The nice thing about Microsoft is that they tell you exactly what they are going to do before they do it.
And when MS made the "Pearl Harbor Day" annoucement that they would build a Netscape-class browswer and integrate into the Windows shell, I though they were insane. Netscape was too slow, too bloated, too crashy to ever be considered a fundemental component in the user interface.
And sure, MS's early attempts like IE 4 were pretty much the clusterfuck that I expected. However, while integration was a pretty crappy user application (and probably will always be, even with more doodads under XP or things like Natulius), it did put the pressure on MS to look at the browser as a mission critical application for the desktop. And by v5.01, they had pretty delivered. This shifit in thinking about the importantce of the browser was something that Netscape, with it's endless crappy.01 releases, could never do.
Actually, if you want to deal with Apple products, you pretty much have to know the codenames.
For example, there were 3 or 4 different G3-based PowerBooks, all with the official name "G3 PowerBook".
Well, that confused even Apple, so the technotes start talking about "G3 PowerBook (bronze keyboard)" and "G3 PowerBook (firewire)".
Since these are utterly retarded product names, the Mac users have pretty much fallen back to the codenames. So when you L@@K at eBay, you see all these ads for "WallStreet PowerBook" and the like. Which of course also makes zero sense to someone not inbred into the Mac community.
The last big PC bust happened in the late 80s. Similar to today, new applications drove a huge number of purchases between 1980 and 1988, but by the end of that period the old standbys of word processors and spreadsheets faced a pretty saturated market, and no amount of sexy new hardware could change that. Compaines like IBM were still selling 8086 machines in 1990 that were no more powerful than original PC, while their pricey Microchannel equipment gathered dust in the stockroom.
As a result lots of former big names sunk off of the radar. Others, like Apple, went extremely high end to chase profits.
The only thing that ended this downward spiral, was Windows 3, I hate to admit. While being totally crappy to it's core, it offered significant productivity increases (meaning, companies could fire a bunch of secretaries and force middle managers to type their own memos), assuming you had the fairly decent hardware it took to run it. Those late era 8086 machines were obsolete within a year. In the quest to get all of this shit working decently, we found ourselves in our current "3 Year Upgrade" cycle. As Internet applications came about, the rip-n-replace cycle only accellerated.
But, now it's been done. Nobody has any reasonable desktop apps which would convince widescale upgrades. All of the good ideas out of silicon valley lately are bandwidth-limited, and that's a fundemental problem that can't be solved by smart hardware/software people. Add in the big players (telcos, cablecos, big ISPs), and it will probably be a long time until we see the next big boom in the computing market.
You're right. There's nothing consumers hate more than low prices.
Actually, there's nothing consumers hate more than an upfront charge. Forcing people to drop $200 for a DSL modem isn't going to get you very far in a world with $.01 cell phones. Instead, people will take "Free" even if it means shit like DSL Winmodems and USB ethernet connectors.
I'm out in the SF Bay Area, which was hit especially hard, and I can confirm that the recession wasn't officially over until 1995, although things were looking up by late '94.
Furthermore, I worked at a couple large Novell to NT conversion jobs in 1994-5, so from my point of view, the trend away from Netware was already under full swing, and this was joined at the hip with the great IT centralization movement. While many shops might not have migrated until a few years later, NetWare 4/NDS uprades were put on hold while IT debated using NT. Novell might not have known it, but NetWare was effectively dead by the time 4.0 stabilized.
Half our IT cost is custom software development, and thus are goal is to more rapidly create and deploy software
Judging by your previous posts, I figured you were a Microsoftie. If so, your software costs and internal IT operation are by no means typical.
But anyway, we're talking servers here, and I don't think that there's a compelling argument that NT is going to "improve your productivity" any more than Linux. In fact, the web development tools on Linux/Unix are at least as good if not better than on the NT platform, and, outside of some entrenched VB operations, that's the direction things are moving.
If Megacorp is to be sold on Linux, it won't be salesmen who do it. Maybe a RedHat salesamn will come through with an attractive Enterprise Support and Training deal, I dunno.
Right. Migration services too.
I said "salesman" because someone needs to get some real numbers together (which include realistic things like a support contract and not support==Usenet==free) and present that to decision makers. That's a sales function in IT, even if the decision is being pushed by internal managers.
The IT scrubs can get Linux into production here and there in the under-the-nose fashion, but nobody is going to stop paying MS site licence fees until someone on top makes the big decision. This can happen if there's sufficent pressure to reduce costs.
Actually, if you run a Windows 3.1 app inside of NT/2000, many of the UI elements (dialogs, scrollbars, window borders) get a more modern Win95ish look.
A better comparision would be running Windows 3.1 apps on OS/2 (which is actually a better technical comparison to the OS X Classic VM than either WinNT or Win95's way of running Win16 programs).
At one time the corporate PC LAN was ruled by Novell NetWare. At it's peak in the early 90s, it had about 80% of the "LAN Server" marketshare. It wasn't the most stable or capable product, but it provided a very managable system for file and print needs, and was often expanded for departmental e-mail service or database needs. Often these Novell systems where installed under the nose of the main/mini-centric IT department in a guerilla manner by departments.
It was also pretty expensive by modern standards, costing something like $1000/seat/year.
Meanwhile Microsoft had been slogging along with about a 10% marketshare for a OS/2-based product called LANManager. Even though LANMan had some nice features like TCP/IP support, Microsoft literally couldn't even give away (and they tried).
Then, the early 90's recession hit, affecting certain corporate headquarters-heavy areas like California and the East Coast especially bad. For those of you who are relatively new to the job market, here's what during a recession: The corporation cuts costs to please Wall Street. An prime example of a "cost" here is the IT department and IT projects.
So, as new generation of IT managers took hold, what they found was a mess: dozens of different mail systems and departmentally managed networks. Different warring tech support groups backing different technology. Hundreds of little Novell servers out in closets managed by relative amateurs.
A few things happend as a result: 1) PC and PC network management was taken from the departments and centralized under the main IT department, 2) IT support was outsourced (it was virtually impossible to get a perm sysadmin job back then) and 3) Aggressive measures were taken to reduce licence costs.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft salesman was standing at the door with their relatively new Windows NT product that carried a very attractive price. If you were large enough, they would negotiate a licence costs that was less than 1/3 of what Novell wanted. No matter that the file and print was less managable and less scalable, you could also use it as an application server to centralize (say) e-mail and/or move it off of those expensive mini's and unix systems.
The result was devestating to Novell's business. Even though Microsoft's prices gradually went up, and Novell's went down, Novell was left with something like a 20% marketshare when it was all over.
So, now we have a situation where Microsoft's prices are going up even higher and IT spending is due again for another round of cutbacks and centralization. Well, those licence costs might have seemed relatively inconsequential when the budget was expanding and you had things like Y2K and webification to worry about. But in a static or declining budget, they will stand out. And CIO's who are paid bonuses to cut costs will notice. If the RedHat salesman comes calling with numbers in hand, they will listen.
You aren't paying attention, which is completely retarded especially because you are justifying shipping Netscape for security reasons. (Tech support I can see.)
Re:More accurately, the reincarnaton of A/UX?
on
OS X
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· Score: 1
Hey - I was a college labslave in a room full of IIci's (no cache models) without upgraded video, so there you go. If I had to use Word or something I had better luck using the "server" which was a SE/30. Eventually I got a LC at home, and while that was also a shitbox, I'd rate it above the IIci.
That's not true. The unused part of the slice is effectively allocated (other programs can't use it).
Furthermore, the allocations must be contigious in VM. If you start and stop a bunch of apps, you will get a fragmented memory situation where you can't start an app even though you have the memory free.
Not to mention that the VM scheme in MacOS is sloooow, and most professionals just buy more real RAM and turn it off.
OS X has a pretty nifty solution to this: It emulates a 1 GB VM space for classic. So you can set all your apps to 50-100MB RAM slices and forget about it.
Re: What's wrong with this title?
on
OS X
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· Score: 1
There were configurations of the IIfx that shipped with A/UX as the default operating system.
Just for historical reference, the IIfx's base configuration (4MB RAM / 40MB HD / no video card or keyboard) cost $9,995. The A/UX models generally shipped with a special fast SCSI board and probably ran at about $20,000. The box had special I/O DSP circutry that was only enabled when running A/UX.
As the other guy mentioned, this was the most coveted personal computer on the market. However, when compared to real workstations like Sun Sparcs (which weren't that much more expensive), it was pretty lame. Kinda like MacOS X, it was the Mac application base that kept it interesting.
As I said in another reply, the IIci was a much more braindamaged box in ways other than the CPU speed. When it was the entry-level color Mac, it still retailed at something like $5000 in a base configuration.
Re:More accurately, the reincarnaton of A/UX?
on
OS X
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· Score: 1
Actually, for the price of (say) a IIfx in a decent configuration and the A/UX licence, you could have gotten a new Chevy or maybe a nice used Mercedes at the time.
Re:More accurately, the reincarnaton of A/UX?
on
OS X
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· Score: 1
Hey I can still smell the IIci running System 6. That machine sucked! (used main RAM for video RAM for example)
A/UX ran and booted plenty fast on my IIfx. I also didn't have any particular problems with symlinks that I can remember.
Software availablity was a problem - both due to the obsolete API, but also due to the fact that GNU banned the platform and wouldn't release anything that worked on A/UX. Independant forks eventually got some of the major stuff like gcc working, but by then it was too late to care.
But the point is, Apple had their "MacOS of the future" right on their price sheet more than 10 years ago. They should have fixed the problems (such as moving to BSD so they didn't have to pay the huge UNIX licence fees) and moved ahead with it.
Don't blame Apple or the OS if it's clearly some fault either in your hardware or in your current installation
Go look at Macintouch at the "Beige G3" section. All sorts of horror stories about people having to pull out cards, dink with IDE master/slaves settings, and so on. It's quite possible his PowerBook has some non-vanilla hardware which would cause OS X to croak.
Not that this stuff is a huge problem in the big picture, but it's definately not the "Mac experience" as Apple has previously touted it.
"There is no Windows 2000 compatible DVD Decoder installed on this system. A DVD decoder device or decoder software is required to play movies (a DVD drive alone is not sufficient)"
So, Microsoft has shipped *part* of a DVD player for Windows (the user interface part), but it relies on other third-party software or hardware. A bare DVD drive + Windows doesn't help you.
When Apple ships it's DVD Player, it will certainly include a decoder.
For the people that read/., most of us will either continue using Netscape / Mozilla / etc
So how can we get this to change? Make a huge chonologically ordered list of MS's security problems?
What makes me sick about this discussion (and the last one) is the assumption that Netscape is more secure because they do a worse job of publishing security flaws.
You want a cronological list of MS's security problems: http://www.microsoft.com/security . There you go. Now show me Netscape's security page or even a fucking fix list for one of their myriad.01 point releases. Or were all of those minor upgrades just for the heck of it.
But, even though the karma whore mantra here is "Security Through Obscurity Doesn't Work", apparently "PR Through Obscurity" works just fine with you chuckleheads. Microsoft does the right thing and publish security bulletins and you fucks view it as a giant 'Kick Me' sign.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for raking Microsoft for stupid design decisions (say the Outlook COM Automation interfaces). But some stupid edge case bug which is just a bug like this one is not worth standing up on your soapbox.
Yeah, so go ahead, feel happy and surf the web with Netscape 4.7x, an acknowledge POS that has had huge security holes in the past and will in the future. Or go use Mozilla, which might be better, but nobody knows because it's hasn't been audited due to it's pre-1.0 version number.
You post seems confused. The patch is quite small, and IE 5.0 (an older version) is supported and probably will be until Windows XP ships.
Look at Netscape for example:
1) Doesn't support older versions at all (no 4.6x patches for you, and even further 4.7x releases are questionable)
2) You must download the entire 17MB 'Communicator' package for each patch release -- Unless 'SmartUpgrade' finally started working after a 2 year hiatus, but I'm not bothering to check
3) Netscape doesn't publish security bulletins, so you don't really know if you need the upgrade or not (answer is Netscape has had a similar security track record to IE and you do need those patch releases)
I'll take the MS situation, thanks.
You do have a point about patch quality control. If you are good about keeping your Win systems updated, you'll notice that they tend to have quite a few 'bugged' patches, or patches that silently withdrawn and replaced with working versions a few days later.
Ooog, I've been using Macs long enough to remember the big keyboard layout change when they went to ADB. Apple advertising materials even touted the PC-compatible key layout for the extended keyboard.
IIRC, Apple started selling a 8086 DOS compatibilty co-processor board and a 5.25 PC floppy drive at about the same time, hence the logic.
Apple did make a couple smart changes (the Help key for one), but they also brought along the strange legacy elements too (scroll lock light).
"If you think using Un*x makes you some kind of super genius who should be feared by mere mortals and end users, either get over it or start using *BSD"
OK, I just looked at thier Q2 report, and there's no mention of MCS being a profit center. They do say that revenues went up. Services/Consulting is not even a seperate line item for Microsoft, so it's tough to say exactly what that means.
My 'break-even' source is MCS consultants themselves, and a friend who independant but in the past has gone in on jobs with a MCS business card. You have a reference that they are anything other than a sales org?
Slashdot Mirror
The nice thing about Microsoft is that they tell you exactly what they are going to do before they do it.
.01 releases, could never do.
And when MS made the "Pearl Harbor Day" annoucement that they would build a Netscape-class browswer and integrate into the Windows shell, I though they were insane. Netscape was too slow, too bloated, too crashy to ever be considered a fundemental component in the user interface.
And sure, MS's early attempts like IE 4 were pretty much the clusterfuck that I expected. However, while integration was a pretty crappy user application (and probably will always be, even with more doodads under XP or things like Natulius), it did put the pressure on MS to look at the browser as a mission critical application for the desktop. And by v5.01, they had pretty delivered. This shifit in thinking about the importantce of the browser was something that Netscape, with it's endless crappy
Actually, if you want to deal with Apple products, you pretty much have to know the codenames.
For example, there were 3 or 4 different G3-based PowerBooks, all with the official name "G3 PowerBook".
Well, that confused even Apple, so the technotes start talking about "G3 PowerBook (bronze keyboard)" and "G3 PowerBook (firewire)".
Since these are utterly retarded product names, the Mac users have pretty much fallen back to the codenames. So when you L@@K at eBay, you see all these ads for "WallStreet PowerBook" and the like. Which of course also makes zero sense to someone not inbred into the Mac community.
The last big PC bust happened in the late 80s. Similar to today, new applications drove a huge number of purchases between 1980 and 1988, but by the end of that period the old standbys of word processors and spreadsheets faced a pretty saturated market, and no amount of sexy new hardware could change that. Compaines like IBM were still selling 8086 machines in 1990 that were no more powerful than original PC, while their pricey Microchannel equipment gathered dust in the stockroom.
As a result lots of former big names sunk off of the radar. Others, like Apple, went extremely high end to chase profits.
The only thing that ended this downward spiral, was Windows 3, I hate to admit. While being totally crappy to it's core, it offered significant productivity increases (meaning, companies could fire a bunch of secretaries and force middle managers to type their own memos), assuming you had the fairly decent hardware it took to run it. Those late era 8086 machines were obsolete within a year. In the quest to get all of this shit working decently, we found ourselves in our current "3 Year Upgrade" cycle. As Internet applications came about, the rip-n-replace cycle only accellerated.
But, now it's been done. Nobody has any reasonable desktop apps which would convince widescale upgrades. All of the good ideas out of silicon valley lately are bandwidth-limited, and that's a fundemental problem that can't be solved by smart hardware/software people. Add in the big players (telcos, cablecos, big ISPs), and it will probably be a long time until we see the next big boom in the computing market.
You're right. There's nothing consumers hate more than low prices.
Actually, there's nothing consumers hate more than an upfront charge. Forcing people to drop $200 for a DSL modem isn't going to get you very far in a world with $.01 cell phones. Instead, people will take "Free" even if it means shit like DSL Winmodems and USB ethernet connectors.
See http://firingsquad.gamers.com/features/nvidia1215/
FiringSquad: Will NVIDIA continue driver support for 3dfx's Voodoo 3,4,5 line?
We're not purchasing 3dfx's current product line. We're only purchasing 3dfx's core assets. Support of 3dfx's current products will remain with 3dfx.
I vote for Pray for the Wildcats
I'm out in the SF Bay Area, which was hit especially hard, and I can confirm that the recession wasn't officially over until 1995, although things were looking up by late '94.
Furthermore, I worked at a couple large Novell to NT conversion jobs in 1994-5, so from my point of view, the trend away from Netware was already under full swing, and this was joined at the hip with the great IT centralization movement. While many shops might not have migrated until a few years later, NetWare 4/NDS uprades were put on hold while IT debated using NT. Novell might not have known it, but NetWare was effectively dead by the time 4.0 stabilized.
Half our IT cost is custom software development, and thus are goal is to more rapidly create and deploy software
Judging by your previous posts, I figured you were a Microsoftie. If so, your software costs and internal IT operation are by no means typical.
But anyway, we're talking servers here, and I don't think that there's a compelling argument that NT is going to "improve your productivity" any more than Linux. In fact, the web development tools on Linux/Unix are at least as good if not better than on the NT platform, and, outside of some entrenched VB operations, that's the direction things are moving.
If Megacorp is to be sold on Linux, it won't be salesmen who do it. Maybe a RedHat salesamn will come through with an attractive Enterprise Support and Training deal, I dunno.
Right. Migration services too.
I said "salesman" because someone needs to get some real numbers together (which include realistic things like a support contract and not support==Usenet==free) and present that to decision makers. That's a sales function in IT, even if the decision is being pushed by internal managers.
The IT scrubs can get Linux into production here and there in the under-the-nose fashion, but nobody is going to stop paying MS site licence fees until someone on top makes the big decision. This can happen if there's sufficent pressure to reduce costs.
Actually, if you run a Windows 3.1 app inside of NT/2000, many of the UI elements (dialogs, scrollbars, window borders) get a more modern Win95ish look.
A better comparision would be running Windows 3.1 apps on OS/2 (which is actually a better technical comparison to the OS X Classic VM than either WinNT or Win95's way of running Win16 programs).
At one time the corporate PC LAN was ruled by Novell NetWare. At it's peak in the early 90s, it had about 80% of the "LAN Server" marketshare. It wasn't the most stable or capable product, but it provided a very managable system for file and print needs, and was often expanded for departmental e-mail service or database needs. Often these Novell systems where installed under the nose of the main/mini-centric IT department in a guerilla manner by departments.
It was also pretty expensive by modern standards, costing something like $1000/seat/year.
Meanwhile Microsoft had been slogging along with about a 10% marketshare for a OS/2-based product called LANManager. Even though LANMan had some nice features like TCP/IP support, Microsoft literally couldn't even give away (and they tried).
Then, the early 90's recession hit, affecting certain corporate headquarters-heavy areas like California and the East Coast especially bad. For those of you who are relatively new to the job market, here's what during a recession: The corporation cuts costs to please Wall Street. An prime example of a "cost" here is the IT department and IT projects.
So, as new generation of IT managers took hold, what they found was a mess: dozens of different mail systems and departmentally managed networks. Different warring tech support groups backing different technology. Hundreds of little Novell servers out in closets managed by relative amateurs.
A few things happend as a result: 1) PC and PC network management was taken from the departments and centralized under the main IT department, 2) IT support was outsourced (it was virtually impossible to get a perm sysadmin job back then) and 3) Aggressive measures were taken to reduce licence costs.
Meanwhile, the Microsoft salesman was standing at the door with their relatively new Windows NT product that carried a very attractive price. If you were large enough, they would negotiate a licence costs that was less than 1/3 of what Novell wanted. No matter that the file and print was less managable and less scalable, you could also use it as an application server to centralize (say) e-mail and/or move it off of those expensive mini's and unix systems.
The result was devestating to Novell's business. Even though Microsoft's prices gradually went up, and Novell's went down, Novell was left with something like a 20% marketshare when it was all over.
So, now we have a situation where Microsoft's prices are going up even higher and IT spending is due again for another round of cutbacks and centralization. Well, those licence costs might have seemed relatively inconsequential when the budget was expanding and you had things like Y2K and webification to worry about. But in a static or declining budget, they will stand out. And CIO's who are paid bonuses to cut costs will notice. If the RedHat salesman comes calling with numbers in hand, they will listen.
Netscape 4.76 - Remote excecution exploit fix .01 releases of Netscape 4.x)
Netscape 4.75 - 'Brown Orafice' exploit fix
Netscape 4.74 - Image overflow exploit fix
Netscape 4.73 - Cookie reading exploit fix
...
(Maybe somebody has kept track for all 200 other
You aren't paying attention, which is completely retarded especially because you are justifying shipping Netscape for security reasons. (Tech support I can see.)
Hey - I was a college labslave in a room full of IIci's (no cache models) without upgraded video, so there you go. If I had to use Word or something I had better luck using the "server" which was a SE/30. Eventually I got a LC at home, and while that was also a shitbox, I'd rate it above the IIci.
That's not true. The unused part of the slice is effectively allocated (other programs can't use it).
Furthermore, the allocations must be contigious in VM. If you start and stop a bunch of apps, you will get a fragmented memory situation where you can't start an app even though you have the memory free.
Not to mention that the VM scheme in MacOS is sloooow, and most professionals just buy more real RAM and turn it off.
OS X has a pretty nifty solution to this: It emulates a 1 GB VM space for classic. So you can set all your apps to 50-100MB RAM slices and forget about it.
There were configurations of the IIfx that shipped with A/UX as the default operating system.
Just for historical reference, the IIfx's base configuration (4MB RAM / 40MB HD / no video card or keyboard) cost $9,995. The A/UX models generally shipped with a special fast SCSI board and probably ran at about $20,000. The box had special I/O DSP circutry that was only enabled when running A/UX.
As the other guy mentioned, this was the most coveted personal computer on the market. However, when compared to real workstations like Sun Sparcs (which weren't that much more expensive), it was pretty lame. Kinda like MacOS X, it was the Mac application base that kept it interesting.
As I said in another reply, the IIci was a much more braindamaged box in ways other than the CPU speed. When it was the entry-level color Mac, it still retailed at something like $5000 in a base configuration.
Actually, for the price of (say) a IIfx in a decent configuration and the A/UX licence, you could have gotten a new Chevy or maybe a nice used Mercedes at the time.
Hey I can still smell the IIci running System 6. That machine sucked! (used main RAM for video RAM for example)
A/UX ran and booted plenty fast on my IIfx. I also didn't have any particular problems with symlinks that I can remember.
Software availablity was a problem - both due to the obsolete API, but also due to the fact that GNU banned the platform and wouldn't release anything that worked on A/UX. Independant forks eventually got some of the major stuff like gcc working, but by then it was too late to care.
But the point is, Apple had their "MacOS of the future" right on their price sheet more than 10 years ago. They should have fixed the problems (such as moving to BSD so they didn't have to pay the huge UNIX licence fees) and moved ahead with it.
Don't blame Apple or the OS if it's clearly some fault either in your hardware or in your current installation
Go look at Macintouch at the "Beige G3" section. All sorts of horror stories about people having to pull out cards, dink with IDE master/slaves settings, and so on. It's quite possible his PowerBook has some non-vanilla hardware which would cause OS X to croak.
Not that this stuff is a huge problem in the big picture, but it's definately not the "Mac experience" as Apple has previously touted it.
I try to run that and get a nice message :
"There is no Windows 2000 compatible DVD Decoder installed on this system. A DVD decoder device or decoder software is required to play movies (a DVD drive alone is not sufficient)"
So, Microsoft has shipped *part* of a DVD player for Windows (the user interface part), but it relies on other third-party software or hardware. A bare DVD drive + Windows doesn't help you.
When Apple ships it's DVD Player, it will certainly include a decoder.
For the people that read /., most of us will either continue using Netscape / Mozilla / etc
.01 point releases. Or were all of those minor upgrades just for the heck of it.
So how can we get this to change? Make a huge chonologically ordered list of MS's security problems?
What makes me sick about this discussion (and the last one) is the assumption that Netscape is more secure because they do a worse job of publishing security flaws.
You want a cronological list of MS's security problems: http://www.microsoft.com/security . There you go. Now show me Netscape's security page or even a fucking fix list for one of their myriad
But, even though the karma whore mantra here is "Security Through Obscurity Doesn't Work", apparently "PR Through Obscurity" works just fine with you chuckleheads. Microsoft does the right thing and publish security bulletins and you fucks view it as a giant 'Kick Me' sign.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for raking Microsoft for stupid design decisions (say the Outlook COM Automation interfaces). But some stupid edge case bug which is just a bug like this one is not worth standing up on your soapbox.
Yeah, so go ahead, feel happy and surf the web with Netscape 4.7x, an acknowledge POS that has had huge security holes in the past and will in the future. Or go use Mozilla, which might be better, but nobody knows because it's hasn't been audited due to it's pre-1.0 version number.
You post seems confused. The patch is quite small, and IE 5.0 (an older version) is supported and probably will be until Windows XP ships.
Look at Netscape for example:
1) Doesn't support older versions at all (no 4.6x patches for you, and even further 4.7x releases are questionable)
2) You must download the entire 17MB 'Communicator' package for each patch release -- Unless 'SmartUpgrade' finally started working after a 2 year hiatus, but I'm not bothering to check
3) Netscape doesn't publish security bulletins, so you don't really know if you need the upgrade or not (answer is Netscape has had a similar security track record to IE and you do need those patch releases)
I'll take the MS situation, thanks.
You do have a point about patch quality control. If you are good about keeping your Win systems updated, you'll notice that they tend to have quite a few 'bugged' patches, or patches that silently withdrawn and replaced with working versions a few days later.
Bluetooth has a security which allows you to define which messages it answers too.
This is a real concern because there are some plans to send localized spam to phones and palmpilots in places like airports and shopping malls.
Can't say much more about except there will be away to stop it.
Ooog, I've been using Macs long enough to remember the big keyboard layout change when they went to ADB. Apple advertising materials even touted the PC-compatible key layout for the extended keyboard.
IIRC, Apple started selling a 8086 DOS compatibilty co-processor board and a 5.25 PC floppy drive at about the same time, hence the logic.
Apple did make a couple smart changes (the Help key for one), but they also brought along the strange legacy elements too (scroll lock light).
This one is also good:
"If you think using Un*x makes you some kind of super genius who should be feared by mere mortals and end users, either get over it or start using *BSD"
OK, I just looked at thier Q2 report, and there's no mention of MCS being a profit center. They do say that revenues went up. Services/Consulting is not even a seperate line item for Microsoft, so it's tough to say exactly what that means.
My 'break-even' source is MCS consultants themselves, and a friend who independant but in the past has gone in on jobs with a MCS business card. You have a reference that they are anything other than a sales org?
*ANY historical data*
You got that right. Try finding information on any well documented historical period (World War I), and you'll get nowhere.
I'd also love to have an archive of old computer trade rags (PCWeek, Infoworld, etc), if only to keep track of old Microsoft vaporware.