Take a look at Mac message boards and you'll see that Mac users turn on eachother, and argue in a similarly childish and offensive manner. Yet many hardware producers provide drivers for Mac.
You'll even find pathetic arguing on ZDNet boards from Windows users.
As well as the development-effort-for-possibly-low-return issue, Linux may also face hardware vendors doubting its long-term viability.
And some may just assume that as long as you have your Windows dual-boot option, they can keep you resorting to that when required...
I also do not believe in copy protection whose sole purpose is to complicate the situation for the end users that buy software and expect specific uses from it.
I would suggest that a significant purpose of the "copy protection" is to discourage people from avoiding the purchase. The registration will be a simple process for the vast majority of users (who do not change their hardware components). If Microsoft can harass the minority who are pirating their software, without totally pissing off the majority, they will consider it.
Personally, I think that they could have avoided this scheme. I know 10 people who would pirate Win2K Pro and not pay the AUD$400, but if the price was AUD$50-90, they would legally purchase the software.
I've never seen Mozilla advertised on TV or in mainstream newspapers and publicatoins. I've seen Microsoft advertise its products in these places.
Maybe if Netscape/Mozilla marketed its product to the general public, there would be more awareness among that group?
Fault for that lack of awareness lies with the organisation.
If I try to create a car brand to compete with the massive companies, I'd need to do some serious advertising/marketing/PR to get people aware, interested, and buying. If people trust existing brands, and ignore my car brand, then that is hardly their fault - they've worked hard to build up awareness and trust in their name.
I'm sure it's been said before, but of the various united states who joined this case (19 or so, weren't there?), how many use and continue to buy Microsoft software?
Couldn't they make a statement by shifting to a different platform?
Microsoft might lose some sales to Linux if Office were ported, but I don't think it would be significant. All the current dual-booters who keep their win98 partition for games wouldn't change, right?
And I can't imagine too many Windows users shifting across. Speaking for myself, I have tried Linux and didn't find it easy to use or particularly useful for my field of work.
(June 6, 2001) WIRED reports that e-books are doing poorly. Not a big surprise for me, since that's what I predicted three years ago. In contrast, e-reports are doing well. As an example, I am selling about a million dollars a year in downloads of my usability guidelines for things like designing the PR section of a corporate website, designing for international users, and improving checkout and registration.
(Emphasis is mine. Those downloads are in PDF format.)
We have an article about "smart tags" at evolt.org that people might be interested in reading - includes a few more links and a screenshot of them in action:
we pay about au$130/month for our telstra business adsl connection, and receive an allowance of 500Mb of data (both up and download). extra Mb's are charged to us at almost 20 cents. in the last 3 months, our usage has been 578Mb, 666Mb, 1078Mb.
3Gb would be heaven. that recent 1078Mb figure is based on 6 or 7 people sharing the connection (although only two of us do much downloading - the occasional movie trailer, etc).
telstra suck, but i wouldn't complain if they put a 3gig allowance on our connection.;)
their email suggests that they provide effective logging tools so that you can track your usage. don't believe that for a second. their usage tracking is fucking pathetic. you'll check your stats on a monday, only to find that usage for each day of the previous *week* changes the very next day.
also, they'll go for 7-10 days, without updating your "daily" usage stats *at all*. (oh, and another thing - their bills for an online service come out by mail, and you can't pay them online. wonderful...)
on about june 3, our stats for may appeared finalised. they were all there and our total was in the 900's. the very next day, that total was 1078Mb.
this month we're logging all outgoing and incoming data, parsing the log file, and writing it to a database. i wonder if we'll see a difference between their stats and ours?
That was timothy's minor edit of my story submission. I wrote that those 6 complaints were about local sites, when the distinction should've been "locally hosted" sites.
The fact remains - the public did not demand censorship; the coalition brought it upon us in trying to win the GST vote of censorship-loving Harradine. Their plan now wastes our money which could otherwise be spent on far more worthwhile causes.
what frustrates me is that they're wasting *our* money trying to enforce this kinda bullshit.
remember when the big "AU censoring the net" storm hit? it has proven vastly ineffectual, yet $1m+ has been wasted in the attempt (and continues to be wasted).
yes, in most budgets, $1m gets lost, but if you put that figure into health or education, it'd make a difference...
still referred to as the city of churches, but mostly from an architectural pov. there are many news articles outlining the fact that attendance at almost every church is rapidly declining (probably a nationwide if not worldwide trend).
adelaide is known for its arts festivals rather than its churches. i know of *noone* who has travelled here to see churches, but i know of many who arrive to attend the fringe festival, womadelaide (world of music and dance), etc.
the government tries to push us as the "IT" state, but it is such a joke. most of the IT action is in the eastern states (where they can at least get cable internet access, etc).
I wrote an article for evolt.org on this topic over a year ago (24 August 1999).
A couple of my concerns were regarding their handling of the growing number of dynamic sites on the Internet, and the criteria for inclusion (ie, musician fan sites, and childrens' entertainment groups were included in the database).
My primary suggestion was that the Australian government's money could be better spent on providing subsidised hosting for approved and culturally significant Web projects, instead of merely duplicating (at least in the short term) a lot of content.
Many Australian developers are very well aware of ALT tags and their importance. I would guess that there is just as great a percentage of American developers not using ALT tags as Australian developers doing the same. Recent similar legal issues have shown that AOL have been careless with regard to accessibility issues also. Incidentally, I would be interested to know if the IBM developers were Americans or Australians.
I do not see the relevance of your comment: "But I don't think Australia is off the hook--they apparently didn't think of it either."
IBM were contracted here as the experts/consultants. It is up to them to use ALT tags and explain their inclusion to the client. When you commission the construction of a cabinet, you can hardly be expected to insist that the maker uses specific glues, timber, joins, etc. The cabinet maker should make these decisions (and explain them if necessary) themselves, and any maker taking the easy road deserves a poor reputation.
I completely agree that IBM should be forced to accept the costs of these fixes. Hopefully it will teach developers world-wide that accessibility is not something to be taken lightly.
I encourage every Web site developer who reads this comment to visit evolt.org, and join our list for Web developers. Many of our members quickly learn the importance of the ALT tag, usability issues, etc.
I use a Matrox G400 32MB DualHead - 2 monitors running from the 1 AGP card. Apparently Win98 will support up to 9 monitors if you have enough G400's. Not sure if you have to run 1 AGP and the rest PCI though.
Just flicked through my preferred wholesalers online pricelist and found:
Well, they must have a pyromaniac at the company. Yesterday, Macintouch.com had users reporting macs catching on fire.
"We've had two reports of fires in recent Mac models, raising some concerns about leaving the computers unattended."
from Josh Barton: "First, the hard drive in one literally caught on fire during the night. I came in to the office to the pleasent smell of burning plastic and electronics to find some fire damage to the inside of the computer. Thank goodness a thick piece of metal stopped the flames before they burned through the plastic of the computer and started a major fire."
from David Shenk: "On Friday afternoon, May 26, my Powerbook G3 (333/Bronze) spontaneously caught fire while I was typing in my home office. It was a very small fire and I put it out in a few seconds, but there was real smoke and it was quickly melting the case on the bottom."
"I've gotten a strong indication from Apple that they will not be reporting it to anyone. Further, they informed me today that what happened to my computer is now considered 'proprietary' and 'confidential,' and that I am not entitled to any sort of explanation."
from Ty Davison "Well this wasn't fun. New Pismo PowerBook 500-MHz trying to go into FireWire Target Disk Mode so that the hard drive would show up on my friends B&W G3/300. New FireWire cable connected in FireWire port 1 of both machines. The Pismo enters Target disk mode (FireWire logo on the screen) but no hard drive icon on the G3. I shut the PowerBook down. I change the FireWire cable to port 2 in the G3. I pull the FireWire cable out of port one in the PowerBook, and I get a crackling sound and SMOKE out of the FireWire port 2 as a plug the cable in. (And the PIsmo is off!)"
Get your bread ready, cos we're making toast! Solves all of those winter heating problems! Nothing beats the smell of melting macs in the morning!
Call me when they have something like this doing a far higher res, and onto a contact lens. I'd really rather not wear such bulky goggles.
Surely it'd be possible, right? I can get mirrored lenses, and any number of colours and images. What tech advances are required to make contact lens displays a reality?
I'm not sure how likely 600MHz and 700MHz chips are by early 2001. This article at The Register suggests that Motorola are struggling to deliver speed increments, forcing Apple to pull the dual-G4 move.
The G5 they mention sounds interesting...
"The schedule may also affect Motorola's G5 chip, its first multi-core CPU, which is believed to contain four G4s operating in close harmony to generate four times the performance of a single chip at a given clock speed. With the cores so tightly coupled, users should get all the benefit of four-way multiprocessing without the usual CPU management overhead"
"Had the Government decided to limit audio and video streaming, the development of Australia's high-speed internet industry [...] would have been severely curtailed."
We have a high-speed internet industry???
If we have one, it's obviously not easily accessible in South Australia. *looks at FTP Voyager stats - uploading to a Web server in the US* - 4.78 bytes/sec...
IE/Win's lack of compliance stems from Microsoft tailoring the software to its primary customers (huge corporations) who require specific functions for their IE-only intranets. These are hosted on Windows machines, and accessed by Windows machines.
Microsoft sells the corporations the intranet solutions they require, but they'll need Microsoft's servers to serve them, and every employee, to access this wonderful intranet, will need Microsoft's operating system.
This is why Microsoft have been unable to bring full standards compliance to IE/Win - doing so would break parts of the intranets, etc, that they've sold to their big customers in the past.
As a Web developer, I find that IE/Win's level of CSS compliance is very decent, and enables me to accomplish everything I require. This goes for Netscape's version 6 preview also.
Of course, Netscape 4 is fucking pathetic when it comes to CSS. I would rather that it had no support for CSS than its half-hearted attempt.
Are you talking about the Studio or Cinema Display? I believe that Sony have a monitor which will do 1800x1550 (2.8M pixels) for about AU$2300 (under US$1400 surely). For $4k, you could run two of them with a G400 DualHead and get a monster res.
I run my G400 over a 21" and 15" at 2560x1024. According to the Matrox site, you can hook up to 9 monitors under Win98 (4 or so under NT or something like that) using a bunch of G400's. As soon as I have the money, I'll be trying out 5120x1024.
Must. Get. More. Pixels.
Funnily enough, my kitten's name is Pixel (seriously, I can't get enough pixels...). He sleeps on the 21" - so I guess my res is 2560x1025... That extra one Pixel vertically makes all the difference.;)
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO: pathetic article. Don't waste your time reading it.
Take a look at Mac message boards and you'll see that Mac users turn on eachother, and argue in a similarly childish and offensive manner. Yet many hardware producers provide drivers for Mac.
You'll even find pathetic arguing on ZDNet boards from Windows users.
As well as the development-effort-for-possibly-low-return issue, Linux may also face hardware vendors doubting its long-term viability.
And some may just assume that as long as you have your Windows dual-boot option, they can keep you resorting to that when required...
Good luck, Linux users.
I would suggest that a significant purpose of the "copy protection" is to discourage people from avoiding the purchase. The registration will be a simple process for the vast majority of users (who do not change their hardware components). If Microsoft can harass the minority who are pirating their software, without totally pissing off the majority, they will consider it.
Personally, I think that they could have avoided this scheme. I know 10 people who would pirate Win2K Pro and not pay the AUD$400, but if the price was AUD$50-90, they would legally purchase the software.
So, how are you (Linux goons) going to manage that? Threaten to stop using Photoshop for Linux?
I've never seen Mozilla advertised on TV or in mainstream newspapers and publicatoins. I've seen Microsoft advertise its products in these places.
Maybe if Netscape/Mozilla marketed its product to the general public, there would be more awareness among that group?
Fault for that lack of awareness lies with the organisation.
If I try to create a car brand to compete with the massive companies, I'd need to do some serious advertising/marketing/PR to get people aware, interested, and buying. If people trust existing brands, and ignore my car brand, then that is hardly their fault - they've worked hard to build up awareness and trust in their name.
I'm sure it's been said before, but of the various united states who joined this case (19 or so, weren't there?), how many use and continue to buy Microsoft software?
Couldn't they make a statement by shifting to a different platform?
Microsoft might lose some sales to Linux if Office were ported, but I don't think it would be significant. All the current dual-booters who keep their win98 partition for games wouldn't change, right?
And I can't imagine too many Windows users shifting across. Speaking for myself, I have tried Linux and didn't find it easy to use or particularly useful for my field of work.
(Emphasis is mine. Those downloads are in PDF format.)
We have an article about "smart tags" at evolt.org that people might be interested in reading - includes a few more links and a screenshot of them in action:
Microsoft implementing 'Smart Tags' in IE release
I've heard an MP3 of RMS singing to the public. I'd prefer that he would lie instead...
we pay about au$130/month for our telstra business adsl connection, and receive an allowance of 500Mb of data (both up and download). extra Mb's are charged to us at almost 20 cents. in the last 3 months, our usage has been 578Mb, 666Mb, 1078Mb.
3Gb would be heaven. that recent 1078Mb figure is based on 6 or 7 people sharing the connection (although only two of us do much downloading - the occasional movie trailer, etc).
telstra suck, but i wouldn't complain if they put a 3gig allowance on our connection. ;)
their email suggests that they provide effective logging tools so that you can track your usage. don't believe that for a second. their usage tracking is fucking pathetic. you'll check your stats on a monday, only to find that usage for each day of the previous *week* changes the very next day.
also, they'll go for 7-10 days, without updating your "daily" usage stats *at all*. (oh, and another thing - their bills for an online service come out by mail, and you can't pay them online. wonderful...)
on about june 3, our stats for may appeared finalised. they were all there and our total was in the 900's. the very next day, that total was 1078Mb.
this month we're logging all outgoing and incoming data, parsing the log file, and writing it to a database. i wonder if we'll see a difference between their stats and ours?
That was timothy's minor edit of my story submission. I wrote that those 6 complaints were about local sites, when the distinction should've been "locally hosted" sites.
The fact remains - the public did not demand censorship; the coalition brought it upon us in trying to win the GST vote of censorship-loving Harradine. Their plan now wastes our money which could otherwise be spent on far more worthwhile causes.
The top Australian newspaper (The Australian) has a weekend magazine lift-out that will print "fuck" unbleeped.
Sex in the City does air on a free-to-air major network, and have aired "cunt" unbleeped.
*shrug*
what frustrates me is that they're wasting *our* money trying to enforce this kinda bullshit.
remember when the big "AU censoring the net" storm hit? it has proven vastly ineffectual, yet $1m+ has been wasted in the attempt (and continues to be wasted).
yes, in most budgets, $1m gets lost, but if you put that figure into health or education, it'd make a difference...
still referred to as the city of churches, but mostly from an architectural pov. there are many news articles outlining the fact that attendance at almost every church is rapidly declining (probably a nationwide if not worldwide trend).
adelaide is known for its arts festivals rather than its churches. i know of *noone* who has travelled here to see churches, but i know of many who arrive to attend the fringe festival, womadelaide (world of music and dance), etc.
the government tries to push us as the "IT" state, but it is such a joke. most of the IT action is in the eastern states (where they can at least get cable internet access, etc).
I wrote an article for evolt.org on this topic over a year ago (24 August 1999).
A couple of my concerns were regarding their handling of the growing number of dynamic sites on the Internet, and the criteria for inclusion (ie, musician fan sites, and childrens' entertainment groups were included in the database).
My primary suggestion was that the Australian government's money could be better spent on providing subsidised hosting for approved and culturally significant Web projects, instead of merely duplicating (at least in the short term) a lot of content.
Many Australian developers are very well aware of ALT tags and their importance. I would guess that there is just as great a percentage of American developers not using ALT tags as Australian developers doing the same. Recent similar legal issues have shown that AOL have been careless with regard to accessibility issues also. Incidentally, I would be interested to know if the IBM developers were Americans or Australians.
I do not see the relevance of your comment: "But I don't think Australia is off the hook--they apparently didn't think of it either."
IBM were contracted here as the experts/consultants. It is up to them to use ALT tags and explain their inclusion to the client. When you commission the construction of a cabinet, you can hardly be expected to insist that the maker uses specific glues, timber, joins, etc. The cabinet maker should make these decisions (and explain them if necessary) themselves, and any maker taking the easy road deserves a poor reputation.
I completely agree that IBM should be forced to accept the costs of these fixes. Hopefully it will teach developers world-wide that accessibility is not something to be taken lightly.
I encourage every Web site developer who reads this comment to visit evolt.org , and join our list for Web developers. Many of our members quickly learn the importance of the ALT tag, usability issues, etc.
Didn't think of that - good point. What confused me was that this wholesaler uses "1*AGP" to denote "1 2xAGP slot" on other items.
Anyway, thanks for pointing that out.
I use a Matrox G400 32MB DualHead - 2 monitors running from the 1 AGP card. Apparently Win98 will support up to 9 monitors if you have enough G400's. Not sure if you have to run 1 AGP and the rest PCI though.
Just flicked through my preferred wholesalers online pricelist and found:
Epox - VIA, Slot I, 4*AGP, Sound, ATX (6VBA2)
That could be a mistake though... *shrug*
Well, they must have a pyromaniac at the company. Yesterday, Macintouch.com had users reporting macs catching on fire.
"We've had two reports of fires in recent Mac models, raising some concerns about leaving the computers unattended."
from Josh Barton:
"First, the hard drive in one literally caught on fire during the night. I came in to the office to the pleasent smell of burning plastic and electronics to find some fire damage to the inside of the computer. Thank goodness a thick piece of metal stopped the flames before they burned through the plastic of the computer and started a major fire."
from David Shenk:
"On Friday afternoon, May 26, my Powerbook G3 (333/Bronze) spontaneously caught fire while I was typing in my home office. It was a very small fire and I put it out in a few seconds, but there was real smoke and it was quickly melting the case on the bottom."
"I've gotten a strong indication from Apple that they will not be reporting it to anyone. Further, they informed me today that what happened to my computer is now considered 'proprietary' and 'confidential,' and that I am not entitled to any sort of explanation."
from Ty Davison
"Well this wasn't fun. New Pismo PowerBook 500-MHz trying to go into FireWire Target Disk Mode so that the hard drive would show up on my friends B&W G3/300. New FireWire cable connected in FireWire port 1 of both machines. The Pismo enters Target disk mode (FireWire logo on the screen) but no hard drive icon on the G3. I shut the PowerBook down. I change the FireWire cable to port 2 in the G3. I pull the FireWire cable out of port one in the PowerBook, and I get a crackling sound and SMOKE out of the FireWire port 2 as a plug the cable in. (And the PIsmo is off!)"
Get your bread ready, cos we're making toast! Solves all of those winter heating problems! Nothing beats the smell of melting macs in the morning!
;)
Brings new meaning to the term "firewire", eh?
Call me when they have something like this doing a far higher res, and onto a contact lens. I'd really rather not wear such bulky goggles.
Surely it'd be possible, right? I can get mirrored lenses, and any number of colours and images. What tech advances are required to make contact lens displays a reality?
I'm not sure how likely 600MHz and 700MHz chips are by early 2001. This article at The Register suggests that Motorola are struggling to deliver speed increments, forcing Apple to pull the dual-G4 move.
The G5 they mention sounds interesting...
"The schedule may also affect Motorola's G5 chip, its first multi-core CPU, which is believed to contain four G4s operating in close harmony to generate four times the performance of a single chip at a given clock speed. With the cores so tightly coupled, users should get all the benefit of four-way multiprocessing without the usual CPU management overhead"
We have a high-speed internet industry???
If we have one, it's obviously not easily accessible in South Australia. *looks at FTP Voyager stats - uploading to a Web server in the US* - 4.78 bytes/sec...
IE/Win's lack of compliance stems from Microsoft tailoring the software to its primary customers (huge corporations) who require specific functions for their IE-only intranets. These are hosted on Windows machines, and accessed by Windows machines.
Microsoft sells the corporations the intranet solutions they require, but they'll need Microsoft's servers to serve them, and every employee, to access this wonderful intranet, will need Microsoft's operating system.
This is why Microsoft have been unable to bring full standards compliance to IE/Win - doing so would break parts of the intranets, etc, that they've sold to their big customers in the past.
As a Web developer, I find that IE/Win's level of CSS compliance is very decent, and enables me to accomplish everything I require. This goes for Netscape's version 6 preview also.
Of course, Netscape 4 is fucking pathetic when it comes to CSS. I would rather that it had no support for CSS than its half-hearted attempt.
Are you talking about the Studio or Cinema Display? I believe that Sony have a monitor which will do 1800x1550 (2.8M pixels) for about AU$2300 (under US$1400 surely). For $4k, you could run two of them with a G400 DualHead and get a monster res.
;)
I run my G400 over a 21" and 15" at 2560x1024. According to the Matrox site, you can hook up to 9 monitors under Win98 (4 or so under NT or something like that) using a bunch of G400's. As soon as I have the money, I'll be trying out 5120x1024.
Must. Get. More. Pixels.
Funnily enough, my kitten's name is Pixel (seriously, I can't get enough pixels...). He sleeps on the 21" - so I guess my res is 2560x1025... That extra one Pixel vertically makes all the difference.