
Finally, Gateway and Tulip bought Amiga and the Commodore brand respectively (I'm fuzzy on whether they were bought directly from the liquidators or if one bought both and then sold on the other.) Tulip, a Dutch PC manufacturer, presumably also planned to use Commodore's northern-European PC associations to sell PCs. At this point, the two brands split properly. I'm not sure what happened to CBM's other assets, such as the 6502 manufacturer Mostek.
Isn't Mozilla largely a Netscape thing? There are probably examples of people working on it outside of Netscape/Ex-Netscape, but the same is true of OpenOffice.org, albeit the major example I can think of is external-but-cooperative with the project - NeoOffice.org, the port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac.
I have to agree. And given the FCC has done nothing to get rid of phone porn (1-900 numbers), I find it a tad unlikely they're going to regulate Internet content, especially as there'd be constitutional issues in them doing so.
In practice, the Internet will receive the same type of regulation as the PSTN. That is, the component of it that exists in the US will be under the FCC's "thumb", who will generally have a largely hands-off approach as far as users go, but some regulation aimed at ensuring interoperability, competition, basic service provision, and universal service, from the infrastructure providers.
And people will talk about it as if that's a bad thing, but quite honestly, I don't think it is. There's nothing really wrong with how the PSTN is regulated, and I can't see any problem with the Internet being dealt with the same way. As the Internet becomes more of a critical component of the modern economy, and as provision becomes more and more consolidated, we'll need to see some oversight to prevent wholesale abuses by the powerful.
To put it another way: All work and no play makes BellSouth's CEO a dull boy.
Well, there's probably some truth to that, but with all the money he's getting for his magazine column, not to mention the copyright royalties he gets from his symphonies, maybe it's time Dvorak thought about letting his 80-90 year old keyboard design patents lapse for the good of mankind?
Believe it or not, sometimes the hubs of research of development are on the supply end rather than the consumer end.
In any case, it's only a dupe for those people who haven't checked Zonk off their front page stories. This probably means that 90% of long-time Slashdot readers will be seeing this for the first time here. I have to assume CmdrTaco is one of them...
I'd find starting a telecommunications network, with its own infrastructure, of any useful kind pretty close to impossible. So, unless you're actually Bill Gates et al, would you.
And trust me, I'd love to do that. I'd love to just start a mobile phone company. I mean, I have some great ideas about how mobile phones should work. I can pretty much work out how the things could be funded too so the business makes a profit. But, you know what? It's a little expensive. I need a huge amount of money up front, before I can get it back from the customers.
Creating a website, and writing a program to crawl the Internet is cheap.
Building towers every few miles, and linking them with some form of high-bandwidth telecommunications link, is phenominally expensive. Out of the range of the vast majority of us.
That's mobile phones. Of course, if we're talking land-based telecommunications (copper, fiber optic), then competition actually makes the costs more expensive. Let's suppose I decide I'm going to compete against BellSouth in my city. With my own infrastructure, because, remember, you're proposing total deregulation.
Suppose I get half their old customers. Does this mean:
1. BellSouth's costs just halved, meaning they can charge their existing customers the same amount.
2. BellSouth's costs, for maintaining a network that still covers the same area but with half the number of paying customers, just, for the most part, stayed about the same?
Not difficult to answer that one, and it's actually part of what made early AT&T leaders actually support the notion of monopolies in telecommunications to begin with.
Can you see me actually getting half of BellSouth's customers? I'd have to build out a network that costs as much to maintain as their's does for the same group of potential customers, yet survive on a fraction of that group. I'd have to be nuts to even try.
Here's what happens if you deregulate:
Competition dies completely. Companies work out that it's in their best interests to combine, for two reasons: The first is, as in the infrastructure example above, it's cheaper to build and maintain one network than two. Two companies mean supporting two networks for the same group of potential customers. The second is that control over the market means control over the customer - as long as the product isn't unusable, the customer will pay through the nose and no market will open for exceptionally expensive alternatives that might otherwise eventually come down in price once enough people move to it and compete.
Most of us want regulation. We want the big guys to play fair. We either want competition, or we want services that are reasonably priced, high quality, flexible, and non-discriminatory. What we don't want are monopolies that kill any chance of real competition and force us to use an inferior product. We know that BellSouth doesn't need to come to our doors with guns to put us in a position that we can only use their internet service, it just has to own its own wires, and not make any exceptionally stupid errors.
Banks probably use the term "Vice President" in the same way as burger outlets use "Assistant Manager". He's probably a cashier... ;-)