I'll bet an RBOC can get into a lot of trouble with the local PUC's and the FCC by refusing to provide a service to a customer solely because of that customer's choice of equipment. That's one step down the slippery slope toward requiring you to lease your phones from Ma Bell, which is one of the reasons we have RBOC's now instead of Ma Bell.
It's one thing to not provide tech support for every possible OS. It's another to deny service altogether.
All that has happened is that modems have joined hard drives, monitors, and especially printers by competing on performance specs that are only meaningful in advertising lingo, not the real world.
In days past, if you bought a 300 bps modem, you would expect nothing less than 300. This probably held true up to about 9600 bps, then, gradually, we got used to not connecting at full speeds. It's funny now that the happy posters in this topic are happy at 45K, not 56K or even 53K. Nobody would have been happy with 220 bps from their 300 bps modem.
But modem's aren't special; they're just following the trend. Show me a printer which will really live up to its pages-per-minute spec. In fact, show me an old dot matrix printer that got anywhere near its characters per second spec. Show me a monitor that's actually sold based on its viewable screen area. (Actual viewable area is only a footnote now, and only because of another one of these class action suits.) And I'd take any hard drive or CD-ROM drive claims with a huge grain of salt, too.
As consumers, all we can do is become informed. I don't expect the manufacturers to start selling 17.9" monitors -- they'd be afraid of being excluded from a PC Rag's roundup of 300 19" monitors. But maybe we can insist on more realistic reporting. It just might be possible now that there are lots of web sites reviewing hardware and basically making PC Rags obsolete.
One reason that UL approval is ubiquitous is because it doesn't require much. Your new TV could have terrible reception and poor picture quality, but it won't short out your house wiring or go up in smoke. Similar approval for software would only insure that it could be installed and uninstalled cleanly, and that running it wouldn't corrupt your disks.
The litmus test for any proposed regulation of consumer software quality should be SoftRAM 95. Didn't it go out with a "Designed for Windows 95" seal of approval that Microsoft subsequently yanked?
Coincidentally, today's San Jose Mercury News reports that the software industry is campaigning for regulations which would modify the Uniform Commercial Code to codify the terms of EULA's, something that has consumer groups up in arms.
Why does it seem like so many articles in the media lately (and particularly from Katz) try to put some simplistic boundaries around an imagined "geek" culture? The punks who shot up Columbine were not geeks. All people who like The Matrix are not geeks. Most people who really have what pigeonholers would call "geek talent" at programming do not appear to be geeks.
Plus, looking for any kind of meaning in contemporary Hollywood movies is silly. I liked The Matrix, but to pretend that it's any kind of science fiction watershed is silly. In fact, after watching some scenes from a 2001 DVD last night, it's obvious that no SF movie since then has come close to treating SF seriously. Perhaps that's because I can't think of any movie since which had the active involvement of a real SF writer. Everything now is just an effects movie, and the purpose of the effects is to look cool on screen, not to show any realistic version of speculative fiction. That's fine, but if you're looking for meaning, read a book.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Instead of holding their breath waiting for the next vaporware announcement from whoever owns the Amiga name today, anyone with an interest in preserving what was great about the Amiga should be working on getting those features working in a current OS and platform that has a future. Why wait? A new "Amiga," if it ever appears (and I'm skeptical) won't have anything in common with the old one unless it runs an emulator, while open systems like Linux are here today and would benefit from more multimedia features.
The SGI Myths paper mentioned looks like it hasn't been touched in 2.5 years, which makes it embarassingly outdated in places. For example, quoting Byte (Jan '97) labelling the O2 as a "Wintel killer." Well, in 1999, the writing on the wall is that Wintel, in the form of SGI's own VisualPC boxes, is going to kill the O2.
Also, the 6.4 GB/sec figure quoted is Origin memory bandwidth, and has nothing to do with XFS or disk I/O rates. You can get really good throughput out of an Onyx/Origin, like in the hundreds of megabytes per second (I've witnessed that), if you've got lots and lots of striped disks, but gigabytes per second disk bandwidth isn't realistic.
Two column A vs. B product comparisons are always misleading, because whoever puts together the table gets to pick the topics. Don't fall into the trap of trying to refute it point by point. Instead, "The Linux Community" (whoever that is) should decide what it thinks is important, not what Microsoft thinks is important, and focus on that.
I remember a particularly misleading Atari ad from the days of the unfortunate blood fued between the Amiga and the ST. A Commodore magazine spoofed it with an equally valid comparison "proving" that the Commodore 128 was superior to the ST.
Nevertheless, I haven't used Linux in years, but this "comparison" and other recent experiences with Microsoft make me want to contribute some of my own programming skills to improve Linux. Is there a site that tries to coordinate new development efforts that I can check to find something worthwhile to work on?
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It's one thing to not provide tech support for every possible OS. It's another to deny service altogether.
Why on earth would you stick with an ISP that reads your email, logs your surfing, etc???
Would you care to name the ISP so that nobody else unwittingly signs up for the same "service"?
In days past, if you bought a 300 bps modem, you would expect nothing less than 300. This probably held true up to about 9600 bps, then, gradually, we got used to not connecting at full speeds. It's funny now that the happy posters in this topic are happy at 45K, not 56K or even 53K. Nobody would have been happy with 220 bps from their 300 bps modem.
But modem's aren't special; they're just following the trend. Show me a printer which will really live up to its pages-per-minute spec. In fact, show me an old dot matrix printer that got anywhere near its characters per second spec. Show me a monitor that's actually sold based on its viewable screen area. (Actual viewable area is only a footnote now, and only because of another one of these class action suits.) And I'd take any hard drive or CD-ROM drive claims with a huge grain of salt, too.
As consumers, all we can do is become informed. I don't expect the manufacturers to start selling 17.9" monitors -- they'd be afraid of being excluded from a PC Rag's roundup of 300 19" monitors. But maybe we can insist on more realistic reporting. It just might be possible now that there are lots of web sites reviewing hardware and basically making PC Rags obsolete.
The litmus test for any proposed regulation of consumer software quality should be SoftRAM 95. Didn't it go out with a "Designed for Windows 95" seal of approval that Microsoft subsequently yanked?
Coincidentally, today's San Jose Mercury News reports that the software industry is campaigning for regulations which would modify the Uniform Commercial Code to codify the terms of EULA's, something that has consumer groups up in arms.
"I don't know what language I'll be programming with in [insert future year here], but I know it will be called FORTRAN."
Plus, looking for any kind of meaning in contemporary Hollywood movies is silly. I liked The Matrix, but to pretend that it's any kind of science fiction watershed is silly. In fact, after watching some scenes from a 2001 DVD last night, it's obvious that no SF movie since then has come close to treating SF seriously. Perhaps that's because I can't think of any movie since which had the active involvement of a real SF writer. Everything now is just an effects movie, and the purpose of the effects is to look cool on screen, not to show any realistic version of speculative fiction. That's fine, but if you're looking for meaning, read a book.
Well put.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Instead of holding their breath waiting for the next vaporware announcement from whoever owns the Amiga name today, anyone with an interest in preserving what was great about the Amiga should be working on getting those features working in a current OS and platform that has a future. Why wait? A new "Amiga," if it ever appears (and I'm skeptical) won't have anything in common with the old one unless it runs an emulator, while open systems like Linux are here today and would benefit from more multimedia features.
The SGI Myths paper mentioned looks like it hasn't been touched in 2.5 years, which makes it embarassingly outdated in places. For example, quoting Byte (Jan '97) labelling the O2 as a "Wintel killer." Well, in 1999, the writing on the wall is that Wintel, in the form of SGI's own VisualPC boxes, is going to kill the O2.
Also, the 6.4 GB/sec figure quoted is Origin memory bandwidth, and has nothing to do with XFS or disk I/O rates. You can get really good throughput out of an Onyx/Origin, like in the hundreds of megabytes per second (I've witnessed that), if you've got lots and lots of striped disks, but gigabytes per second disk bandwidth isn't realistic.
Two column A vs. B product comparisons are always misleading, because whoever puts together the table gets to pick the topics. Don't fall into the trap of trying to refute it point by point. Instead, "The Linux Community" (whoever that is) should decide what it thinks is important, not what Microsoft thinks is important, and focus on that.
I remember a particularly misleading Atari ad from the days of the unfortunate blood fued between the Amiga and the ST. A Commodore magazine spoofed it with an equally valid comparison "proving" that the Commodore 128 was superior to the ST.
Nevertheless, I haven't used Linux in years, but this "comparison" and other recent experiences with Microsoft make me want to contribute some of my own programming skills to improve Linux. Is there a site that tries to coordinate new development efforts that I can check to find something worthwhile to work on?