"It was designed from the ground up as a professional format; only after video head and other technology improved did it become viable for home users."
Betamax was introduced as a (expensive) consumer format in 1975 or so. Did BetaCam exist before this? (U-Matic did, I know, but I always thought Beta was consumer first, pro later.)
Well, the real reason we are using floppies is because PC customers are, in general, cheap-ass bastards.
Compaq had a big 120MB SuperDisk Floppy push back in 1994-5, shipping them standard on many machines and optional on all. Guess what, nobody wanted to pay an extra $100.
Maybe there will be some hope of standard CD-RW, but that's expensive because on Windows the software is still all third party.
It is a conspiricy. The manufactures want people to associate Widescreen with High Definition.
And it actually makes sense. If Middle Class Joe buys a really nice $1000 SD NTSC widescreen in 2001 and uses it to watch DVDs and digital SD cable, it's *very* unlikely that he's going to go and buy a $1000 High Definition set in 2003. Which means he's not watching HD broadcasts, not buying HD-DVDs, and just slowing down the ATV adoption by that much. So sell Joe a normal set, and maybe he'll be salivating over the HD widescreen in a couple years, one once he sees how nice football looks on it.
On the otherhand, Stock Option Chet can buy a $5000 'HD Ready' set now, and is capable of dealing with all of the converters needed in 2 years, or maybe he'll just blow another $5000, depending on his mood and whether the Copy Protection folks really let him use his analog HD set to it's potential.
While you are correct that larger businesses with "real" IT departments standardizing on Win2K
Actually, it's usually the larger, more ossified businesses that still have large Win 95 (or even Win 3.1) deployments out there. Often it's for very good legacy app support reasons.
I think the argument is "If we PC companies don't get onto this Secure Media initiative, Hollywood and the consumer hardware companies (Sony, Phillips) will create their own appliance boxes and cut us out of the action. Therefore we have to do the previously unthinkable and close our systems or home PC users won't be able to take advantage of all of the wonderful PPV secure digital audio and video services Hollywood is thinking up."
Which is bullshit, of course, because the media industry as tried repeatedly to turn the "set-top box" into the digital distribution point and failed everytime. The *only* thing that's worked is Internet-connected PCs and what comes with that is any damn applicaiton someone can dream up, copy prohibition or no. So, now the goal is to turn the PC back into that closed set-top.
I would imagine that CPRM is never really going to get any traction in the PC world (or at least not for the next 5 years).
Where it will be useful for Hollywood, now, is in pocket MP3 players and TiVo-like devices and so on. (Imagine consumer-grade digital music 'decks' and so on.)
They have had to justify why they should report to a CEO rather than the CFO
Well, the history of IT is that it started in the accounting department (which had the most processes to automate: accounts recievable, payroll, spreadsheet what-ifs). So most of the older IT guys were Finance/Accounting types, and it probably made sense for them to report ultimately to the CFO.
The "Classic" VM was mostly left over from the MacOS-on-Unix environment for AU/X. It probably would have been just as easy for either NeXTStep or BeOS. (Classic was working fine in the earliest previews of Rhapsody.)
The problematic part was Carbon, which again probably would have been the same amount of effort for either.
And of course, once you replaced DisplayPostScript with Quartz, you had to teach OS X how to print again anyway, so that issue was probably not as big as seemed either. (BeOS probably would have gotten an UI overhaul too, if only for marketing reasons.)
So, yes NeXTStep was a far more mature OS than BeOS, but all-in-all I don't think the decision either way would have helped OS X get to market more quickly. The real question is what happens after the OS ships - would third party vendors rather have the OPENSTEP API or Be's multimedia performance? (I know lots of the A/V people are not so happy with the 'modern' nature of OS X because they run right on the hardware under MacOS.) Can you really make a Unix-like multiuser system that newbie users will accept?
Don't be pendantic. My app is going to point a stream of data at your server. You have two options:
1) A proprietary binary stream on port 139 for which do you do not have the proper libraries to parse.
2) A proprietary text-based XML stream using HTTP POSTs on port 80, which you can parse, but can't validate against the missing schema.
I think most in the audience would pick Option 2, because at least they have a fighting chance with their Apache Perl scriptz or whatever.
The point was,.NET preserves MS by making Windows irrelevant..
Which is actually a smart move. Operating Systems are a commodity product, and with Windows 2000, Microsoft has basically finished the substantial work making them. From here on in, it's tuning and bugfixes.
The only reason MS is opposing the breakup is because the $50/tax on PC purchases is a nice business to be in, and so is selling NOS seats. But they know where the real profits come from - control of the platform, and could live just fine without "collection of poorly debugged device drivers" itself. Once Windows.NET gets out the door, they will be more than happy acceed the government and let the OS division hang out to dry.
You mean that.NET doesn't do away with COM, yet, because it's impossible for them to rebuild and replace 10 years worth of COM components and interfaces in a blink of the eye. But, when you see the MS hype that "Lookie - we did (COM-like stuff) without COM!", it's clear that the future is.NET and not COM.
Which is a very strange shift in position for such a core group of technologies and a huge gamble. They must have really believed that there was no way to sell (D)COM to the 'enterprise' to take such a gamble, or the article premise is true (which it probably is,.NET being 'middleware' and COM being 'operating system' perhaps in the DOJ breakup plan.)
Not to mention the current awkward period when they need to tell people to essentially use both.NET and COM and like it. Not that COM will ever really go unsupported, but MS does have it's tendancies to forget about APIs that are no longer officially blessed.
Some people here understand what.NET is, since it's largely a warmed over version of Java, with the primary feature being the removal of the language dependancy (which allows the VB legion to get in on the act with out being stymied by curly braces)
Of course, if people don't understand what.NET is all about, that's largely Microsoft's fault. They are already spreading BS that Exchange is part of.NET (how?), Whistler is Windows.NET 1.0 (not in the betas it isn't) and so on. So, when everything is part of.NET, obviously the really important changes are going to be overlooked.
If MS is lucky the only people that will overlook the core of.NET will be Apple and IBM. However, I have a feeling that this will go to the same marketing doom as "Windows DNA", which was their way of pushing DCOM but eventually devolved down to a justification for crappy Access apps and so on and ultimately did not sell in the enterprise.
Wrong..NET is a completely different architecture than (D)COM. So, if you've made an investement in COM (most Windows shops have), you're probably screwed by this new tactic.
For the last 4 years, it's been COM, COM, COM from Microsoft (after they decided what to call it). Now they'll change their tune, and the softies will pretend that that 'legacy' shit never existed.
No, you have to deal with Apple to get a MacOS system. Anyone can buy PPC CPUs and CHRP is an open architecture, and Linux for PPC is free.
Now, it's easy to make a 2 second observation that Apple is the only one selling PPC systems and then make the incorrect correlation that PPC == Apple, and then deduce from that that anything you don't like about the PPC platform is Apple's fault.
But that only goes to show how successfully IBM, Motorola, and Microsoft have distanced themselves from the Power*PC* as a PC platform.
Using content-based markup is a great idea, but someone would need to create have a standard list of CSS classes so that different clients can interoperate. (Things like '.message', '.reply', '.forward', 'quote', etc.) And then, you'd probably also need standard HTML presentation tags for back-compatibility.
i.e. any form of "enchanced" text for email should have been designed to be easily readable on something which didn't render it.
Thus, the WINMAIL.DAT. Oh yeah, we don't like that either....
In reality, pretty much every Text/HTML MIME part comes with an accompanying Text/Plain part, which is the two sizes fits all solution. Problem is, there is no way to tell Netscape/Outlook/etc to display the text part instead of the HTML part.
Clinton/Gore did some 'major league' fundraising in Silicon Valley in 92 and 96, but then completly failed to listen to their contributors, and instead acted as the law enforcement and national security communities' and of course Hollywood's lapdog on data privacy and ownership issues.
(Athough Dianne Feinstein, Northern California's political darling has been far worse than even Clinton on these things.)
Only late in 1999 did they realize that Bush was out fundraising them in the Valley did they figure out why. Certain policies changed, but Bush had made his promises, so it was probably too late. Now we'll see if Bush lives up to it, or backs down to the paranoia set just as Clinton did.
And more... I was in Europe... unexpensive 16:9 TVs are all over... on my way back here I checked around for 16:9 TVs, nothing under $2500
They think they can't mass-market widescreens until HDTV is ready. This is because there so little HD programming out there, and no HD prerecorded movies, so they need something cheap and easy to sell people, and associating widescreen with HD does the trick. (Despite the fact that there has been widescreen laserdiscs out for, oh, 5 years.)
And, then, they can't sell HDTV to us until they get the copy-protection stuff sorted out. Which effectively has put widescreen on ice for the last couple years, except on the super high-end. (This is especially stupid because I'm sure that a big number of those European 16:9 tubes come from the same asian factories as the American 4:3 ones. Where are the anti-trust cops when you really need them?)
So you could have been watching your nice Region 1 DVD on your nice $1000 NTSC SD analog TV two years ago, but Hollywood had their nut cords tied up about Copy Prohibit bits on the firewire cable the whole time. Sorry. HAND.
Unfortunately for the networks, Nielsen ratings don't count for recorded material even if you are good consumer and watch all the commercials. Well, maybe if you just pause it for a few minutes, it still counts, but who knows.
(According to a post below, in Europe recorded programs 'count' in viewship totals, which is one reason they are less interested in recording controls...)
Re:Mac advocate argues Apple hardware overpriced?
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The very good reason for not going to x86 is that once you lose control over the hardware platform, an OS becomes very expensive to support. There's no way Apple can compete with Microsoft of the legion of Linux hackers on driver support.
You can't tell users that they have to have a Model X SCSI card and a Model Y video card. Every previous x86 OS that tried this never got off the ground. Most x86 users will get their OS with Windows ME, fully supported, and will bitch plenty if they have to change anything to get another OS to work. Even Linux, which has pretty good driver support gets user flack all the time for certain missing pieces.
The alternative is for Apple to build their own 'certified' x86 hardware. This would be an even bigger PR disaster. Why would anyone want to buy a $799 Athlon iMac when they could scrape the beigebox parts together for $429? Also, look at the flack SGI got over their 'proprietary' Intel box.
You are basically correct that OS X might be nice, but bottom line is that it's isn't compelling enough to compete against Windows on it's home turf. Same goes for Linux+Gnome/KDE, BTW, although Linux has plenty of server potential.
Apple can hold their hardware/software nitch, if PPC can get it's act together. If PPC turns out to be no good, they'd be better off moving to Alpha or Sparc. On x86, they'd be just another OS/2.
You're right that "Cairo" as originally PRed never shipped. My recollection was that it was it was always NT5, and that NT4 was PRed as an explicit rushjob to get the Win95 interface out there, along with Power Management and Plug'N'Play (both of which sadly never made it into NT4).
Some parts of "Cairo" made it early - the distributed file system (anyone ever use this?) and distributed COM shipped in about 1998, but the fully OO OS never materialized and probably won't until they rewrite NT from the ground up for.NET (=not before they are broken up).
The greater point is that MS was spraying FUD years and years before they were even close from a product engineering standpoint. For example, I recieved a whitepaper on ActiveDirectory in 1995, due RSN (we were a big Novell shop about to do NDS), and that was 5 years before anything shipped, so the marketers must have been at it before the engineers were.
Back on topic, in the OSX corner, remember how "Windows 2000 Consumer" would ship 3-6 months after Professional? And how Windows 2000 would be the "unified" OS (just like NT4 before it...)
None of this ever happened, and now we hear about Whistler Consumer (PRed at Q4 2001, which means maybe Q2 2002, unless they decide to tack on a bunch of creamy.NET goodness, which then means Q2 2003.) What makes me think that they are going to introduce Windows ME-II to tide themselves over to 'unification' ?
Sure it is. A very small percentage of car buyers are actually interested in engine HP and Torque. As long as it 'feels' fast enough, it's usually a sell.
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"It was designed from the ground up as a professional format; only after video head and other technology improved did it become viable for home users."
Betamax was introduced as a (expensive) consumer format in 1975 or so. Did BetaCam exist before this? (U-Matic did, I know, but I always thought Beta was consumer first, pro later.)
Well, the real reason we are using floppies is because PC customers are, in general, cheap-ass bastards.
Compaq had a big 120MB SuperDisk Floppy push back in 1994-5, shipping them standard on many machines and optional on all. Guess what, nobody wanted to pay an extra $100.
Maybe there will be some hope of standard CD-RW, but that's expensive because on Windows the software is still all third party.
It is a conspiricy. The manufactures want people to associate Widescreen with High Definition.
And it actually makes sense. If Middle Class Joe buys a really nice $1000 SD NTSC widescreen in 2001 and uses it to watch DVDs and digital SD cable, it's *very* unlikely that he's going to go and buy a $1000 High Definition set in 2003. Which means he's not watching HD broadcasts, not buying HD-DVDs, and just slowing down the ATV adoption by that much. So sell Joe a normal set, and maybe he'll be salivating over the HD widescreen in a couple years, one once he sees how nice football looks on it.
On the otherhand, Stock Option Chet can buy a $5000 'HD Ready' set now, and is capable of dealing with all of the converters needed in 2 years, or maybe he'll just blow another $5000, depending on his mood and whether the Copy Protection folks really let him use his analog HD set to it's potential.
While you are correct that larger businesses with "real" IT departments standardizing on Win2K
Actually, it's usually the larger, more ossified businesses that still have large Win 95 (or even Win 3.1) deployments out there. Often it's for very good legacy app support reasons.
I think the argument is "If we PC companies don't get onto this Secure Media initiative, Hollywood and the consumer hardware companies (Sony, Phillips) will create their own appliance boxes and cut us out of the action. Therefore we have to do the previously unthinkable and close our systems or home PC users won't be able to take advantage of all of the wonderful PPV secure digital audio and video services Hollywood is thinking up."
Which is bullshit, of course, because the media industry as tried repeatedly to turn the "set-top box" into the digital distribution point and failed everytime. The *only* thing that's worked is Internet-connected PCs and what comes with that is any damn applicaiton someone can dream up, copy prohibition or no. So, now the goal is to turn the PC back into that closed set-top.
I would imagine that CPRM is never really going to get any traction in the PC world (or at least not for the next 5 years).
Where it will be useful for Hollywood, now, is in pocket MP3 players and TiVo-like devices and so on. (Imagine consumer-grade digital music 'decks' and so on.)
They have had to justify why they should report to a CEO rather than the CFO
Well, the history of IT is that it started in the accounting department (which had the most processes to automate: accounts recievable, payroll, spreadsheet what-ifs). So most of the older IT guys were Finance/Accounting types, and it probably made sense for them to report ultimately to the CFO.
The "Classic" VM was mostly left over from the MacOS-on-Unix environment for AU/X. It probably would have been just as easy for either NeXTStep or BeOS. (Classic was working fine in the earliest previews of Rhapsody.)
The problematic part was Carbon, which again probably would have been the same amount of effort for either.
And of course, once you replaced DisplayPostScript with Quartz, you had to teach OS X how to print again anyway, so that issue was probably not as big as seemed either. (BeOS probably would have gotten an UI overhaul too, if only for marketing reasons.)
So, yes NeXTStep was a far more mature OS than BeOS, but all-in-all I don't think the decision either way would have helped OS X get to market more quickly. The real question is what happens after the OS ships - would third party vendors rather have the OPENSTEP API or Be's multimedia performance? (I know lots of the A/V people are not so happy with the 'modern' nature of OS X because they run right on the hardware under MacOS.) Can you really make a Unix-like multiuser system that newbie users will accept?
So does TCP.
Don't be pendantic. My app is going to point a stream of data at your server. You have two options:
1) A proprietary binary stream on port 139 for which do you do not have the proper libraries to parse.
2) A proprietary text-based XML stream using HTTP POSTs on port 80, which you can parse, but can't validate against the missing schema.
I think most in the audience would pick Option 2, because at least they have a fighting chance with their Apache Perl scriptz or whatever.
The point was, .NET preserves MS by making Windows irrelevant..
Which is actually a smart move. Operating Systems are a commodity product, and with Windows 2000, Microsoft has basically finished the substantial work making them. From here on in, it's tuning and bugfixes.
The only reason MS is opposing the breakup is because the $50/tax on PC purchases is a nice business to be in, and so is selling NOS seats. But they know where the real profits come from - control of the platform, and could live just fine without "collection of poorly debugged device drivers" itself. Once Windows.NET gets out the door, they will be more than happy acceed the government and let the OS division hang out to dry.
You mean that .NET doesn't do away with COM, yet, because it's impossible for them to rebuild and replace 10 years worth of COM components and interfaces in a blink of the eye. But, when you see the MS hype that "Lookie - we did (COM-like stuff) without COM!", it's clear that the future is .NET and not COM.
.NET being 'middleware' and COM being 'operating system' perhaps in the DOJ breakup plan.)
.NET and COM and like it. Not that COM will ever really go unsupported, but MS does have it's tendancies to forget about APIs that are no longer officially blessed.
Which is a very strange shift in position for such a core group of technologies and a huge gamble. They must have really believed that there was no way to sell (D)COM to the 'enterprise' to take such a gamble, or the article premise is true (which it probably is,
Not to mention the current awkward period when they need to tell people to essentially use both
Some people here understand what .NET is, since it's largely a warmed over version of Java, with the primary feature being the removal of the language dependancy (which allows the VB legion to get in on the act with out being stymied by curly braces)
.NET is all about, that's largely Microsoft's fault. They are already spreading BS that Exchange is part of .NET (how?), Whistler is Windows.NET 1.0 (not in the betas it isn't) and so on. So, when everything is part of .NET, obviously the really important changes are going to be overlooked.
.NET will be Apple and IBM. However, I have a feeling that this will go to the same marketing doom as "Windows DNA", which was their way of pushing DCOM but eventually devolved down to a justification for crappy Access apps and so on and ultimately did not sell in the enterprise.
Of course, if people don't understand what
If MS is lucky the only people that will overlook the core of
Wrong. .NET is a completely different architecture than (D)COM. So, if you've made an investement in COM (most Windows shops have), you're probably screwed by this new tactic.
For the last 4 years, it's been COM, COM, COM from Microsoft (after they decided what to call it). Now they'll change their tune, and the softies will pretend that that 'legacy' shit never existed.
I have to deal with Apple to get a PPC system.
No, you have to deal with Apple to get a MacOS system. Anyone can buy PPC CPUs and CHRP is an open architecture, and Linux for PPC is free.
Now, it's easy to make a 2 second observation that Apple is the only one selling PPC systems and then make the incorrect correlation that PPC == Apple, and then deduce from that that anything you don't like about the PPC platform is Apple's fault.
But that only goes to show how successfully IBM, Motorola, and Microsoft have distanced themselves from the Power*PC* as a PC platform.
Using content-based markup is a great idea, but someone would need to create have a standard list of CSS classes so that different clients can interoperate. (Things like '.message', '.reply', '.forward', 'quote', etc.) And then, you'd probably also need standard HTML presentation tags for back-compatibility.
i.e. any form of "enchanced" text for email should have been designed to be easily readable on something which didn't render it.
Thus, the WINMAIL.DAT. Oh yeah, we don't like that either....
In reality, pretty much every Text/HTML MIME part comes with an accompanying Text/Plain part, which is the two sizes fits all solution. Problem is, there is no way to tell Netscape/Outlook/etc to display the text part instead of the HTML part.
Clinton/Gore did some 'major league' fundraising in Silicon Valley in 92 and 96, but then completly failed to listen to their contributors, and instead acted as the law enforcement and national security communities' and of course Hollywood's lapdog on data privacy and ownership issues.
(Athough Dianne Feinstein, Northern California's political darling has been far worse than even Clinton on these things.)
Only late in 1999 did they realize that Bush was out fundraising them in the Valley did they figure out why. Certain policies changed, but Bush had made his promises, so it was probably too late. Now we'll see if Bush lives up to it, or backs down to the paranoia set just as Clinton did.
(FYI, I'm not a republican.)
And more... I was in Europe ... unexpensive 16:9 TVs are all over... on my way back here I checked around for 16:9 TVs, nothing under $2500
They think they can't mass-market widescreens until HDTV is ready. This is because there so little HD programming out there, and no HD prerecorded movies, so they need something cheap and easy to sell people, and associating widescreen with HD does the trick. (Despite the fact that there has been widescreen laserdiscs out for, oh, 5 years.)
And, then, they can't sell HDTV to us until they get the copy-protection stuff sorted out. Which effectively has put widescreen on ice for the last couple years, except on the super high-end. (This is especially stupid because I'm sure that a big number of those European 16:9 tubes come from the same asian factories as the American 4:3 ones. Where are the anti-trust cops when you really need them?)
So you could have been watching your nice Region 1 DVD on your nice $1000 NTSC SD analog TV two years ago, but Hollywood had their nut cords tied up about Copy Prohibit bits on the firewire cable the whole time. Sorry. HAND.
Unfortunately for the networks, Nielsen ratings don't count for recorded material even if you are good consumer and watch all the commercials. Well, maybe if you just pause it for a few minutes, it still counts, but who knows.
(According to a post below, in Europe recorded programs 'count' in viewship totals, which is one reason they are less interested in recording controls...)
The very good reason for not going to x86 is that once you lose control over the hardware platform, an OS becomes very expensive to support. There's no way Apple can compete with Microsoft of the legion of Linux hackers on driver support.
You can't tell users that they have to have a Model X SCSI card and a Model Y video card. Every previous x86 OS that tried this never got off the ground. Most x86 users will get their OS with Windows ME, fully supported, and will bitch plenty if they have to change anything to get another OS to work. Even Linux, which has pretty good driver support gets user flack all the time for certain missing pieces.
The alternative is for Apple to build their own 'certified' x86 hardware. This would be an even bigger PR disaster. Why would anyone want to buy a $799 Athlon iMac when they could scrape the beigebox parts together for $429? Also, look at the flack SGI got over their 'proprietary' Intel box.
You are basically correct that OS X might be nice, but bottom line is that it's isn't compelling enough to compete against Windows on it's home turf. Same goes for Linux+Gnome/KDE, BTW, although Linux has plenty of server potential.
Apple can hold their hardware/software nitch, if PPC can get it's act together. If PPC turns out to be no good, they'd be better off moving to Alpha or Sparc. On x86, they'd be just another OS/2.
You're right that "Cairo" as originally PRed never shipped. My recollection was that it was it was always NT5, and that NT4 was PRed as an explicit rushjob to get the Win95 interface out there, along with Power Management and Plug'N'Play (both of which sadly never made it into NT4).
.NET (=not before they are broken up).
.NET goodness, which then means Q2 2003.) What makes me think that they are going to introduce Windows ME-II to tide themselves over to 'unification' ?
Some parts of "Cairo" made it early - the distributed file system (anyone ever use this?) and distributed COM shipped in about 1998, but the fully OO OS never materialized and probably won't until they rewrite NT from the ground up for
The greater point is that MS was spraying FUD years and years before they were even close from a product engineering standpoint. For example, I recieved a whitepaper on ActiveDirectory in 1995, due RSN (we were a big Novell shop about to do NDS), and that was 5 years before anything shipped, so the marketers must have been at it before the engineers were.
Back on topic, in the OSX corner, remember how "Windows 2000 Consumer" would ship 3-6 months after Professional? And how Windows 2000 would be the "unified" OS (just like NT4 before it...)
None of this ever happened, and now we hear about Whistler Consumer (PRed at Q4 2001, which means maybe Q2 2002, unless they decide to tack on a bunch of creamy
IIRC, there was a 'hack' shipped with System 7 for non-clean ROM machines. They were still limited to something like 8MB, though.
A/UX ran on 68K machines, and Apple never produced a SMP 68K machine. So if A/UX did have SMP support, it's academic.
Sure it is. A very small percentage of car buyers are actually interested in engine HP and Torque. As long as it 'feels' fast enough, it's usually a sell.
Good thing the Halon didn't drop, because that's what the Big Red Button used to do...