First,
It is obvious that MSFT is chargin $80 for a working OS, aka an OS on the harddrive, running a kernel, etc. $10 is the CD and manuals. Hence I should be able to buy as many copies of XP as I want for $10 each, then I should pay $80 to actually activate it (once or multiple times). What's with this assumption that I will actually want to install and activate something I buy that gives you the right to charge me $80. (It would be nice paying sales tax on $10, instead of $90).
Second,
Its a crying shame that they ran out of licenses. And here I was hoping consumers would be able to say no to new Microsuck OS. It looks like the Microsoft defense team was right. They are doing what's right for the consumer. They obviously have overwhelming support for there new "features" why don't we all sign up for Microsoft credit cards, transfer our bank accounts, and discard our mutual funds for straight up MSFT stock!!!
MSFT likes to bundle stuff with windows. Why not force them to do so.
Cap the price at $300 and force them to bundle Office Pro (to replace Wordpad) and all of the Microsoft games (to sit alongside Solitaire). The full version of Outlook (instead of the weak Express edition).
Wouldn't that bundle benefit the consumer! (*insert evil smirk*)
The opinions expressed herein are my opinions and are not influenced or the responsibility of my employer.
I would like to point out the difference between an operating system, and operating system distribution. For this analogy I would like to use Linux. For Linux, the operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the heart and soul of the operating system, the kernel provides functionality to manage computing resources. It manages the hardware, aka the CPU and RAM memory. It provides very basic building blocks - semaphores, mutexes, memory allocation, and communications to external devices. This is a kernel.
By design, an operating system kernel can also talk to additional devices - Hard Drives, CD-ROMS, sound cards, Ethernet cards, USB devices, PCI bus controllers, etc. However, all these components are merely drivers that use the core functionality of the kernel to accomplish communications with these devices.
Most Operating system bundles come with lots of drivers, because there is a lot of hardware to talk to, and not being able to talk to a hard drive leaves one with an operating system that only sits in an idle loop on the CPU, because it can load no useful programs or drivers from a storage device.
Most operating system bundles also come with lots of Protocol drivers, such as TCP/IP (the protocol under HTTP/Web) services, USB, Firewire, Bluetooth, Wirelsess LAN, UDP, SNMP, etc. Wait, Microsoft doesn't provide all of those. Many of them you install when you install a PCI card that provides the underlying hardware functionality. In fact when I installed my new motherboard, I overrode all the Windows drivers for the PCI bus, with those supplied by the manufacturer. I did this casually, without effort, no complaints from Windows2000, and Windows2000 did not try to use its default drivers, ever again.
So far, I have limited my description to the operating system kernel and hardware drivers. These could be viewed as essential for using the hardware that a PC has. As of yet I have made no mention of applications. Applications which operate through drivers and the kernel to gather, store, retrieve and manipulate digital information.
To be fair some applications belong in an operating system bundle. The TaskManager is an excellent example. This application talks to the kernel and allows the user to inspect and, if desired remove, processes running on the computer. Could someone write a TaskManager for windows? Yes, if they wanted to reverse engineer the unpublished kernel API. Linux has an innovative task manager that operates like a first person shooting game, I have seen nothing of the sort for Windows.
Why do people buy Windows?
Mainly they buy it because it has a large library of applications that run on Windows.
What are these applications?
Until, say 1995 (prior to the web browsing phenomenon) the most popular app was the Office Suite. WordPerfect, Word, Lotus, and others fought long and hard for dominance. Did Microsoft EVER bundle Office with Windows - NO! Did Microsoft ever co-erce vendors to bundling Office with Windows, offering unbelievable deals? Why don't you ask Compaq, Dell and Gateway? I don't honestly know, but I seem remember a time when the original Microsoft Office was nearly as cheap and plentiful as water. Now Microsoft owns over 80% of the market and charges $400 for the basic edition.
Why are internet browsers and media players so different? They are all applications. While the Task Manager may be an essential application, playing.wav files for your logon is nice, a help system all but required, it is possible to have these without bundling applications as Microsoft has.
Software is infinitely flexible. If Microsoft wants to use HTML for the help system, this is fine. But the abiltiy to open HTML help files in no way requires the ability to open http://msn.com! The codec needed to play a wav file, is completely independent from the one needed for proprietary Windows MediA (WMA) files. Microsoft has gone a long way to provided needed functionality: a pluggable digital media player, configurable device drivers, standardized and extensible HTML rendering engines. Windows even has Wordpad, which can edit basic Word documents, even though there are few, if any files in the operating system bundle in Word format.
I can replace a faulty hardware driver, I can install a more secure TCP/IP stack, but I can't replace the HTML rendering engine, no one makes one, and no one can, because the full API is probably not available. I can only install my custom engine alongside the Microsoft one, and explicitly open my browser. However, the next email worm can still exploit any holes in the Microsoft engine.
Microsoft is clearly bundling its way into lockin, and the remedy does nothing, possibly protecting the lockin under the guise of security.
Microsoft is playing us for idiots, it ships full versions Windows Media Player, instead of one that only plays.wav files. It ships a crippled Wordpad, not the latest Microsoft Word.
If Microsoft wants to bundle applications then give us everything! I want the Office Professional and don't stop with Solitaire, I want Civilization III and all the others as well. Bundle me that for just $300.
What corporation doesn't think of something as their data (its called proprietary information). Just because they have internet access will a company want there data accessible throught the internet, just because a user posted the correct username and password? Add in some biometrics and really haus encryption and maybe they'll let you see a picture, but they'd never what the actual document to be sent.
Whats with this doing away of heirachal filing systems. Do I file all my mail in on big container? It's ludicrous. I would never find anything. You would still end up with so heirarchal naming conventions. (Amex Bill Jan 01, or First draft of my resume, etc.) Just to have some mnemonic device for identifying something or even to ask for something. (have you ever tried searching email for a phone number, you either find 2 that you don't want or 500. Either way it takes forever to sort through the mess and unless computers become sentient, they can't sort it for you).
"Well, who knows, but their idea of a transparent large-scale network that is self-managing as they've described is an interesting one"
I'm sorry, but I this idea is as much Microsofts idea as the GUI (3rd hand stolen from Xerox Parc). Do you see the number of references? Do you see that this 2 page research paper pulls all of its idea(s) from other sources!
I think the biggest idea in the paper is the runtime binding. Much like the ideas presented by Corba. As easy as replacing a class file in Java. This is what.NET is trying to provide for C/C++/COBOL/PASCAL/Ada/FORTRAN and any other language it supports. Linking against specific libraries is an old and tired idea. We can spare a few clock cycles to dynamically look up a function in a library by it's signature, then we can remember it, or optimize the lookup or something. But we shouldn't have to relink our application when we add a function to a library. And someday we won't have to recompile a class when someone adds a method (Java does this now, but the class loader is so much cooler than most other pieces of software).
Lets please beat Microsoft to this one, surely all of the free University thought could be put to good use.
I would like to agree with other posters. A common format between open source Linux WPs would be a big bonus! And it would make writing a Word2LinuxWP filter much easier.
What is the difference between LaTeX and XML? Aren't both specialized subsets of SGML?
Does anyone have any links?
One thing I will give XML, you could specify your WP as conforming to a given DTD version then as people add more features to the DTD you can release a new version of the WP that has support for the DTD features. This would drive the market in a feature oriented way without breaking much. Plus if it's in XML you can verify the ducument is well formed even if you couldn't edit or display some advanced tag. Of course the ultimate is that your WP would be a big component manager and you could 'plugin' new document features when a new DTD is approved.
Final comment - Isn't WordPerfect based on customized version of TeX?
The industry finally needs 64 bit chips.
It is too bad that DEC beat the NEED for 64 bits by about 10 years. I can remember when they had double the MHz of Intel at 64 bits wide. Of course the chip itself went for about $1000...
Funny how DEC gave up on 64 Bit processors before the IA-64 was even announced!!!
Even recently Alpha AXP servers from Compaq still do as good or better than x86 servers.
Did it ever occur to you that when Bill Gates threw support behind Jobs and Apple and offered to keep makeing Office for MacOS that there was a 'stipulation' that MacOS would never run on x86. What if the monopoly that is Microshaft has pre-empted and basically forbid Apple from even allowing anything more meaningful the basic kernel from being released!
If all of OS X WAS ported to x86 and all you had to do is recompile:
a) would Mac products be compiled for x86?
b) would Any free-lance developers support the closed GUI?
c) Would/Could this become the GUI that unifies the Linux/BSD desktop market?
Case that looks like a DVD player / VCR including an LCD panel that I can put dumb little messages on and display the time if I ever write a Linux driver for it. Case will have a 5.25 slot for a CD/DVD of some kind (I wish DVD RAM was up to snuff although I've heard of DVD/CDRW combos). AND a shallow 5.25 faceplate slot (where I can put the SBLive Platinum Faceplate with the IR PORT!)
Low profile AGP GeForce2 with DVI and HDTV out. (VGA & NTSC would be nice but this is a low profile card and I want a portable LCD and HDTV hookups.)
Low profile SBLive 5.1 Platinum.
Low Profile MPEG2 decoder/encoder.
4 USB ports ON THE FRONT!
USB gamepads comparable to PS2 DualShock (Xbox gamepads?)
This puppy would look like a DVD player with Sound outputs on the front and gameports. It might even look like the PS2. Although I think having a super slim version of Linux running 24/7 and breifly waking the CPU from hibernation to display the time on the LCD would be cool.
Of course I'd have to figure out how to do "Instant On Linux". Might even mirror the Indrema software into this badboy, especially if we found a low-profile GeForce3 instead.
CRUD! Need 3 PCI slots for the TV input so this can double as a TiVo. Oh well, that's the way pie in the sky dreams go. I guess I'll just have to buy an Xbox and figure out how to dual boot with the Indrema Linux.
Here's some more info.
http://www.etcetra.com/12051999/dotnet.htm
These things don't have batteries. As you walk through a special area with special equipment the chip gets passively powered and sends out its ID allowing you to merely push your cart and slide your credit card and BAM! no more checkout lines.
Chances are there will be no standard to frequencies and no central database of IDs and it takes special equipment to read anyway.
Besides, if they can friggin sniff dead skin cells out of the air and ID me by my DNA what does it matter that I've got 3 IDs off apples running through my intestines plus an ID in my head.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux is too unstable and difficult to maintain and difficult for a fifth grader to use (sorry KDE and GNOME, maybe in 3 years).
Make MSFT buy 200,000 iMacs instead of PCs. If they want to write off the free Mac Internet Explorer, fine by me.
First,
It is obvious that MSFT is chargin $80 for a working OS, aka an OS on the harddrive, running a kernel, etc. $10 is the CD and manuals. Hence I should be able to buy as many copies of XP as I want for $10 each, then I should pay $80 to actually activate it (once or multiple times). What's with this assumption that I will actually want to install and activate something I buy that gives you the right to charge me $80. (It would be nice paying sales tax on $10, instead of $90).
Second,
Its a crying shame that they ran out of licenses. And here I was hoping consumers would be able to say no to new Microsuck OS. It looks like the Microsoft defense team was right. They are doing what's right for the consumer. They obviously have overwhelming support for there new "features" why don't we all sign up for Microsoft credit cards, transfer our bank accounts, and discard our mutual funds for straight up MSFT stock!!!
I have a novel solution...
MSFT likes to bundle stuff with windows. Why not force them to do so.
Cap the price at $300 and force them to bundle Office Pro (to replace Wordpad) and all of the Microsoft games (to sit alongside Solitaire). The full version of Outlook (instead of the weak Express edition).
Wouldn't that bundle benefit the consumer! (*insert evil smirk*)
You mentioned the protocols should be fully disclosed and mentioned in passing that the encryption keys would not be disclosed.
What about the numeric algorithms used to calculate the date fields from the keys?
If anyone else makes a similar point in their letter, please make the keys not released more prominent.
P.S. please comment on my document, I have not submitted it yet.
To Whom It May Concern,
.wav files for your logon is nice, a help system all but required, it is possible to have these without bundling applications as Microsoft has.
.wav files. It ships a crippled Wordpad, not the latest Microsoft Word.
The opinions expressed herein are my opinions and are not influenced or the responsibility of my employer.
I would like to point out the difference between an operating system, and operating system distribution. For this analogy I would like to use Linux. For Linux, the operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the heart and soul of the operating system, the kernel provides functionality to manage computing resources. It manages the hardware, aka the CPU and RAM memory. It provides very basic building blocks - semaphores, mutexes, memory allocation, and communications to external devices. This is a kernel.
By design, an operating system kernel can also talk to additional devices - Hard Drives, CD-ROMS, sound cards, Ethernet cards, USB devices, PCI bus controllers, etc. However, all these components are merely drivers that use the core functionality of the kernel to accomplish communications with these devices.
Most Operating system bundles come with lots of drivers, because there is a lot of hardware to talk to, and not being able to talk to a hard drive leaves one with an operating system that only sits in an idle loop on the CPU, because it can load no useful programs or drivers from a storage device.
Most operating system bundles also come with lots of Protocol drivers, such as TCP/IP (the protocol under HTTP/Web) services, USB, Firewire, Bluetooth, Wirelsess LAN, UDP, SNMP, etc. Wait, Microsoft doesn't provide all of those. Many of them you install when you install a PCI card that provides the underlying hardware functionality. In fact when I installed my new motherboard, I overrode all the Windows drivers for the PCI bus, with those supplied by the manufacturer. I did this casually, without effort, no complaints from Windows2000, and Windows2000 did not try to use its default drivers, ever again.
So far, I have limited my description to the operating system kernel and hardware drivers. These could be viewed as essential for using the hardware that a PC has. As of yet I have made no mention of applications. Applications which operate through drivers and the kernel to gather, store, retrieve and manipulate digital information.
To be fair some applications belong in an operating system bundle. The TaskManager is an excellent example. This application talks to the kernel and allows the user to inspect and, if desired remove, processes running on the computer. Could someone write a TaskManager for windows? Yes, if they wanted to reverse engineer the unpublished kernel API. Linux has an innovative task manager that operates like a first person shooting game, I have seen nothing of the sort for Windows.
Why do people buy Windows?
Mainly they buy it because it has a large library of applications that run on Windows.
What are these applications?
Until, say 1995 (prior to the web browsing phenomenon) the most popular app was the Office Suite. WordPerfect, Word, Lotus, and others fought long and hard for dominance. Did Microsoft EVER bundle Office with Windows - NO! Did Microsoft ever co-erce vendors to bundling Office with Windows, offering unbelievable deals? Why don't you ask Compaq, Dell and Gateway? I don't honestly know, but I seem remember a time when the original Microsoft Office was nearly as cheap and plentiful as water. Now Microsoft owns over 80% of the market and charges $400 for the basic edition.
Why are internet browsers and media players so different? They are all applications. While the Task Manager may be an essential application, playing
Software is infinitely flexible. If Microsoft wants to use HTML for the help system, this is fine. But the abiltiy to open HTML help files in no way requires the ability to open http://msn.com! The codec needed to play a wav file, is completely independent from the one needed for proprietary Windows MediA (WMA) files. Microsoft has gone a long way to provided needed functionality: a pluggable digital media player, configurable device drivers, standardized and extensible HTML rendering engines. Windows even has Wordpad, which can edit basic Word documents, even though there are few, if any files in the operating system bundle in Word format.
I can replace a faulty hardware driver, I can install a more secure TCP/IP stack, but I can't replace the HTML rendering engine, no one makes one, and no one can, because the full API is probably not available. I can only install my custom engine alongside the Microsoft one, and explicitly open my browser. However, the next email worm can still exploit any holes in the Microsoft engine.
Microsoft is clearly bundling its way into lockin, and the remedy does nothing, possibly protecting the lockin under the guise of security.
Microsoft is playing us for idiots, it ships full versions Windows Media Player, instead of one that only plays
If Microsoft wants to bundle applications then give us everything! I want the Office Professional and don't stop with Solitaire, I want Civilization III and all the others as well. Bundle me that for just $300.
What corporation doesn't think of something as their data (its called proprietary information). Just because they have internet access will a company want there data accessible throught the internet, just because a user posted the correct username and password? Add in some biometrics and really haus encryption and maybe they'll let you see a picture, but they'd never what the actual document to be sent.
Whats with this doing away of heirachal filing systems. Do I file all my mail in on big container? It's ludicrous. I would never find anything. You would still end up with so heirarchal naming conventions. (Amex Bill Jan 01, or First draft of my resume, etc.) Just to have some mnemonic device for identifying something or even to ask for something. (have you ever tried searching email for a phone number, you either find 2 that you don't want or 500. Either way it takes forever to sort through the mess and unless computers become sentient, they can't sort it for you).
"Well, who knows, but their idea of a transparent large-scale network that is self-managing as they've described is an interesting one"
I'm sorry, but I this idea is as much Microsofts idea as the GUI (3rd hand stolen from Xerox Parc). Do you see the number of references? Do you see that this 2 page research paper pulls all of its idea(s) from other sources!
I think the biggest idea in the paper is the runtime binding. Much like the ideas presented by Corba. As easy as replacing a class file in Java. This is what .NET is trying to provide for C/C++/COBOL/PASCAL/Ada/FORTRAN and any other language it supports. Linking against specific libraries is an old and tired idea. We can spare a few clock cycles to dynamically look up a function in a library by it's signature, then we can remember it, or optimize the lookup or something. But we shouldn't have to relink our application when we add a function to a library. And someday we won't have to recompile a class when someone adds a method (Java does this now, but the class loader is so much cooler than most other pieces of software).
Lets please beat Microsoft to this one, surely all of the free University thought could be put to good use.
A common format between open source Linux WPs would be a big bonus! And it would make writing a Word2LinuxWP filter much easier.
What is the difference between LaTeX and XML? Aren't both specialized subsets of SGML?
Does anyone have any links?
One thing I will give XML, you could specify your WP as conforming to a given DTD version then as people add more features to the DTD you can release a new version of the WP that has support for the DTD features. This would drive the market in a feature oriented way without breaking much. Plus if it's in XML you can verify the ducument is well formed even if you couldn't edit or display some advanced tag. Of course the ultimate is that your WP would be a big component manager and you could 'plugin' new document features when a new DTD is approved.
Final comment - Isn't WordPerfect based on customized version of TeX?
It is too bad that DEC beat the NEED for 64 bits by about 10 years. I can remember when they had double the MHz of Intel at 64 bits wide. Of course the chip itself went for about $1000...
Funny how DEC gave up on 64 Bit processors before the IA-64 was even announced!!!
Even recently Alpha AXP servers from Compaq still do as good or better than x86 servers.
http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/qa/whyalpha.html
It takes 3 times more Hydrogen vapor in the air than gasoline for combustion to occur
If all of OS X WAS ported to x86 and all you had to do is recompile:
a) would Mac products be compiled for x86?
b) would Any free-lance developers support the closed GUI?
c) Would/Could this become the GUI that unifies the Linux/BSD desktop market?
I've searched the web for NLX, NPX, micorATX. They all have crappy intergrated Video and Sound.
One thing I did learn is that there is such a thing as Low Profile PCI and supposedly AGP cards. These are simply shorter cards.
- Wish List
- FlexATX / Micro ATX with integrated 10/100 Ethernet. 1 AGP, 2PCI.
- Case that looks like a DVD player / VCR including an LCD panel that I can put dumb little messages on and display the time if I ever write a Linux driver for it. Case will have a 5.25 slot for a CD/DVD of some kind (I wish DVD RAM was up to snuff although I've heard of DVD/CDRW combos). AND a shallow 5.25 faceplate slot (where I can put the SBLive Platinum Faceplate with the IR PORT!)
- Low profile AGP GeForce2 with DVI and HDTV out. (VGA & NTSC would be nice but this is a low profile card and I want a portable LCD and HDTV hookups.)
- Low profile SBLive 5.1 Platinum.
- Low Profile MPEG2 decoder/encoder.
- 4 USB ports ON THE FRONT!
- USB gamepads comparable to PS2 DualShock (Xbox gamepads?)
This puppy would look like a DVD player with Sound outputs on the front and gameports. It might even look like the PS2. Although I think having a super slim version of Linux running 24/7 and breifly waking the CPU from hibernation to display the time on the LCD would be cool.Of course I'd have to figure out how to do "Instant On Linux". Might even mirror the Indrema software into this badboy, especially if we found a low-profile GeForce3 instead.
CRUD! Need 3 PCI slots for the TV input so this can double as a TiVo. Oh well, that's the way pie in the sky dreams go. I guess I'll just have to buy an Xbox and figure out how to dual boot with the Indrema Linux.
Here's some more info. http://www.etcetra.com/12051999/dotnet.htm
These things don't have batteries. As you walk through a special area with special equipment the chip gets passively powered and sends out its ID allowing you to merely push your cart and slide your credit card and BAM! no more checkout lines.
Chances are there will be no standard to frequencies and no central database of IDs and it takes special equipment to read anyway. Besides, if they can friggin sniff dead skin cells out of the air and ID me by my DNA what does it matter that I've got 3 IDs off apples running through my intestines plus an ID in my head.
Telemarketers read the phone book and call me unless I pay extra for an unlisted number.
I recieve RadioShack catalogs because they won't take a return without your address
I buy floppy disks online and get on the AOL 6.0 mailing list.
The real crime is not that people sell information for money. Its that they sell my information and I NEVER SEE A BLOODY CENT!!