I know slashdot group mind will be upset, but honestly those mac ads are pretty ignorant. I haven't had too many problems with Windows, but I have a Mac, and you know what? It has just as many annoyances as any other OS - maybe more so, because it seems like every patch apple releases breaks something I have. I can't honestly remember the last time a hotfix or service pack microsoft released broke anything of mine.
I deployed Windows 7 to about 200 lab machines at school - a mixture of optiplex 520's, 620's, 745's, 755's, and 960's - and it all went along without a hitch. Haven't had any app compatibility issues, and even deepfreeze works like a top (on x64 no less).
Windows locks you into x86 sure, but its an open architecture. There's nothing stopping an OEM from writing drivers for every single piece of unique hardware they have to get it working properly. And there's nothing in the Windows license I've seen that locks you into only installing it onto a windows branded pc.
I honestly would say no-one was interested in running obscure Unix OS's on 3rd party hardware because for the most part people (I know I did) bought those platforms because of vertical integration (ie - to run one specific application for our organization) or because of the vendor support offerings - neither of which would have been valid if it was running on 3rd party hardware.
I do remember when geocities came online. I was still using Windows 3.1 (really hadn't played with linux much) and had a shell connection to a Solaris machine run by Oregon EDNET (compass). If you search around google you'll find references to that.
Anyhow I thought it was cool they were basically giving away website space for free. The original version of it wasn't a banner, popup encursted nightmare - those came later, probably when someone who worked there woke up one day and asked themselves how it was going to make money.
For sure - my first website ever was on geocities.
I know the first OSX Mac I ever had (can't remember the OS version 10.3 probably), but it was an original Mac Mini - I had a really hard time trying to skip the ad/signup sheet for.Mac - I really didn't understand how to skip past this step, and it wasn't even necessary. As I recall after a while I figured out you could quit the app that launched the Ad/signup form, but it wasn't even remotely intuitive.
Mac's are like this though - when its working its a really nice environment and very pleasant, but when they mess up that experience they really kick you in the nuts hard and take your lunch money.
So yes, you can skip the.Mac thing, but if your a new user and naive like me - it really doesn't seem like you can, and its not at all intuitive (they may have changed this...) to skip.
And you know what Apple? If it was free I probably would have signed up.
They can just beat you when you leave work for the day, or have other member do unsavory things to you and your food through the day, or make veiled threats against your family.
When and where? Seriously... I'm in a union and I've never heard of this happening in the last 20 years. The worst I ever saw was someone who stirred the pot was encourage to take a job in management (and you know who gave her the job? not the union, but the managers themselves).
For every union abuse you can cite I could easily cite another 20-30 management abuses that are far worse - because not only do they have more power, but in general - labor laws really aren't enforced in this country. Example - right to organize - look at the vast amount of organization stories from a lot of different sectors of the economy, and you'll see what I'm talking about (like Stream International or Walmart closing call centers and shops because of people organizing).
If you were really that concerned about safety why are you relying on a cell phone? Anywhere where your going to get into this kind of accident without someone noticing on the side of the road your phone most likely won't work anyhow.
I broke down just outside of Boise Idaho a few years back - no cell coverage (at the time), but what saved me was I'm a ham radio operator. I was able to call another operator in town who called a tow truck for me.
When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales they sold over 3 million copies of the OS which dwarfed all Mac hardware sales to that date (keep in mind the launch date for Win 3 was 1990 - so outselling 6 years of Mac sales in its first year is nothing to scoff at). I got that number from Cringely's Accidental Empires (decent book).
I can't find the sales figures for Windows 1.0 or 2.0, but they did go from 140 million in revenue in 1985 (Windows 1 launch date) to over a billion in 1990 (Windows 3 launch date). If it was a niche it was for a very very short period.
Anyhow as someone who had a bunch of Amiga's (I still have 2 - an A4000 and an A1200 - as well as a Pegasos II) - it was always a niche because the only killer app it had was Video Toaster. The killer app for the Mac originally was Pagemaker, and then Photoshop.
I have a Mac, and to be honest it doesn't have a single app I use that makes me want to buy the machine over anything else. Its still running 10.4.x, but the UI experience is really honestly nothing to write home about. It never remembers any of my window positions in Finder, and there are situations where its easy to lose dialogue boxes (for example - if a save dialogue pops up in Firefox it will let you click on the Firefox window moving the save window back (this is something MS-Windows will not let you do) - and its really hard to get that save window to the front again...). Even when I worked in the print industry at one point a stronghold for the Mac - however no-one used Mac's there anymore because they were too expensive, and Quark/Adobe stuff ran on Windows just fine and would read all the Mac files just fine. Most all of EFI's stuff runs on Windows these days - Mac's just interface with it.
Apple has essentially positioned OSX for people who like the software/hardware or people who think its hip to use a Mac. While I agree its gaining marketshare and that is a good thing, I wonder to what end. Its an interesting position really - I don't think any other computer company has been able to sustain a market based on user experience or hipness alone so it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Ironically one of the developer tools Commodore shipped with the SDK was Enforcer - which used the otherwise unused MMU to detect improperly referenced pointers and invalid access to memory.
Still a pretty crappy way to save money on all those Amiga's with 'EC' 68k's.
I've looked at that and similar systems for a while now, but honestly, I just can't justify that sort of price premium. In all reality if they had wanted to spur adoption, then they should have built it for plain-jane x86 hardware. No need to support everything under the sun - hell just approve a specific combination of hardware as a reference platform and go from there (for non-gaming applications there are several motherboards where the whole of everything a user would need is right there on the board, making testing easy).
Some of this is a bit of legacy. Back when Commodore went bankrupt there was a lot of talk about moving to PowerPC since Motorola basically EOL'd the 68k series of cpu's and the Mac used PPC chips it seemed a logical path to take. ESCOM even talked about moving to PPC before they went bankrupt, and Phase 5 came out with the Cyberstorm CPU card for the 3000/4000 - which essentially was a 68060 and a 604 PPC cpu on a single board - these machines effectively became a development platform for the next version of Amiga DOS.
So there is a decent amount of PPC development already done for the Amiga - even though now most of it is obsolete (arguably). The PPC platform has never been a really mature environment - every PREP machine I've ever had (even the Pegasos II) had buggy firmware that took hours to get working just to boot the base OS. Every step of the way you felt like the machine you had in front of you just barely made it out of the prototype stage.
So yeah I'd welcome a x86 version. Amiga DOS still has a lot of potential for being user friendly, but extremely powerful and flexible at the same time - which there really isn't an OS out there that covers this fully. Even if it means re-writing a lot of software already written to take advantage of PPC cpu's.
The next-gen Nokia phone [arstechnica.com] on the other hand (successor to the N900) will get all the hardware features of the iPhone, but with the openness of a linux software stack. Want to make an app that downloads podcasts? Fine! Want to use your phone as a modem? No problem! In fact, no corporation enforcing their moral or business rules on how you use your phone, or alienation of talented developers [macworld.com]!
Sounds like the way my N97 (S60 R5 device) works;).
Well in the 1980's when the RFC was written for zone files (1034/1035) it probably sounded like a perfectly sound way to configure this sort of thing, same with DNS in general (RFC's for which were also written in the 1980's).
If it were invented from scratch today I'm sure it would resemble something like LDAP.
The fact we haven't had more mass DNS failures like this is actually surprising.
Are you kidding? The server requirements for running a persistent online world are far greater than the server requirements for running a match making system - which is essentially what SC2 online play is.
Actually a lot of the products case sensitive capable, but the licensing system (flexnet) isn't - thank management for that one (anti-piracy efforts etc).
Acrobat 8's case sensitive bugs were fixed in the move to Intel - as you'll recall the dev systems only ran case sensitive filesystems, same with Acrobat 9.
Reader for instance last I check has no issues on case sensitive filesystems - since it doesn't use flexnet at all.
When will software/computer/IT companies be held to the same standards that other engineers (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical) are? If a bridge is built and it collapses due to a poor design, or a gadget catches fire or brakes are poorly designed, people head to their local courthouse and sue.
You can read my other posts to see I'm far from an apple fanboi or apologist, but that day you speak of will come when customers are willing to wait 8-10 years and pay several thousand dollars for their OS. Software perfection is achievable, but it takes a product 10-15 years to reach that state (example: there are MS-DOS accounting tools I've supported in the last 4 years I'd regard as examples of perfection).
In the computer world, people just accept that "All my photographs, resume, music, documents, tax returns, whatever" being lost forever is par for the course.
Is there a single thing in your life that you hold to that standard? You've lived a sheltered life if so. I've had my car break down on the freeway in the middle of nowhere, I've been on airplanes that have had (minor) inflight problems, and I've lost data to hardware issues and theft. So yes par for the course - which is why I'm paranoid enough to bring things and use things to counter the above to minimize the impact on my life and well being - example: backing my crap up before installing a 1.0 version of an OS onto my PC.
Windows, on the other hand, is generally recognized (with decent evidence) as a total clusterfuck, so reminding that they could get Linux for free instead of putting up with that shit is actually likely to net some converts.
When I did Acrobat technical support (and InDesign tech support) for Adobe back when it was in the US - I don't recall a single patch, OS upgrade or anything released by Microsoft that ever broke our programs (in any major way). The only exception was 64 bit Windows where the Adobe PDF printer driver didn't work until Acrobat 8.1 was released. All techs at the time had to support both Windows and Mac (I had a Mac Pro, G5 and a Dell T5400 on my desk).
Apple repeatedly broke our apps whether it was network file locking, launching, printing (one bug I noticed they have yet to fix is printing to custom page sizes - I haven't tested this in snow leopard admittedly). I don't think there was a single dot release that didn't affect at least one of our products in some negative way where we had to release a patch to fix a problem - sometimes very quickly.
One thing is clear - Microsoft took quality assurance and compatibility far more seriously than Apple ever did, and they took the platform compatibility bugs very serious unlike RADAR which is essentially a black hole.
More importantly its a platform to run ad-hoc applications on top of (like Java or Commodore 64) and Apple doesn't want their customers having freedom of choice to run applications on their phones.
Its really Microsoft's own fault though. More than once I can tell a sales guy I rather not buy anything new, and they'll come along with a better deal and a lower price. Or I can wheel and deal until they give me the next upgrade for free or whatever. If you have a lot of money on the line - that sales person if they are any good (and have any self interest in a huge commission) will find a way to make you happy eventually.
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I know slashdot group mind will be upset, but honestly those mac ads are pretty ignorant. I haven't had too many problems with Windows, but I have a Mac, and you know what? It has just as many annoyances as any other OS - maybe more so, because it seems like every patch apple releases breaks something I have. I can't honestly remember the last time a hotfix or service pack microsoft released broke anything of mine.
I deployed Windows 7 to about 200 lab machines at school - a mixture of optiplex 520's, 620's, 745's, 755's, and 960's - and it all went along without a hitch. Haven't had any app compatibility issues, and even deepfreeze works like a top (on x64 no less).
Windows locks you into x86 sure, but its an open architecture. There's nothing stopping an OEM from writing drivers for every single piece of unique hardware they have to get it working properly. And there's nothing in the Windows license I've seen that locks you into only installing it onto a windows branded pc.
I honestly would say no-one was interested in running obscure Unix OS's on 3rd party hardware because for the most part people (I know I did) bought those platforms because of vertical integration (ie - to run one specific application for our organization) or because of the vendor support offerings - neither of which would have been valid if it was running on 3rd party hardware.
I do remember when geocities came online. I was still using Windows 3.1 (really hadn't played with linux much) and had a shell connection to a Solaris machine run by Oregon EDNET (compass). If you search around google you'll find references to that.
Anyhow I thought it was cool they were basically giving away website space for free. The original version of it wasn't a banner, popup encursted nightmare - those came later, probably when someone who worked there woke up one day and asked themselves how it was going to make money.
For sure - my first website ever was on geocities.
They are clearly very interested in signing you up for the service though.
Not even Microsoft pushes .net, windows live or msn during install.
Well like I said - it was an original mac mini - so this probably was 10.3.x, and no it wasn't straight forward.
Glad to hear they fixed it though.
I know the first OSX Mac I ever had (can't remember the OS version 10.3 probably), but it was an original Mac Mini - I had a really hard time trying to skip the ad/signup sheet for .Mac - I really didn't understand how to skip past this step, and it wasn't even necessary. As I recall after a while I figured out you could quit the app that launched the Ad/signup form, but it wasn't even remotely intuitive.
Mac's are like this though - when its working its a really nice environment and very pleasant, but when they mess up that experience they really kick you in the nuts hard and take your lunch money.
So yes, you can skip the .Mac thing, but if your a new user and naive like me - it really doesn't seem like you can, and its not at all intuitive (they may have changed this...) to skip.
And you know what Apple? If it was free I probably would have signed up.
Are you for real? Seriously: what kind of person goes to work for some Italian guys named "Guido" and "Mario"...
When and where? Seriously... I'm in a union and I've never heard of this happening in the last 20 years. The worst I ever saw was someone who stirred the pot was encourage to take a job in management (and you know who gave her the job? not the union, but the managers themselves).
For every union abuse you can cite I could easily cite another 20-30 management abuses that are far worse - because not only do they have more power, but in general - labor laws really aren't enforced in this country. Example - right to organize - look at the vast amount of organization stories from a lot of different sectors of the economy, and you'll see what I'm talking about (like Stream International or Walmart closing call centers and shops because of people organizing).
If you were really that concerned about safety why are you relying on a cell phone? Anywhere where your going to get into this kind of accident without someone noticing on the side of the road your phone most likely won't work anyhow.
I broke down just outside of Boise Idaho a few years back - no cell coverage (at the time), but what saved me was I'm a ham radio operator. I was able to call another operator in town who called a tow truck for me.
Do you really think this change will affect radio waves all that much? Especially in RF laden California?
You're not a shareholder in the state you live in?
People really need to stop thinking of benefit purely in terms of money...
When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales they sold over 3 million copies of the OS which dwarfed all Mac hardware sales to that date (keep in mind the launch date for Win 3 was 1990 - so outselling 6 years of Mac sales in its first year is nothing to scoff at). I got that number from Cringely's Accidental Empires (decent book).
I can't find the sales figures for Windows 1.0 or 2.0, but they did go from 140 million in revenue in 1985 (Windows 1 launch date) to over a billion in 1990 (Windows 3 launch date). If it was a niche it was for a very very short period.
Anyhow as someone who had a bunch of Amiga's (I still have 2 - an A4000 and an A1200 - as well as a Pegasos II) - it was always a niche because the only killer app it had was Video Toaster. The killer app for the Mac originally was Pagemaker, and then Photoshop.
I have a Mac, and to be honest it doesn't have a single app I use that makes me want to buy the machine over anything else. Its still running 10.4.x, but the UI experience is really honestly nothing to write home about. It never remembers any of my window positions in Finder, and there are situations where its easy to lose dialogue boxes (for example - if a save dialogue pops up in Firefox it will let you click on the Firefox window moving the save window back (this is something MS-Windows will not let you do) - and its really hard to get that save window to the front again...). Even when I worked in the print industry at one point a stronghold for the Mac - however no-one used Mac's there anymore because they were too expensive, and Quark/Adobe stuff ran on Windows just fine and would read all the Mac files just fine. Most all of EFI's stuff runs on Windows these days - Mac's just interface with it.
Apple has essentially positioned OSX for people who like the software/hardware or people who think its hip to use a Mac. While I agree its gaining marketshare and that is a good thing, I wonder to what end. Its an interesting position really - I don't think any other computer company has been able to sustain a market based on user experience or hipness alone so it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Ironically one of the developer tools Commodore shipped with the SDK was Enforcer - which used the otherwise unused MMU to detect improperly referenced pointers and invalid access to memory.
Still a pretty crappy way to save money on all those Amiga's with 'EC' 68k's.
Some of this is a bit of legacy. Back when Commodore went bankrupt there was a lot of talk about moving to PowerPC since Motorola basically EOL'd the 68k series of cpu's and the Mac used PPC chips it seemed a logical path to take. ESCOM even talked about moving to PPC before they went bankrupt, and Phase 5 came out with the Cyberstorm CPU card for the 3000/4000 - which essentially was a 68060 and a 604 PPC cpu on a single board - these machines effectively became a development platform for the next version of Amiga DOS.
So there is a decent amount of PPC development already done for the Amiga - even though now most of it is obsolete (arguably). The PPC platform has never been a really mature environment - every PREP machine I've ever had (even the Pegasos II) had buggy firmware that took hours to get working just to boot the base OS. Every step of the way you felt like the machine you had in front of you just barely made it out of the prototype stage.
So yeah I'd welcome a x86 version. Amiga DOS still has a lot of potential for being user friendly, but extremely powerful and flexible at the same time - which there really isn't an OS out there that covers this fully. Even if it means re-writing a lot of software already written to take advantage of PPC cpu's.
Sounds like the way my N97 (S60 R5 device) works ;).
How is it late? Symbian was opensourced in 2008.
Well in the 1980's when the RFC was written for zone files (1034/1035) it probably sounded like a perfectly sound way to configure this sort of thing, same with DNS in general (RFC's for which were also written in the 1980's).
If it were invented from scratch today I'm sure it would resemble something like LDAP.
The fact we haven't had more mass DNS failures like this is actually surprising.
Are you kidding? The server requirements for running a persistent online world are far greater than the server requirements for running a match making system - which is essentially what SC2 online play is.
Actually a lot of the products case sensitive capable, but the licensing system (flexnet) isn't - thank management for that one (anti-piracy efforts etc).
Acrobat 8's case sensitive bugs were fixed in the move to Intel - as you'll recall the dev systems only ran case sensitive filesystems, same with Acrobat 9.
Reader for instance last I check has no issues on case sensitive filesystems - since it doesn't use flexnet at all.
You can read my other posts to see I'm far from an apple fanboi or apologist, but that day you speak of will come when customers are willing to wait 8-10 years and pay several thousand dollars for their OS. Software perfection is achievable, but it takes a product 10-15 years to reach that state (example: there are MS-DOS accounting tools I've supported in the last 4 years I'd regard as examples of perfection).
Is there a single thing in your life that you hold to that standard? You've lived a sheltered life if so. I've had my car break down on the freeway in the middle of nowhere, I've been on airplanes that have had (minor) inflight problems, and I've lost data to hardware issues and theft. So yes par for the course - which is why I'm paranoid enough to bring things and use things to counter the above to minimize the impact on my life and well being - example: backing my crap up before installing a 1.0 version of an OS onto my PC.
When I did Acrobat technical support (and InDesign tech support) for Adobe back when it was in the US - I don't recall a single patch, OS upgrade or anything released by Microsoft that ever broke our programs (in any major way). The only exception was 64 bit Windows where the Adobe PDF printer driver didn't work until Acrobat 8.1 was released. All techs at the time had to support both Windows and Mac (I had a Mac Pro, G5 and a Dell T5400 on my desk).
Apple repeatedly broke our apps whether it was network file locking, launching, printing (one bug I noticed they have yet to fix is printing to custom page sizes - I haven't tested this in snow leopard admittedly). I don't think there was a single dot release that didn't affect at least one of our products in some negative way where we had to release a patch to fix a problem - sometimes very quickly.
One thing is clear - Microsoft took quality assurance and compatibility far more seriously than Apple ever did, and they took the platform compatibility bugs very serious unlike RADAR which is essentially a black hole.
At least Microsoft fixes them for free.
More importantly its a platform to run ad-hoc applications on top of (like Java or Commodore 64) and Apple doesn't want their customers having freedom of choice to run applications on their phones.
Its really Microsoft's own fault though. More than once I can tell a sales guy I rather not buy anything new, and they'll come along with a better deal and a lower price. Or I can wheel and deal until they give me the next upgrade for free or whatever. If you have a lot of money on the line - that sales person if they are any good (and have any self interest in a huge commission) will find a way to make you happy eventually.