The fact that Adobe is also becoming one of a long list of commercial software vendors, such as Microsoft, Macromedia, the makers of MathCad, AutoCAD, etc opting for product activation is an interesting one.
Why do they do it?
Obviously it's done to combat piracy. Although marketing departments can be extremely stupid and more than capable of ruining a good software company in ties of financial crisis, I don't think that this is an idea that comes from marketing, but one that comes from corporate financial departments as an attempt to improve the company bottom line by forcing the pirates of popular products to buy their products. They DO have a point. I've worked in a number of companies where there've been 2 bought copies of Photoshop being used by 20 or more users.
Does it work?
Yes, obviously. Most companies that were using more than their bought number of licences will pony up the money if they need the software (my last company went through the AutoCAD activation hoops, and although it left a bad taste, they went for it). All those private users who previously used pirated versions will continue to do so, and would not have paid for the software in any case.
Does it drive some users away.
On the other hand, there are definitely some companies and private users that will try to seek alternatives, as the general increase in pricing in products (AutoCAD, Express 6, Adobe CS all cost enormous sums) and users in poorer countries i.e. most of the world will in no way pay for those products (such as paying $800 for Adobe CS in Russia where the average monthly wage is somewhere around $300). Onerous licencing and problems with software quality where more attention is paid to activation than bugs in the software is partly responsible for the move to Linux in some corporations. Almost all software packages will in any case be cracked and private users will continue to use those cracks.
The irony is that the majority of previously legitimate users won't care so much, and will go along with activation IF it doesn't disrupt their workflow. It will NOT really make that much difference to the software companies' bottom line as those that paid before will continue to do so, and those that used cracks will continue to do so. Only those who used more copies than they paid for might add a couple of percentage points to software sales.
In the long run, there will probably be no difference, as the market can only sell so many copies of Adobe CS at $800 a pop. I don't think many graphics pros will consider changing now, but given two or three years there might be enough quality in the GIMP, SodiPodi (printing!!! colour synchronisation!!!) etc to start a move to them, but not now.
That said Photshop 5.5 and Illustrator 8 were IMO the pinacle of features/performance. The later versions suffer from too much feature overflow.
Yesterday, my luddite PC laptop owning buddy and I were discussing his new digital camera. He was angry because the software to use the thing was so damn complex (Sony camera and software) that it was almost impossible to use. So I showed him how to uninstall the software and just copy the stuff over in windows explorer.
He made comments about how stupid so many of those programmes were.
And that is such a good point, it should be tattooed onto every product designer's forehead: KISS, keep it simple. No one likes playing with hundres of settings or getting confused with software that some dickshit company designed as an afterthought to their product. This is why people like Apple products.
Given the current overly coroprate friendly environment in US-Justice and vice-versa, I would like to take a bet that this will not be resolved and that Diebold will be free to win elections for it's favourite party.
This whole PHP/Java fight is getting simply ridiculous. Isn't it about time that it stopped? If you think PHP will do the job then use PHP, if you think Java will do the job the use Java. You'll see soon enough if you were right in your conclusions.
Both have their strong points and weaknesses, just like assembly, which makes for some extremely fast code and is good for stuff like drivers but tends to take a bit longer when you're writing your webserver in it.
I can believe a VC company doing this. All those braindead VC people from the dotcom days were plaowing much more money than this into similar hairbrained schemes, so there doesn't seem to be a lack of stupidity in VC companies.
What it does highlight is the way the VC suits think, and what they actually know of technology. It shows that VC suits like companies with management that makes big bold and agressive statements. It shows that VC companies will spend money on words alone, because SCO's verbal tactics open them to charges of slander and libel, and even if they actually win part of the case (although I severly doubt it, IBM is going to kill them in court I think) there's still the RedHat and IBM countersuits to consider.
What this makes me think is that it's time to start skinning VC companies for money again. All you need is some arsewipe businessplan and some agressive statements and someone who's been in the business for a while and the VC loonies will throw $50 milloin at you.
The point was that the US programme was based on a working rocket design that had been tested by more than 2000 V2 launches in WWII, as well as the rocket team and all their ideas. The US didn't start from scratch, just as the Chinese didn't. The Chinese launchers are indigenous designs and yet I still can imagine that someone, somewhere, in a pique of bitterness will claim, that the Chinese didn't invent the rocket, when in fact they did, somewhere in the 15th century.
Does it really matter? Are your feelings of national pride so hurt because others succede where your country hasn't been lately?
Thanks for posting a decent non trolling answer. I appreciate it.
One shouldn't forget that the Chinese space effort isn't soley there for this manned space programme. Indeed, this programme is just a fraction of their launch capabilities. Condsider that this budget also covers military satellites and launches, which are under the aegis and budget of the military in the US, as well as their commercial satellite launching capability and the work they are doing on building satellite launches with solid fueled rockets that would enable them to launch satellites in extremely short order.
As for the comparisons of Fascism and Communism, and their oppression of people, wel, I think you're patrly right. They certainly do meet at a certain point, but have some significant differences, those mostly relating to economic collectivisation and Communism's theoretical equality of workers worldwide, two things that were radically different in the principles of the Third Reich. China, however, does definitely tend to xenophobic views, that is true.
There have been many posts here about the Chinese basing their capsule design on the Russian Soyuz design from the 60's and how this supposedly makes the Chinese effort worthless. Think about this.
The whole entire complete US space programme was based on German technology and ideas from WWII taken from Germany and transplanted into the US along with the German rocket team people under Werner von Braun. Even the idea of a space plane was based on a German WWII idea called the "Saenger Amerikabomber" which was an idea to develop a manned spcae plane that would be able to reach the continental United States and drop a bomb before completing one sub orbit by skippping off the atmosphere and then returning to Germany.
It would certainly give you more credit not post as an AC, Chinese or not. And so what if their technology is based on Russian technology. The electronics and computing are almost certainly more modern than that in the Space Shuttle, notwithstanding the fact that the whole entire complete US space programme was based on German technology and ideas from WWII taken from Germany and transplanted into the US along with the German rocket team people under Werner von Braun.
I wrote in the article yesterday on the amazing amount racist xenophobia posted here whenever some other nation achieves something new in a scientific or technological field.
I am simply flabbergasted. Instead of congratulating the Chinese for a well planned, robust and cheap human space effort, which it is, there are literaly hundreds of hateful, ignorant, racist posts filled to the brim with spite and jealously. And I think it's a real problem with a lot of Americans because it happens so consistently. You want to know why so much of the world has a poor opinion of the USA? Read slashdot, where the supposedly technophile elite make comments based on a lack of knowledge, a sense of low self esteem and jealousy.
In my opinion, if there is anything that will be the undoing of the USA, it is those attitudes, because jealousy never won a space race. There's an old saying that basing one's actions on jealousy or envy is a guarantee of failure.
You want my real opinion? No, you don't but here it is anyway.
The China of today is, if anything, a fascist market state. The ignorance displayed here on Chinese (well, on any non US) poiltics is symbolic of a nation stearing blindly to its own future. The nominally Communist party has very little in common with collectivisation or any other tenets of Marx or Mao's preachings.
The Chinese have achieved a human launch in space with a well paced programme that has taken it's time and not rushed things, which is why this has gone so smoothly. It has done this with a budget that is less than 1/7th of NASA's. And before you start yet another round of 30 year old technology trolling, may I point out to you that the computing power in the Chinese rocketry is at least 20 years newer than that in the Space Shuttle.
NASA would be well advised to take a lesson from the simplicity and pacing of the Chinese programme.
It never ceases to amaze me how much hate some people reserve for any other nation than America, be it in Europe, Asia or Africa that achieves any goal in science or technology. Wouldn't trying to achieve something with your own lives possibly make you happier? (Hmmm, scratch that, it probably wouldn't)
I am amazed at the very well paced programme that the Chinese have concentrated on. In some ways it's very simple, in that the technology is known, but in another light that same simple technology allows them to proceed almost flawlessly (compared to the more messy NASA high tech experimentations that have gotten exactly nowhere) and to achive a working human launch capacity that is both affordable and robust.
I hope this will be a kicck in the butt to both NASA and ESA to actually do something themselves instead of wallowing in self pity and fear. Here's looking to a revival of the Hermes spaceplane and a robust and cheap NASA human launch capacity. Competition is good.
I took a look at the recent vintage festival site and came across some images of the Amiga 3000UX, the one that came with a bona fide S5V4 Unix. I remember drooling about owning one of those back in 1991. Those things could have changed the market by themselves if Commodore and Sun and all the other proprietry UNix buggers hadn't been so immesurably greedy.
In Germany at the famous Tempelhof AB in Berlin in the late 80's I was an operator on a Wang 100. Damn good those systems. Reliable as hell and they had text based word processing and a spreadsheet application called 20/20 and a database called EZQuery, all integrated with the Wang office automation system for notes, office mail and calendaring. Not one virus or hickup in the two years I worked there. Can one say that about MSOffice/Exchange crap today, NO! I would dearly love to know what the real improvements have been.
A lot of us, one hell of a lot of us, have had the flip side to this wonderful warm and fuzzy story: A boss screaming at you, manipulating you and refusing to understand even if you take hours of time to explain the matter with physical analogies such as filing cabinets and other things. How many of us have heard the phrase, screamed at us in high decibel tones, "I don't care what it is, it has to work, it's all your fault"?
The idea that IT is contemptuous of PHBs is often correct, as the IT will make clear in private amongst colleagues, but it is most often that the contempt is a product of the PHB abusing his power and treating underlings like shit.
MS, problems and cashflow
on
Longhorn in 2006
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I am a Mac user (used to admin XP boxes), so those who want to skip this, go ahead.
I don't nearly hate Microsoft as much as some of the fanatic zealots, I've used Windows in all colours from 95 to XP to 2k Advanced Server, and I actually think that mostly it's good enough. I have found software relatively easy to install and use, and security to be mostly ok if one took the time to take note of patches and security warnings (Blaster could have been avoided by most by simply closing the port or stopping the service). I even find Office to be good enough, even though I have never used more than perhaps 20% of its features. The OS has definitely improved in XP and major apps like those from Adobe or Macromedia run better there than on my Mac.
What I still don't like about Windows is the lack of UI consisitency. The dialogs and window layout in system critical components is anything but easy to comprehend and most often just resembles a mess of older dialogs that have been rearranged and newer ones that have been "tacked" on.
However, for most people, Windows has been good enough even though the vast majority of PC users do NOT really understand how their computer works (and why should they?). Now on to my Longhorn puzzlings:
1. I think MS has the cash reserves to withstand major mistakes that no other company can afford to make. Witness the subsidy of the XBox. MS can really afford to make major OS mistakes and the money will still flow in as the sheer momentum of all those millions of PCs that get sold all have Windows OEM on them. The situation might change a bit by 2006 in that Linux could well have achieved some critical mass in the business world by then. That possibility is, by all accounts very real, and I doubt that any business that will have switched to Linux will ever switch back to Windows, no matter how good it is, simply for the price point, which MS cannot beat. In home PCs I seriously doubt that Linux will have made huge gains by 2006. Some but not much. Windows is too entrenched in the home, I think.
2.MS cash reserves could dry up very quickly if no new products arrive by 2006, but as some else mentioned, there's 64bit computing to consider, although I think Apple and especially Linux will beat them to the gun with uptake initially. I think that in the server arena, Linux will definitely beat Windows in 64bit computing.
3.MS' UI task oriented approach as implemented in XP will almost certainly be a major feature in Longhorn in order to make the PC easier for home users to understand, but unless they address the issue with user newbie feedback studies, it will only confuse users as much as the current approach.
4.The new compositing model, will probably present MS with major headaches initially as legacy software will probably work but not as well as it did before. It will be used to market the hell out of Longhorn though.
5.Microsoft will, I'm sure, use whatever methods they can to lock future users in, be it server incompatibilities with Exchange or with DRM or with special pproprietry protocols, they will do as much as they can. They will certainly try to get hardware makers to implement features that lock out Linux, such as hardware DRM, and an MS coded BIOS that will break the hardware if changed, or things like DirectX only graphic cards. I'm sure MS sees this as a point in their survival.
6.Lonhorn is probably a make or break milestone for Microsoft. They probably want to get as many users as possible onto XP and 2k3 server before Longhorn arrives. Longhorn will probably be for them like Win95 was, released with huge media attention pointing out the ease and beauty of the new OS. The timing is probably ok because their marketshare won't drastically erode by then. The only questions will be how far Linux and OSX will have progressed by then (probably quite a lot judging by what's happened since 2000) and if the enterprise will not have changed by then.
Although I'm curious as to how cases in the US legal system can be sealed, I think this will not have much influence on the case of IBM suing SCO for breaching the GPL, as IBM has already subpoened Canopy records. I think the IBM legal team knows full well that canopy is behind it, and if it turns out that GPL software is in SCO without copyright notices, then Darl and Co are in for a lot of pain.
I mentioned that I hate analogies, and I meant it. It's the first time I've ever used it with respect to Apple, and I meant it soley with respect to branding, not as regards technical specifications. But whatever...
I'm not some luddite, who is overburdened with the concept of having to use a computer. I was until recently a sysadmin in a mixed Windows and Novell shop, and have done my time as a web developer as well as just about everything else in between. I actually quite like Windows XP, but I abhor the manic control that Microsoft has, and dual booting with Linux or running VMware is not what I want. I get a lot of value out of my two Mac machines, both of which I use, and will not sell unless absolutely necessary.
Of those things of value that I get are computers with considerably higher resale value (if I were to resell them) than comparitively aged x86 Laptops, and an open OS with all the tools available to Linux and a free IDE and development environment that would cost me as much as the whole OSX itself, if I were to buy it on Windows.
That's my value.
As for porting to OSX, it would kill Apple's hardware market, because people like you wouldn't buy into it I assume, as you don't buy into it now. Apple subsidises its OS through hardware sales. There would also be no software available (for all your talk about using OSX, would you do it if you couldn't game or run Office?) and no drivers.
While Apple could conceivably make x86 hardware that only ran OSX due to proprietry firmware etc, which they would have to do because they make the bulk of their money with hardware, the real problem lies with software. Adobe, Macromedia, Quark, Oracle, Sybase, Digidesign amongst others would not switch again after taking years to switch to Mac OSX, and would more than likely simply abandon the market. That would leave Apple with a fantastic OS with almost no software, and I assume you can imagine what that would do to Apple's bottom line.
Be tried this very thing with BeOS, which by all accounts was far superior to NT back in the late 90's. Microsoft fucked them at every corner and where is Be today, a passing note on slashdot and a website selling an OS with no software.
After reading yet another "How John Sculley fucked up" article I feel I can say few things. The first is that the board of Pepsi is, with the same hindsight that John Sculley now has, probably enormously glad that he buggered off to Apple in the 80's and didn't stay at Pepsi where they would have had to fire him a few years later for plain apocryphal business decision making.
Because John Sculley, with his wonderful hindsight, still doesn't "get it" and that says a lot about him. His absolutely idiotic remarks about Apple moving to x86 are worth less today than they were when Apple had actually ported Mac OS to x86 in a project called "Startrek" in 1994, only to call it off at the last moment.
The Brand is everything with Apple. Check it out. Go to the website, go to an Applestore. The design of the hardware, the design of the software, the design of Steve Jobs' stage appearances, the design of the Website, the design of the Apple store, everything is made to fit into the brand. There is practically NO other company that does this as well as Apple. No one. Nada. Zilch. Or why do you think that mac OSX doesn't have themes and skins as part of the basic OS? (Yes, I know that 3rd party people make skins, but they are not endorsed or supported by Apple)
I hate car analogies, but in terms of branding, Apple is the BMW of computing. The designs are timeless in a way that makes my 4 year old Lombard Powerbook as interesting to look at as my 2 year old Titanium Powerbook (Ever notice that Apple used two shades and textures of black plastic in the Lombard/Pismo design?). It's a design that makes a 4 year old B&W Tower interesting and a design that makes you stop and stare when you see a G5 from the outside as well as the inside.
It's something that "cheap and ugly as you can be as long as it's fast" tech nuts and ex executives of bottled sugar water don't "get".
Technically, it would have all been possible, and in 1990 Apple stood a good chance of beating Microsoft at its own game as all the graphical applications would have been forced to move over to x86 along with Apple, and Mac OS 7 was way better than Windows 3.0, but by 1994, when the "Startrek" project was underway, it was already too late. Apple had gotten lost in the future OS dealings with Taligent, Pink, Starttrek and the miserable Copland effort.
Buying NeXT was the best thing NeXT (excuse the pun) ever did. And while the clones being lost was sad. Apple would not have been able to turn its business around with the clone competition. It would have diluted the Brand, which was something that Jobs understood correctly in doing.
Today Apple could in no way switch again. They came very close to losing Adobe and Macromedia with the switch to OSX and would almost certainly lose them if they switched to x86 (or Itanium or Opteron or whatever). Those applications are part of Apple's bread and butter business and Apple knows it. But the G5 and the coming G3 with Altivec look good for the near future despite or because of Intel vapourware announcements to scare of opteron customers.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Adobe is also becoming one of a long list of commercial software vendors, such as Microsoft, Macromedia, the makers of MathCad, AutoCAD, etc opting for product activation is an interesting one.
Why do they do it?
Obviously it's done to combat piracy. Although marketing departments can be extremely stupid and more than capable of ruining a good software company in ties of financial crisis, I don't think that this is an idea that comes from marketing, but one that comes from corporate financial departments as an attempt to improve the company bottom line by forcing the pirates of popular products to buy their products. They DO have a point. I've worked in a number of companies where there've been 2 bought copies of Photoshop being used by 20 or more users.
Does it work?
Yes, obviously. Most companies that were using more than their bought number of licences will pony up the money if they need the software (my last company went through the AutoCAD activation hoops, and although it left a bad taste, they went for it). All those private users who previously used pirated versions will continue to do so, and would not have paid for the software in any case.
Does it drive some users away.
On the other hand, there are definitely some companies and private users that will try to seek alternatives, as the general increase in pricing in products (AutoCAD, Express 6, Adobe CS all cost enormous sums) and users in poorer countries i.e. most of the world will in no way pay for those products (such as paying $800 for Adobe CS in Russia where the average monthly wage is somewhere around $300). Onerous licencing and problems with software quality where more attention is paid to activation than bugs in the software is partly responsible for the move to Linux in some corporations. Almost all software packages will in any case be cracked and private users will continue to use those cracks.
The irony is that the majority of previously legitimate users won't care so much, and will go along with activation IF it doesn't disrupt their workflow. It will NOT really make that much difference to the software companies' bottom line as those that paid before will continue to do so, and those that used cracks will continue to do so. Only those who used more copies than they paid for might add a couple of percentage points to software sales.
In the long run, there will probably be no difference, as the market can only sell so many copies of Adobe CS at $800 a pop. I don't think many graphics pros will consider changing now, but given two or three years there might be enough quality in the GIMP, SodiPodi (printing!!! colour synchronisation!!!) etc to start a move to them, but not now.
That said Photshop 5.5 and Illustrator 8 were IMO the pinacle of features/performance. The later versions suffer from too much feature overflow.
Yesterday, my luddite PC laptop owning buddy and I were discussing his new digital camera. He was angry because the software to use the thing was so damn complex (Sony camera and software) that it was almost impossible to use. So I showed him how to uninstall the software and just copy the stuff over in windows explorer.
He made comments about how stupid so many of those programmes were.
And that is such a good point, it should be tattooed onto every product designer's forehead: KISS, keep it simple. No one likes playing with hundres of settings or getting confused with software that some dickshit company designed as an afterthought to their product. This is why people like Apple products.
Given the current overly coroprate friendly environment in US-Justice and vice-versa, I would like to take a bet that this will not be resolved and that Diebold will be free to win elections for it's favourite party.
This whole PHP/Java fight is getting simply ridiculous. Isn't it about time that it stopped? If you think PHP will do the job then use PHP, if you think Java will do the job the use Java. You'll see soon enough if you were right in your conclusions.
Both have their strong points and weaknesses, just like assembly, which makes for some extremely fast code and is good for stuff like drivers but tends to take a bit longer when you're writing your webserver in it.
I can believe a VC company doing this. All those braindead VC people from the dotcom days were plaowing much more money than this into similar hairbrained schemes, so there doesn't seem to be a lack of stupidity in VC companies.
What it does highlight is the way the VC suits think, and what they actually know of technology. It shows that VC suits like companies with management that makes big bold and agressive statements. It shows that VC companies will spend money on words alone, because SCO's verbal tactics open them to charges of slander and libel, and even if they actually win part of the case (although I severly doubt it, IBM is going to kill them in court I think) there's still the RedHat and IBM countersuits to consider.
What this makes me think is that it's time to start skinning VC companies for money again. All you need is some arsewipe businessplan and some agressive statements and someone who's been in the business for a while and the VC loonies will throw $50 milloin at you.
The point was that the US programme was based on a working rocket design that had been tested by more than 2000 V2 launches in WWII, as well as the rocket team and all their ideas. The US didn't start from scratch, just as the Chinese didn't. The Chinese launchers are indigenous designs and yet I still can imagine that someone, somewhere, in a pique of bitterness will claim, that the Chinese didn't invent the rocket, when in fact they did, somewhere in the 15th century.
Does it really matter? Are your feelings of national pride so hurt because others succede where your country hasn't been lately?
Thanks for posting a decent non trolling answer. I appreciate it.
One shouldn't forget that the Chinese space effort isn't soley there for this manned space programme. Indeed, this programme is just a fraction of their launch capabilities. Condsider that this budget also covers military satellites and launches, which are under the aegis and budget of the military in the US, as well as their commercial satellite launching capability and the work they are doing on building satellite launches with solid fueled rockets that would enable them to launch satellites in extremely short order.
As for the comparisons of Fascism and Communism, and their oppression of people, wel, I think you're patrly right. They certainly do meet at a certain point, but have some significant differences, those mostly relating to economic collectivisation and Communism's theoretical equality of workers worldwide, two things that were radically different in the principles of the Third Reich. China, however, does definitely tend to xenophobic views, that is true.
Here is a link to an info page on the Saenger design, with many more other strange concepts in the parent pages. take a look, it's fascinating.
There have been many posts here about the Chinese basing their capsule design on the Russian Soyuz design from the 60's and how this supposedly makes the Chinese effort worthless. Think about this.
The whole entire complete US space programme was based on German technology and ideas from WWII taken from Germany and transplanted into the US along with the German rocket team people under Werner von Braun. Even the idea of a space plane was based on a German WWII idea called the "Saenger Amerikabomber" which was an idea to develop a manned spcae plane that would be able to reach the continental United States and drop a bomb before completing one sub orbit by skippping off the atmosphere and then returning to Germany.
It would certainly give you more credit not post as an AC, Chinese or not. And so what if their technology is based on Russian technology. The electronics and computing are almost certainly more modern than that in the Space Shuttle, notwithstanding the fact that the whole entire complete US space programme was based on German technology and ideas from WWII taken from Germany and transplanted into the US along with the German rocket team people under Werner von Braun.
I wrote in the article yesterday on the amazing amount racist xenophobia posted here whenever some other nation achieves something new in a scientific or technological field.
I am simply flabbergasted. Instead of congratulating the Chinese for a well planned, robust and cheap human space effort, which it is, there are literaly hundreds of hateful, ignorant, racist posts filled to the brim with spite and jealously. And I think it's a real problem with a lot of Americans because it happens so consistently. You want to know why so much of the world has a poor opinion of the USA? Read slashdot, where the supposedly technophile elite make comments based on a lack of knowledge, a sense of low self esteem and jealousy.
In my opinion, if there is anything that will be the undoing of the USA, it is those attitudes, because jealousy never won a space race. There's an old saying that basing one's actions on jealousy or envy is a guarantee of failure.
You want my real opinion? No, you don't but here it is anyway.
The China of today is, if anything, a fascist market state. The ignorance displayed here on Chinese (well, on any non US) poiltics is symbolic of a nation stearing blindly to its own future. The nominally Communist party has very little in common with collectivisation or any other tenets of Marx or Mao's preachings.
The Chinese have achieved a human launch in space with a well paced programme that has taken it's time and not rushed things, which is why this has gone so smoothly. It has done this with a budget that is less than 1/7th of NASA's. And before you start yet another round of 30 year old technology trolling, may I point out to you that the computing power in the Chinese rocketry is at least 20 years newer than that in the Space Shuttle.
NASA would be well advised to take a lesson from the simplicity and pacing of the Chinese programme.
It never ceases to amaze me how much hate some people reserve for any other nation than America, be it in Europe, Asia or Africa that achieves any goal in science or technology. Wouldn't trying to achieve something with your own lives possibly make you happier? (Hmmm, scratch that, it probably wouldn't)
I am amazed at the very well paced programme that the Chinese have concentrated on. In some ways it's very simple, in that the technology is known, but in another light that same simple technology allows them to proceed almost flawlessly (compared to the more messy NASA high tech experimentations that have gotten exactly nowhere) and to achive a working human launch capacity that is both affordable and robust.
I hope this will be a kicck in the butt to both NASA and ESA to actually do something themselves instead of wallowing in self pity and fear. Here's looking to a revival of the Hermes spaceplane and a robust and cheap NASA human launch capacity. Competition is good.
Mir want au es racketli! Erschti Auguscht fur alli!
Nei stimmt nod. ich bi de chef!
I took a look at the recent vintage festival site and came across some images of the Amiga 3000UX, the one that came with a bona fide S5V4 Unix. I remember drooling about owning one of those back in 1991. Those things could have changed the market by themselves if Commodore and Sun and all the other proprietry UNix buggers hadn't been so immesurably greedy.
AREXX was just damn beautiful. I have never seen anything as powerful and simple since.
In Germany at the famous Tempelhof AB in Berlin in the late 80's I was an operator on a Wang 100. Damn good those systems. Reliable as hell and they had text based word processing and a spreadsheet application called 20/20 and a database called EZQuery, all integrated with the Wang office automation system for notes, office mail and calendaring. Not one virus or hickup in the two years I worked there. Can one say that about MSOffice/Exchange crap today, NO! I would dearly love to know what the real improvements have been.
Miguel's gonna be pissed ;)
A lot of us, one hell of a lot of us, have had the flip side to this wonderful warm and fuzzy story: A boss screaming at you, manipulating you and refusing to understand even if you take hours of time to explain the matter with physical analogies such as filing cabinets and other things. How many of us have heard the phrase, screamed at us in high decibel tones, "I don't care what it is, it has to work, it's all your fault"?
The idea that IT is contemptuous of PHBs is often correct, as the IT will make clear in private amongst colleagues, but it is most often that the contempt is a product of the PHB abusing his power and treating underlings like shit.
I am a Mac user (used to admin XP boxes), so those who want to skip this, go ahead.
I don't nearly hate Microsoft as much as some of the fanatic zealots, I've used Windows in all colours from 95 to XP to 2k Advanced Server, and I actually think that mostly it's good enough. I have found software relatively easy to install and use, and security to be mostly ok if one took the time to take note of patches and security warnings (Blaster could have been avoided by most by simply closing the port or stopping the service). I even find Office to be good enough, even though I have never used more than perhaps 20% of its features. The OS has definitely improved in XP and major apps like those from Adobe or Macromedia run better there than on my Mac.
What I still don't like about Windows is the lack of UI consisitency. The dialogs and window layout in system critical components is anything but easy to comprehend and most often just resembles a mess of older dialogs that have been rearranged and newer ones that have been "tacked" on.
However, for most people, Windows has been good enough even though the vast majority of PC users do NOT really understand how their computer works (and why should they?). Now on to my Longhorn puzzlings:
1. I think MS has the cash reserves to withstand major mistakes that no other company can afford to make. Witness the subsidy of the XBox. MS can really afford to make major OS mistakes and the money will still flow in as the sheer momentum of all those millions of PCs that get sold all have Windows OEM on them. The situation might change a bit by 2006 in that Linux could well have achieved some critical mass in the business world by then. That possibility is, by all accounts very real, and I doubt that any business that will have switched to Linux will ever switch back to Windows, no matter how good it is, simply for the price point, which MS cannot beat. In home PCs I seriously doubt that Linux will have made huge gains by 2006. Some but not much. Windows is too entrenched in the home, I think.
2.MS cash reserves could dry up very quickly if no new products arrive by 2006, but as some else mentioned, there's 64bit computing to consider, although I think Apple and especially Linux will beat them to the gun with uptake initially. I think that in the server arena, Linux will definitely beat Windows in 64bit computing.
3.MS' UI task oriented approach as implemented in XP will almost certainly be a major feature in Longhorn in order to make the PC easier for home users to understand, but unless they address the issue with user newbie feedback studies, it will only confuse users as much as the current approach.
4.The new compositing model, will probably present MS with major headaches initially as legacy software will probably work but not as well as it did before. It will be used to market the hell out of Longhorn though.
5.Microsoft will, I'm sure, use whatever methods they can to lock future users in, be it server incompatibilities with Exchange or with DRM or with special pproprietry protocols, they will do as much as they can. They will certainly try to get hardware makers to implement features that lock out Linux, such as hardware DRM, and an MS coded BIOS that will break the hardware if changed, or things like DirectX only graphic cards. I'm sure MS sees this as a point in their survival.
6.Lonhorn is probably a make or break milestone for Microsoft. They probably want to get as many users as possible onto XP and 2k3 server before Longhorn arrives. Longhorn will probably be for them like Win95 was, released with huge media attention pointing out the ease and beauty of the new OS. The timing is probably ok because their marketshare won't drastically erode by then. The only questions will be how far Linux and OSX will have progressed by then (probably quite a lot judging by what's happened since 2000) and if the enterprise will not have changed by then.
Although I'm curious as to how cases in the US legal system can be sealed, I think this will not have much influence on the case of IBM suing SCO for breaching the GPL, as IBM has already subpoened Canopy records. I think the IBM legal team knows full well that canopy is behind it, and if it turns out that GPL software is in SCO without copyright notices, then Darl and Co are in for a lot of pain.
I mentioned that I hate analogies, and I meant it. It's the first time I've ever used it with respect to Apple, and I meant it soley with respect to branding, not as regards technical specifications. But whatever...
I'm not some luddite, who is overburdened with the concept of having to use a computer. I was until recently a sysadmin in a mixed Windows and Novell shop, and have done my time as a web developer as well as just about everything else in between. I actually quite like Windows XP, but I abhor the manic control that Microsoft has, and dual booting with Linux or running VMware is not what I want. I get a lot of value out of my two Mac machines, both of which I use, and will not sell unless absolutely necessary.
Of those things of value that I get are computers with considerably higher resale value (if I were to resell them) than comparitively aged x86 Laptops, and an open OS with all the tools available to Linux and a free IDE and development environment that would cost me as much as the whole OSX itself, if I were to buy it on Windows.
That's my value.
As for porting to OSX, it would kill Apple's hardware market, because people like you wouldn't buy into it I assume, as you don't buy into it now. Apple subsidises its OS through hardware sales. There would also be no software available (for all your talk about using OSX, would you do it if you couldn't game or run Office?) and no drivers.
Apple would be gone in three years at the most.
I say it's better the way it is.
While Apple could conceivably make x86 hardware that only ran OSX due to proprietry firmware etc, which they would have to do because they make the bulk of their money with hardware, the real problem lies with software. Adobe, Macromedia, Quark, Oracle, Sybase, Digidesign amongst others would not switch again after taking years to switch to Mac OSX, and would more than likely simply abandon the market. That would leave Apple with a fantastic OS with almost no software, and I assume you can imagine what that would do to Apple's bottom line.
Be tried this very thing with BeOS, which by all accounts was far superior to NT back in the late 90's. Microsoft fucked them at every corner and where is Be today, a passing note on slashdot and a website selling an OS with no software.
After reading yet another "How John Sculley fucked up" article I feel I can say few things. The first is that the board of Pepsi is, with the same hindsight that John Sculley now has, probably enormously glad that he buggered off to Apple in the 80's and didn't stay at Pepsi where they would have had to fire him a few years later for plain apocryphal business decision making.
Because John Sculley, with his wonderful hindsight, still doesn't "get it" and that says a lot about him. His absolutely idiotic remarks about Apple moving to x86 are worth less today than they were when Apple had actually ported Mac OS to x86 in a project called "Startrek" in 1994, only to call it off at the last moment.
The Brand is everything with Apple. Check it out. Go to the website, go to an Applestore. The design of the hardware, the design of the software, the design of Steve Jobs' stage appearances, the design of the Website, the design of the Apple store, everything is made to fit into the brand. There is practically NO other company that does this as well as Apple. No one. Nada. Zilch. Or why do you think that mac OSX doesn't have themes and skins as part of the basic OS? (Yes, I know that 3rd party people make skins, but they are not endorsed or supported by Apple)
I hate car analogies, but in terms of branding, Apple is the BMW of computing. The designs are timeless in a way that makes my 4 year old Lombard Powerbook as interesting to look at as my 2 year old Titanium Powerbook (Ever notice that Apple used two shades and textures of black plastic in the Lombard/Pismo design?). It's a design that makes a 4 year old B&W Tower interesting and a design that makes you stop and stare when you see a G5 from the outside as well as the inside.
It's something that "cheap and ugly as you can be as long as it's fast" tech nuts and ex executives of bottled sugar water don't "get".
Technically, it would have all been possible, and in 1990 Apple stood a good chance of beating Microsoft at its own game as all the graphical applications would have been forced to move over to x86 along with Apple, and Mac OS 7 was way better than Windows 3.0, but by 1994, when the "Startrek" project was underway, it was already too late. Apple had gotten lost in the future OS dealings with Taligent, Pink, Starttrek and the miserable Copland effort.
Buying NeXT was the best thing NeXT (excuse the pun) ever did. And while the clones being lost was sad. Apple would not have been able to turn its business around with the clone competition. It would have diluted the Brand, which was something that Jobs understood correctly in doing.
Today Apple could in no way switch again. They came very close to losing Adobe and Macromedia with the switch to OSX and would almost certainly lose them if they switched to x86 (or Itanium or Opteron or whatever). Those applications are part of Apple's bread and butter business and Apple knows it. But the G5 and the coming G3 with Altivec look good for the near future despite or because of Intel vapourware announcements to scare of opteron customers.
Strangely, with me, it's the other way around. I use OSX all the time and my Windows box hasn't been switched on for about a year.