This precedent doesn't just apply to folks who want to run some other operating system on the machines they buy from Dell. It affects me because I don't need the bundled XP Home when I've got an MSDN license that allows me to run XP Pro. Or take the case of a small business with a Microsoft volume license. If they are required to buy a bundled O/S with every machine they purchase, then Microsoft has, in effect, sold two O/S licenses per machine. The $$$ saved by getting back the cost of the bundled O/S will add up!
Wouldn't the Linux community uniformly reject such a notion and refuse to have anything to do with it?
Even then, if you change the name so that Linux is no longer in the picture, how is the system supposed to make Windows users (your converts to the new not-Linux Linux) feel at home? Are you to put a "C:\" facade in the system or just refer to/dev/hda0? Or do you just call it "Hard Drive?" Does "/bin/" stay that way, or is it allowable to change the name to "/Applications/"? What if the distro seller/supporter wants to put a custom, proprietary window manager over the open source kernel?
I am, of course, making reference to Mac OS X here, and while it's ostensibly based on BSD and not Linux, it's still a *nix operating system that doesn't say it's a *nix system unless you go looking for it in the marketing material. This is your *nix without saying anything/much about being a *nix operating system. It has a F/OSS kernel and runs F/OSS appliactions... so why haven't Windows users and Linux users flocked to it?
Excellent post. Not being a sysadmin type I didn't know this (I'm an ASP.NET, SqlServer developer), but with my new job I've got considerable input and say over what the server and network setup will be for my organization for the next several years. We have about 150 desktops and every one is configured with the user running as local admin and most without password (horribly insecure, I know).
I want to change this but I don't want the expense of Active Directory. Can Mac OS X Server's Open Directory be used in place of an A/D PDC/SDC on a Windows network? If not, is there a true A/D replacement in the open source community?
So is this the beginning of an open-source Microsoft operating system kernel, atop which a new (.NET powered, perhaps?) Window manager will run? Did Wired have it right all along -- except the core will be OpenWinCE instead of Linux?
Hey -- if Apple fanatics are right, then MS will do something to further imitate Mac OS X, and OpenWinCE under Avalon 2.0 (et al) and dropping all backward compatibility makes more sense than Torvalds taking over the kernel team in Redmond.
There are some managers who fail to adequately budget time and/or resources and will blame you for not getting the project done on time and then fire you for it.
There are also some managers who will work their development teams to death so they can deliver their projects either ahead of schedule or in less time than other managers said it would take in order to pile up the brownie points toward bonuses and promotions. Their developers are not their concern.
There are more types of a-hole managers for this list, I am sure, and they are a fact of life. Their shortcomings are not yours, per se, but you have to make them yours as long as you wish to work for said employer and boss. The alternative is to find a new job.
Doesn't "free as in speech" pretty much rule out the possibility of imposing a standard GUI toolkit? It's not like quality is even the determining factor either or GNUStep would be far more popular than it currently is.
Linux == freedom == lack of unity. It's simply a fact of life.
Everything is *not* integrated together on Windows. Native Windows apps target different APIs than.NET WinForms apps, which are different again from the upcoming XAML stuff in.NET 3.0 -- and that's just the "Windowing" applications. Getting the disparate technologies to play nicely with each other is a bitch and will likely not get better anytime soon.
And if you're about to copy and paste the MS boilerplate marketing hype about the effectiveness of COM-.NET interop, slap yourself vigorously and back away from the keyboard.
I think it's pretty fair to surmise that Apple isn't even trying to market to Linux users like you. You already know the superiority of *nix operating systems, but you're probably the sort of person who won't pay for software based on principle. Moreover, it's not beyond you to simply re-write parts of the operating system that you don't like. The Core Audience of the Mac ads are people who want the O/S to both work and stay the hell out of their way. They aren't going to write their own drivers, or re-compile from source. They just want the thing to work. Period.
This is only slightly off-topic, but I want to comment on one line in the parent post: that "public education of science is in BIG trouble."
There are many more problems with public education than that, but general illiteracy in science allows the propagandists in the media to cause people to believe such things as the feasibility of liquid explosives in the plot in question -- or that WTC building 7 could have collapsed after not being hit by any debris from WTC towers 1 and 2, and falling straight down at free-fall speeds. Without the total absence of support columns (like say, from demolition charges?) a building of that size cannot fall to the ground that fast.
Or if you prefer a non-9/11 topic: try asking any Greenpeace drone why they are opposed to nuclear energy. If you ask 100 of them you might get one that actually understands the essential basics of nuclear fission, and I've still not met one that understands the difference from reactor grade fuel and ultra-enriched uranium and plutonium used for atomic weapons.
Don't underestimate the impact of podcasting! I've had my iPod since about Easter of this year and from June on, when iTunes began support for podcasts, I've listened almost exclusively to various podcasts. And you know what? For the entertainment-type shows, the value is almost always better than radio. The real value though are the non-entertainment shows: like any radio station is going to run a program where Steve Gibson talks over the head of 99% of the audience, or a single show dedicated to asp.net (much less THREE!). Podcasting takes content control away from the idiots at corporate radio and lets ME decide what I'm going to listen to and when.
Remember: it's still the year of The Steve
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
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· Score: 1
I seem to recall that The Steve was making a lot of noise back in January about 2005 being the year of HD and that there were some products upcoming to capitalize on this... and there was a Sony exec on hand to add to the mystery and intrigue if I recall correctly.
The truth is that the upcoming announcement is both the video iPod and wireless digital hub concept, which will allow the video iPod to wirelessly connect to newly announced G5 Powerbooks and dual-core, dual-G5 PowerMacs -- AND Apple's new iTVHD, a 60 inch flat-screen, wifi, bluetooth, wireless-etc television, made by Sony (and the 'little brother,' a 42 inch iTVHD mini, of course). Oh -- and the Airport Express will have video outputs as well for supporting non-Apple HD TV's. And because this is going to be such a huge, earth shattering announcement, Apple had to come up with the Intel announcement earlier this year to distract from the attention of this upcoming announcement too.
Nobody knows what's coming other than The Steve and a few other people under NDA's, but we'll all get to be sucked into Steve's karma beam next Wednesday to find out!
Rational syntax? Latin? It's one of the few languages in which you can scramble the order of the words in the sentence and not loose any meaning because the word carries enough meta-data in the form of all of the various endings. Heck, regular verbs alone have 140 different forms, and irregular verbs are exactly that, with unique endings per item. And who's to say that the "nominative-ablative-dative-accusative-verb" syntactical ordering is either correct or ideal? Cicero doesn't write like that half of the time and Caesar almost never did in his "Gallic Wars." And consider that the Catholic Church, which has used Latin as its official language longer than the Romans did, has adopted a simplified vulgatum form officially, not that the various Popes and writers throughout the centuries have bothered to use that instead of the higher-browed Classical Latin.... whose rules are you proposing to follow?
English might actually be an easier task than trying to parse Latin.
What would it take to make a useful, functional grammar checker?
An act of God, essentially. Who's going to write such a program, the English teachers? Have you noticed that programmers are not exactly ideal gramarians?
Allocating a billion dollars to the project wouldn't do it. As it is now, more people are involved in getting a version of Windows to launch-state then it took to put a man on the moon. Simply managing the logisitics of something of that scale is boggling enough... and that's before you even look at the quality of the operating system itself. I am curioous, though, how much money it took Apple, all tolled, to get OS X from dream to reality. Anyone want to venture a guess that the total was well north of a billion dollars?
Getting consolidation on Linux is going to be easy as driving them "out of business" by offering a free alternative. As I understand it, most new distros start because someone gets a bug up their panties in a twist because their favorite distro isn't 100% to their liking and so they start a new one. Others like their idea and a crowd forms around the new distro until someone else becomes malcontent-cum-innovator and starts his own distro. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The great thing about Linux is that it's wide open and free. The REALLY BAD thing about Linux is that it's wide open and free, and the egos of the distro creators are on the line. How exactly do you consolidate when those are the rules?
And you can't just buy another brand of bread to render the whole thing mute?
Intel isn't the only player in the x86 compiler game, and I find it impossible to believe that a company like AMD can make microprocessors but not have the savvy to make their own compilers. They are making a perfectly stupid argument, IMO, to call foul that thier competitor is not making things easy for them! If that's all they have to go on, then perhaps they should go out of business...
Maybe I am not getting something here, but why the hell is AMD complaining about Intel's compiler? If they were so concerned about performance why are they not making their own compilers optimised to their own chips? That way, they can turn off the optimisations for Intel CPUs since they probably aren't aware of possible optimizations available inside the competitor's chips?
This whole argument sounds about as logical as if I were to claim Toyota were anti-competitive because their (insert car part type here) doesn't work as well on my Honda/Ford/BMW as well as it does on Toyota's cars...
...or can Intel's x86 chips take advantage of compiler tricks that are not baked into the output for AMD processors because Intel would not be privey to what AMD is up to inside their processors?
And is there not an AMD x86 compiler set -- and if not, whose fault is that? This sounds like sour grapes to me.
This is a very good point. While the WWDC demo was done on a Macintel with a 3.6Ghz P4 (x86), the developer machines from Apple are also x86 boxes, and the first wave of machines next year are supposed to be Pentium M devices (x86), it's curious that the compiler options in XCode are PPC/Intel and not PPC/x86.
What caught my eye in the article linked at the top of this post is that the price premium for Itanium is supposed to disappear sometime in 2007, about the same time that Intel processors will be appearing in PowerMacs and XServers in lieu of PPC970's. Maybe it's just a coincidence and the PowerMacs and XServes will have 64bit x86 processors. Or maybe they will run Itanium?
And then there's the expectation that iPods will be getting XScale processors which will be more than fast enough to decode and play video... which means that if the iPod at that point would play audio and video, show pictures, and include a cell phone, you've basically got a handheld computer in your hand, similar to Compaq's iPaq or Dell's Axim. Perhaps we'll see "OS X Embedded" and the requisite SDK's before long???
Maybe not, but in lieu of real announcements from Apple I will GUARANTEE that we'll see millions of "maybe if" scenarios all over the web...
This actually makes sense. While Sprint does sell their own branded SprintPCS service, they are increasingly selling the network itself. Qwest Wireless and the Virgin prepaid services are good examples: they buy access to Sprint Spectrum's wireless network at wholesale rates and then sell their own branded service. AT&T was *going* to launch a new cellular service in this manner until Cingular acquired them outright.
As for data, which would be necessary for an "iPhone," SprintPCS already offers EV-DO which can reach some pretty good speeds, but they've also signed a deal to test WiMax with Motorola, the rumored maker of the "iPhone."
I am not going to go Cringely and suggest an Apple-Intel-Motorola-SprintPCS merger, but there is a very strong synergistic opportunity here.
The HTML and JavaScript sepcifications upon which web browsers are built are good and all, but were they built with the idea of hosting an application versus a webpage? It seems to me that AJAX is sort of a hack to turn a web browser into an application container; why not build a new, open specification designed from the get-go to be an applications container and not merely an HTML display mechanism?
According to an article at AppleInsider.com: "Employees working the show floor of the Apple's developers conference last week could be overheard discussing the prospect of open-sourcing the company's WebObjects environment used for rapidly building and deploying web-based applications." Perhaps releasing the dev kit for free is just the first step to going open source with it.
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This precedent doesn't just apply to folks who want to run some other operating system on the machines they buy from Dell. It affects me because I don't need the bundled XP Home when I've got an MSDN license that allows me to run XP Pro. Or take the case of a small business with a Microsoft volume license. If they are required to buy a bundled O/S with every machine they purchase, then Microsoft has, in effect, sold two O/S licenses per machine. The $$$ saved by getting back the cost of the bundled O/S will add up!
Wouldn't the Linux community uniformly reject such a notion and refuse to have anything to do with it?
/dev/hda0? Or do you just call it "Hard Drive?" Does "/bin/" stay that way, or is it allowable to change the name to "/Applications/"? What if the distro seller/supporter wants to put a custom, proprietary window manager over the open source kernel?
Even then, if you change the name so that Linux is no longer in the picture, how is the system supposed to make Windows users (your converts to the new not-Linux Linux) feel at home? Are you to put a "C:\" facade in the system or just refer to
I am, of course, making reference to Mac OS X here, and while it's ostensibly based on BSD and not Linux, it's still a *nix operating system that doesn't say it's a *nix system unless you go looking for it in the marketing material. This is your *nix without saying anything/much about being a *nix operating system. It has a F/OSS kernel and runs F/OSS appliactions... so why haven't Windows users and Linux users flocked to it?
They did that; it's called "Apple".
Corrected: Apple did that: it's called Mac OS X.
Speaking of OS X, how big of a difference is it going to make that OS X 10.5 is supposed to be fully Unix certified?
Excellent post. Not being a sysadmin type I didn't know this (I'm an ASP.NET, SqlServer developer), but with my new job I've got considerable input and say over what the server and network setup will be for my organization for the next several years. We have about 150 desktops and every one is configured with the user running as local admin and most without password (horribly insecure, I know).
I want to change this but I don't want the expense of Active Directory. Can Mac OS X Server's Open Directory be used in place of an A/D PDC/SDC on a Windows network? If not, is there a true A/D replacement in the open source community?
So is this the beginning of an open-source Microsoft operating system kernel, atop which a new (.NET powered, perhaps?) Window manager will run? Did Wired have it right all along -- except the core will be OpenWinCE instead of Linux?
Hey -- if Apple fanatics are right, then MS will do something to further imitate Mac OS X, and OpenWinCE under Avalon 2.0 (et al) and dropping all backward compatibility makes more sense than Torvalds taking over the kernel team in Redmond.
There are some managers who fail to adequately budget time and/or resources and will blame you for not getting the project done on time and then fire you for it.
There are also some managers who will work their development teams to death so they can deliver their projects either ahead of schedule or in less time than other managers said it would take in order to pile up the brownie points toward bonuses and promotions. Their developers are not their concern.
There are more types of a-hole managers for this list, I am sure, and they are a fact of life. Their shortcomings are not yours, per se, but you have to make them yours as long as you wish to work for said employer and boss. The alternative is to find a new job.
Doesn't "free as in speech" pretty much rule out the possibility of imposing a standard GUI toolkit? It's not like quality is even the determining factor either or GNUStep would be far more popular than it currently is.
Linux == freedom == lack of unity. It's simply a fact of life.
Everything is *not* integrated together on Windows. Native Windows apps target different APIs than .NET WinForms apps, which are different again from the upcoming XAML stuff in .NET 3.0 -- and that's just the "Windowing" applications. Getting the disparate technologies to play nicely with each other is a bitch and will likely not get better anytime soon.
And if you're about to copy and paste the MS boilerplate marketing hype about the effectiveness of COM-.NET interop, slap yourself vigorously and back away from the keyboard.
I think it's pretty fair to surmise that Apple isn't even trying to market to Linux users like you. You already know the superiority of *nix operating systems, but you're probably the sort of person who won't pay for software based on principle. Moreover, it's not beyond you to simply re-write parts of the operating system that you don't like. The Core Audience of the Mac ads are people who want the O/S to both work and stay the hell out of their way. They aren't going to write their own drivers, or re-compile from source. They just want the thing to work. Period.
This is only slightly off-topic, but I want to comment on one line in the parent post: that "public education of science is in BIG trouble."
There are many more problems with public education than that, but general illiteracy in science allows the propagandists in the media to cause people to believe such things as the feasibility of liquid explosives in the plot in question -- or that WTC building 7 could have collapsed after not being hit by any debris from WTC towers 1 and 2, and falling straight down at free-fall speeds. Without the total absence of support columns (like say, from demolition charges?) a building of that size cannot fall to the ground that fast.
Or if you prefer a non-9/11 topic: try asking any Greenpeace drone why they are opposed to nuclear energy. If you ask 100 of them you might get one that actually understands the essential basics of nuclear fission, and I've still not met one that understands the difference from reactor grade fuel and ultra-enriched uranium and plutonium used for atomic weapons.
Education just ain't [sic] what it used to be...
Don't underestimate the impact of podcasting! I've had my iPod since about Easter of this year and from June on, when iTunes began support for podcasts, I've listened almost exclusively to various podcasts. And you know what? For the entertainment-type shows, the value is almost always better than radio. The real value though are the non-entertainment shows: like any radio station is going to run a program where Steve Gibson talks over the head of 99% of the audience, or a single show dedicated to asp.net (much less THREE!). Podcasting takes content control away from the idiots at corporate radio and lets ME decide what I'm going to listen to and when.
I seem to recall that The Steve was making a lot of noise back in January about 2005 being the year of HD and that there were some products upcoming to capitalize on this... and there was a Sony exec on hand to add to the mystery and intrigue if I recall correctly.
The truth is that the upcoming announcement is both the video iPod and wireless digital hub concept, which will allow the video iPod to wirelessly connect to newly announced G5 Powerbooks and dual-core, dual-G5 PowerMacs -- AND Apple's new iTVHD, a 60 inch flat-screen, wifi, bluetooth, wireless-etc television, made by Sony (and the 'little brother,' a 42 inch iTVHD mini, of course). Oh -- and the Airport Express will have video outputs as well for supporting non-Apple HD TV's. And because this is going to be such a huge, earth shattering announcement, Apple had to come up with the Intel announcement earlier this year to distract from the attention of this upcoming announcement too.
Nobody knows what's coming other than The Steve and a few other people under NDA's, but we'll all get to be sucked into Steve's karma beam next Wednesday to find out!
Rational syntax? Latin? It's one of the few languages in which you can scramble the order of the words in the sentence and not loose any meaning because the word carries enough meta-data in the form of all of the various endings. Heck, regular verbs alone have 140 different forms, and irregular verbs are exactly that, with unique endings per item. And who's to say that the "nominative-ablative-dative-accusative-verb" syntactical ordering is either correct or ideal? Cicero doesn't write like that half of the time and Caesar almost never did in his "Gallic Wars." And consider that the Catholic Church, which has used Latin as its official language longer than the Romans did, has adopted a simplified vulgatum form officially, not that the various Popes and writers throughout the centuries have bothered to use that instead of the higher-browed Classical Latin.... whose rules are you proposing to follow?
English might actually be an easier task than trying to parse Latin.
What would it take to make a useful, functional grammar checker?
An act of God, essentially. Who's going to write such a program, the English teachers? Have you noticed that programmers are not exactly ideal gramarians?
Allocating a billion dollars to the project wouldn't do it. As it is now, more people are involved in getting a version of Windows to launch-state then it took to put a man on the moon. Simply managing the logisitics of something of that scale is boggling enough... and that's before you even look at the quality of the operating system itself. I am curioous, though, how much money it took Apple, all tolled, to get OS X from dream to reality. Anyone want to venture a guess that the total was well north of a billion dollars?
Why do I automatically think "Windows" when I read a phrase like "increasing penetration in the business world...?"
Getting consolidation on Linux is going to be easy as driving them "out of business" by offering a free alternative. As I understand it, most new distros start because someone gets a bug up their panties in a twist because their favorite distro isn't 100% to their liking and so they start a new one. Others like their idea and a crowd forms around the new distro until someone else becomes malcontent-cum-innovator and starts his own distro. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The great thing about Linux is that it's wide open and free. The REALLY BAD thing about Linux is that it's wide open and free, and the egos of the distro creators are on the line. How exactly do you consolidate when those are the rules?
And you can't just buy another brand of bread to render the whole thing mute?
Intel isn't the only player in the x86 compiler game, and I find it impossible to believe that a company like AMD can make microprocessors but not have the savvy to make their own compilers. They are making a perfectly stupid argument, IMO, to call foul that thier competitor is not making things easy for them! If that's all they have to go on, then perhaps they should go out of business...
So not only do the /. editors run story dupes, so does the PR team at HP... brilliant!
Maybe I am not getting something here, but why the hell is AMD complaining about Intel's compiler? If they were so concerned about performance why are they not making their own compilers optimised to their own chips? That way, they can turn off the optimisations for Intel CPUs since they probably aren't aware of possible optimizations available inside the competitor's chips?
This whole argument sounds about as logical as if I were to claim Toyota were anti-competitive because their (insert car part type here) doesn't work as well on my Honda/Ford/BMW as well as it does on Toyota's cars...
I think it's just all a bunch of sour grapes.
...or can Intel's x86 chips take advantage of compiler tricks that are not baked into the output for AMD processors because Intel would not be privey to what AMD is up to inside their processors?
And is there not an AMD x86 compiler set -- and if not, whose fault is that? This sounds like sour grapes to me.
This is a very good point. While the WWDC demo was done on a Macintel with a 3.6Ghz P4 (x86), the developer machines from Apple are also x86 boxes, and the first wave of machines next year are supposed to be Pentium M devices (x86), it's curious that the compiler options in XCode are PPC/Intel and not PPC/x86.
What caught my eye in the article linked at the top of this post is that the price premium for Itanium is supposed to disappear sometime in 2007, about the same time that Intel processors will be appearing in PowerMacs and XServers in lieu of PPC970's. Maybe it's just a coincidence and the PowerMacs and XServes will have 64bit x86 processors. Or maybe they will run Itanium?
And then there's the expectation that iPods will be getting XScale processors which will be more than fast enough to decode and play video... which means that if the iPod at that point would play audio and video, show pictures, and include a cell phone, you've basically got a handheld computer in your hand, similar to Compaq's iPaq or Dell's Axim. Perhaps we'll see "OS X Embedded" and the requisite SDK's before long???
Maybe not, but in lieu of real announcements from Apple I will GUARANTEE that we'll see millions of "maybe if" scenarios all over the web...
This actually makes sense. While Sprint does sell their own branded SprintPCS service, they are increasingly selling the network itself. Qwest Wireless and the Virgin prepaid services are good examples: they buy access to Sprint Spectrum's wireless network at wholesale rates and then sell their own branded service. AT&T was *going* to launch a new cellular service in this manner until Cingular acquired them outright.
As for data, which would be necessary for an "iPhone," SprintPCS already offers EV-DO which can reach some pretty good speeds, but they've also signed a deal to test WiMax with Motorola, the rumored maker of the "iPhone."
I am not going to go Cringely and suggest an Apple-Intel-Motorola-SprintPCS merger, but there is a very strong synergistic opportunity here.
The HTML and JavaScript sepcifications upon which web browsers are built are good and all, but were they built with the idea of hosting an application versus a webpage? It seems to me that AJAX is sort of a hack to turn a web browser into an application container; why not build a new, open specification designed from the get-go to be an applications container and not merely an HTML display mechanism?
According to an article at AppleInsider.com: "Employees working the show floor of the Apple's developers conference last week could be overheard discussing the prospect of open-sourcing the company's WebObjects environment used for rapidly building and deploying web-based applications." Perhaps releasing the dev kit for free is just the first step to going open source with it.