If one were to follow your logic, one wold still come to the same conclusion. EA is the one writing the software (games and their own server infrastructure), not Microsoft.
Sorry to post again just after my other post but I forgot to add what is perhaps the most striking thing about this story: The fact that EA publicly informed the press of Microsoft's attempt's to control the server side of the equation. While it obvious why Microsoft is doing this - a public posing platform for it's hailstorm and.Net strategy , which hasn't been so successful as of late - it is fairly rare that anyone who has business dealings with Microsoft has the courage to go public about it. A lot of companies have simply been too frightened of Microsoft retaliation. I know that EA is far less dependant on Microsoft than most software companies, which perhaps explains the move, but given the current wave of shedding light on Microsoft's practices, it seems that it is a good method to avoid Microsoft retaliating, since Microsoft has had an enormous amount of bad press lately, is publicity shy when it comes to having it's dealings exposed and knows full well that negative news events like this *do* affect both other game developers who feel strengthened in their dealings with MS and the general public who normally doesn't care much whether Microsoft is a monopoly or not but defintely does react when seeing negative news about a company in the mainstream media (i.e."I don't think I'll go for an XBox, no one makes games for it" sort of thing).
The irony with Microsoft is that if they were less amenable to dirty tricks and actually showed some respect towards partners and customers they would be a much more popular company and possibly would not even be in court now.
On the other hand they would probably never have become the huge monopoly that they are if they didn't resort to dirty tricks.
This control freak syndrome exhibited by Microsoft in the EA story is so typical of Microsoft it seems not even worth mentioning or replying to. Although EA is no angel, it does give one a sort of evil satisfaction somewhere that Microsoft doesn't always win in their Everquest(;)) to win domination of the world.
The swiss political system provides for initiatives with referendums which are legally binding. Anyone can start one and it gets voted on if there are more than 100 000 votes (Switzerland is small). What that means is that all you need to do is start an initiative and collect signatures. If it gets through you do your best to inform the public that their privacy is in danger (there is always a rundown of the initiatives sent to voters but many don't bother to read them). If people are worried enough, out the window, the law goes. End of story.
Here in Zürich, where I live, at 5pm in the afternoon I sit in the same traffic jams that I would be sitting in in any city in the world. No one switches off their engines at the traffic lights anymore. That way a waste of time anway and impossible to enforce.
Apart from quick and easy access to any specific machine in the rack, I think the main reason that Apple included the Firewire on the front panel is for Dgital Video. Sine DV is one of Apple's main markets and Video Processing houses generally need huge amounts of storage, this would be tailor made for them. In the Video center the rack will probably be not in some remote data center but in the room next door. You walk in with your Camera, ask the Admin which box has space on it for your prOn, plug the Camera or whatever in and copy the stuff across. The admin could obviously also make a Firewire hub out of the server room for easy access.
Could Intel use this as the basis of a suite against Microsoft even if the anti-trust trial does nothing? I assume they've known about this for a long time, but couldn't publicly act on it and now possibly could?
I think that Microsoft needs Intel as much as Intel needs Microsoft at the moment. AMD has a large market share but I doubt it has the larger one and Intel could theoretically exert a lot of pressure on OEMs as well, especially if they keep up their current lead in CPU clock cycles (good for the press and share price), in Notebooks and in servers.
Since kazaa probably has the means to monitor which songs get shared how often, they "could" pay the artists according to sharing popularity. Remains to be seen if they would though.
Not entirely true. Apple didn't have a unix system for a long time (A/UX was dropped many years ago in the early '90s) and all Macs these days have USB keyboards and mice.
What can one say that hasn't already been said in this case? What more other misdeeds can be brought to light? It seems MS can do anything they please - threaten, bribe, steal, cheat, extort, lie in court - and nothing is ever done to them. Is the reason Enron and Anderson are in court because they went broke or because they broke they law and swindled other people's money away? It seems as long as these huge companies are churning out campaign contributions and employing people, nothing will ever be done to them.
So sad if one isn't a huge corporation. So sad to see a whole county's justicial system be turned into an empty shell of mockery.
Firstly, hats off to Apple. It looks good (and that is a selling point, especially in design companies). It has enough power, the group of researchers (there was a story here on them wanting to use G4's but the tower couldn't be stacked) can now stack them. And above all (this is redundant, has been posted already) the admin software and unlimited seats licence will be selling points in those places (schools, design companies etc) where there is no one who has the technical capability to setup a linux box (and the Cobalts from Sun are not very good in terms of software admin and cost more with far less power) who probably thought that they were stuck with Windows servers.
Nice to see that Apple has finally introduced DDR. means that this will trickle down to the desktop sonner or later.
I liked the OF hack: eject cd Very simple and very nice in an emergency, since it runs before the computer boots. Maybe some ingenious person will be able to write a little forth code for OF to disable the copy protection mechanism since AFAIK OpenFirmware conrols I/O.
Flash started off as a very interesting technology about 6 years ago, and gained popularity amongst users because it was small (142k download or so), relatively innocuous (Only two exploits so far AFAIK) and it brought those things to the web that java applets had promised but failed to do. There was a huge demand for Flash coders in the middle of the Dotcom boom, especially when Flash 4 hit the scene with scripting abilities, allowing developers to make fancy interactive sites, and even more so when Flash 5 came around which improved the scripting and performance yet still remained small and relatively safe.
What happened?
Thousands of dotcommers made enormous flash intro animations to their sites (about half of them forgetting to make a "skip intro" link), which rapidly irritated many many visitors to said sites (a study on the irritation factor of flash intros and banners would be *very* interessting). At the same time as the dotcom scene started crashing around everyone's ears, desperate internet marketing whizzes decided that flash would be a brilliant vehicle for advertising, pushed along by an equally desperate Macromedia, whose products were no longer selling like hot cakes. The results of those ideas can be seen on almost every portal on the web (ZDNet is my favourite with slashdot also not doing too badly), and visitors reactions are known to everybody it seems except for the mindless marketing people who push it. In this way it is very similar to spam.
Macromedia spent a fortune on making Flash a tool that would liven up the web and make colourful, interactive, animated, dynamic sites possible especially in conjunction with macromedia's backend flash application server, generator. Apart from a host of sites early on this trend has died out almost completely, because what macromedia didn't realise is that just like web designers/coders have to cope with different browsers, they also have to cope with users who haven't and won't use the plugin, and therefore go for the lowest common denominator in websites:html with one or two pics etc. Flash didn't save a single dotbomb from going under.
Now, just like any other large company (ahem), they need to add "features" in order to carry on making money with their product. Flash 6(MX) now has built in video, microphone and cookies. I very much doubt this is suddenly going to improve the content of all the Flash we've been getting, although it may kill one or two other companies' media players(Quicktime, WMP, Real) but, in moving out of the traditional small player that they've had, it will fast become larger, and someone is sooner or later going to find some hole in their player (actionscript getting access to the drive while ostensibly looking for cookies? Exploiting a hardware driver(keylogger)?). For all my irritation with Sun's Applet saga and java on windows, Sun worked very hard to make the language and VM design secure (and the fact that of the few exploits with browser JVM's being mostly in MS' JVM does show this). Macromedia doesn't AFAIK have that much experience in security wrt clientside technologies and time will tell what will happen with this player.
I used to be a Director programmer and with Director you could pretty much do anything on the client machine with no checks and shockwave, director's browser plugin went in the same direction as flash is going: first a straight player and then with laetr versions you could download all sort's of xtras onto the client machine. I once, as a security test, wrote a screensaver with shockwave, that everybody in the company loved (it even won an award for design). What no one realised until we tald them, was that the screensaver had been merrily scanning people's drives in the background and uploading filelists to us.
Probably what will happen will be somewhere in the middle. Companies will become more connected in general and more users will have broadband but I think it wil take many more than 5 years before all the current technical incompatibilities and problems are ironed out, if ever. One simple reason is that, while e-mail and normal html over http web browsing have become ubiquitous, hundreds of other net tevhnologies have started and died. Another reason is the simple commercial competition between companies. Microsoft and AOL will not agree on a common IM format for instance. So, probably, some technologies will gain acceptance but most defintely won't.
This reminds me of the theatrical play "Faust" where the main character sells his soul to the devil in order to advance his standing in life, career, love etc. In the end the devil comes for his soul...
In ASCII, this means I have no sympathy with this man. Microsoft has a long record of screwing it's partners and to be honest, these people should know better. Microsoft was caught stealing code by Apple, the makers of Softimage and others and regularly works "with" "partners" in order to "embrace and extend" the product once they have sent the former "partner"(e.g. IBM) off into the wilderness. There would have been hundreds if not thousands of people in the business world that would have warned him not to trust Microsoft, IF he would have bothered to stop checking his bank account every 5 minutes and listend to what they had to say, but greed is a powerful motivating factor. Microsoft could not find find any partners for it's hailstorm/passport strategy for a reason: No one trusts them.
This man would have had a better chance of long term success if he had worked with the opensource crowd to get the technology accepted.
I sort of think it's things like this that make slashdot so worth reading. These gems of pure geekness. +5 to/.
I discovered BrainFuck by chance two years ago and immediately got lost in two nights of trying to get my first quine to compile in the interactive JavaScript BF interpreter. For some perverse reason it is fun. It brings out the little boy in me who used to build model airplanes out of toothpicks: Little unimportant things that become something when you stick them together. perhaps this would also be a possible real world language for programming Nanobots, whose processors wouldn't yet cope with a P4 strapped to their backs.
I am not in any way a C++ programmer. The only thing I've ever read my way through is the Bruce Eckel's book. That was enough for me. I know some Java and C and was starting to learn how to go further on Mac OSX (which uses GCC) and was wondering whether to go with C++ or ObjC. One little trial programme in both and I went with ObjC. It *is* a lot easier, especially if you know some Java and has similar dynamic features. I don't know enough to comment on whther C++ is faster or not but it defintely has a very difficult syntax for beginners.
Although I agree with the OSS crowd that Java should also be opensourced, it is at least a standard and this is a godsend for someone learning the language. In C++ the problem with learning it is whose version do you learn? Microsoft's? GCC? What are the fine points of symantic differences inbetween the differing versions? ObjC has this problem as well but since it's only heavily used on OSx at the moment it is not so critical, but if GNUStep were to more successful for instance there might arise differnces there as well (infighting over GCC ObjC compilation with Apple etc). I personally wish for more standards in these heavily used languages although I don't suppose it'll happen anytime soon.
I can't belive posts like this one where an MS troll actually thinks that someone is going to believe things like "GCC is obscured from us by the marketing people at the FSF" or "Java's source seems to be under the monopolistic thumb of Sun" and "Microsoft's "shared source" under which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair and reasonable of all the licenses in existance" and "harsh restrictions of the BSD license".
I get so flabbergasted that I'm actually speechless when I see some say that the BSD licence is harsh. Or that GCC is obscured. Not only this but you have the sources of Java in every JDK downlowd and this troll actually thinks that the world is going to suddenly switch to VB??? And he hasn't actually ever coded in C++?? Has he coded at all I ask myself, because it seems he's actually better at repeating Microsoft press propaganda statements than anything else.
First I must say that my story is a long time ago (like the author of the article). I was an operator on an IBM 3083 17 years ago and left a few months after they had installed VM. We had the mainframe connected to the comanies bottlings plants across the whole country (running system 36 minis) and during the day, especially later in the afternoon most of the various plant's accounts/processing data would come in. The night shift would then start the accounting and processing jobs around 7PM and run them through the night and a few hours before the morning shift came in the Storage backup system would run (HSM) and then during the day the coders would do their thing etc.
The whole point of VM (and the mainframe) was that it is optimised for business systems, AFAIK, and unlike heavy scientific computing loads, there is seldom a need for incredible processing power in the CPU, but there is a need for distributed processes and extremely good I/O since most business tasks are often thrashing around on the disk getting and updating customer/financial info etc.
I don't think the zSeries would be doing as well as it is (eBay, Swedish and Japanese telcos etc) if there wasn't some advantage to this system. Probably, what sways a lot of these deals is that if your machine has any problems IBM will have a technician there pronto and their staff (at least in those days) were very professional and well trained.
Wow! You tell me to consider myself fortunate for trying to make a comment on Apples present success. Do you think the word "present success" has anything to do with what was happening to Apple in the mid '90s under Scully, Spindler or Amelio? This is 2002 and not 1995. The company has changed, as has the OS. I was trying to be somewhat positive and don't really understand your need to attack me. But if you need it and it solves some of your problems -fine.
If you restrict the topic to Mac OSX only and exclude Newtons, WinCE etc OSX has had the technology since the days of the Developers Preview releases. In the public beta days, just before OSX 10.0 came out Apple announced that it had "developed" handwriting recognition for the OS (No, I can't remember where, possibly Maccentral archives?) but didn't include it in the product at the time. The lack of tablet drivers and applications made it completely useless at the time. In XP it is also useless unless you have a tablet or a TabletPC. I assume that Apple will release it's own version of a tabletPC this year sometime.
Apple was doing very badly in the mid '90s and losing a lot of money and customers until Jobs turned the company around. He did this mostly with the iMac at the time. He refined and simplified the product line which also helped a lot and introduced OSX which has done more to get users of other OS's to switch to Macs than any other previous OS (which tended to do the opposite)
"Um...Again it sounds like you are unaware that Apple has been all about ease-of-use for the last two decades"
OF course I know this, and agree that the classic Mac OS was easy to use. But the OS was very unstable and crash prone and quite backward. I sort of include not having to reboot your Mac three or four times a day under ease of use.
"Yet again...this feature has been available for years in previous versions of the Mac OS. Quite useful, I'm told, for very young children. " Again, I know this. I was referring to OSX, which hasn't had this until now.
While the idea of some Hollywood start having one of these is ridiculous, the idea of selling one to a private enterprise company would be a huge boost for breaking the monopoly that governments hold on space travel. I'm sure that in the US it should not be too difficult for a space industries startup to gather $6 million from investors. The problem of course would be infrastructure (boosters, fuel, launchpads, tracking stations) but it would be a lot further down the road than current efforts are.
The Buran actually flew and according to most reports is very reliable compared to the space shuttle (12 years of testing, can fly automatically).
The ability for smaller firms to get into space would surely be paid back in terms of travel, industry etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If one were to follow your logic, one wold still come to the same conclusion. EA is the one writing the software (games and their own server infrastructure), not Microsoft.
Sorry to post again just after my other post but I forgot to add what is perhaps the most striking thing about this story: The fact that EA publicly informed the press of Microsoft's attempt's to control the server side of the equation. While it obvious why Microsoft is doing this - a public posing platform for it's hailstorm and .Net strategy , which hasn't been so successful as of late - it is fairly rare that anyone who has business dealings with Microsoft has the courage to go public about it. A lot of companies have simply been too frightened of Microsoft retaliation. I know that EA is far less dependant on Microsoft than most software companies, which perhaps explains the move, but given the current wave of shedding light on Microsoft's practices, it seems that it is a good method to avoid Microsoft retaliating, since Microsoft has had an enormous amount of bad press lately, is publicity shy when it comes to having it's dealings exposed and knows full well that negative news events like this *do* affect both other game developers who feel strengthened in their dealings with MS and the general public who normally doesn't care much whether Microsoft is a monopoly or not but defintely does react when seeing negative news about a company in the mainstream media (i.e."I don't think I'll go for an XBox, no one makes games for it" sort of thing).
The irony with Microsoft is that if they were less amenable to dirty tricks and actually showed some respect towards partners and customers they would be a much more popular company and possibly would not even be in court now.
On the other hand they would probably never have become the huge monopoly that they are if they didn't resort to dirty tricks.
This control freak syndrome exhibited by Microsoft in the EA story is so typical of Microsoft it seems not even worth mentioning or replying to. Although EA is no angel, it does give one a sort of evil satisfaction somewhere that Microsoft doesn't always win in their Everquest(;)) to win domination of the world.
The swiss political system provides for initiatives with referendums which are legally binding. Anyone can start one and it gets voted on if there are more than 100 000 votes (Switzerland is small). What that means is that all you need to do is start an initiative and collect signatures. If it gets through you do your best to inform the public that their privacy is in danger (there is always a rundown of the initiatives sent to voters but many don't bother to read them). If people are worried enough, out the window, the law goes. End of story.
Here in Zürich, where I live, at 5pm in the afternoon I sit in the same traffic jams that I would be sitting in in any city in the world. No one switches off their engines at the traffic lights anymore. That way a waste of time anway and impossible to enforce.
Apart from quick and easy access to any specific machine in the rack, I think the main reason that Apple included the Firewire on the front panel is for Dgital Video. Sine DV is one of Apple's main markets and Video Processing houses generally need huge amounts of storage, this would be tailor made for them. In the Video center the rack will probably be not in some remote data center but in the room next door. You walk in with your Camera, ask the Admin which box has space on it for your prOn, plug the Camera or whatever in and copy the stuff across. The admin could obviously also make a Firewire hub out of the server room for easy access.
Could Intel use this as the basis of a suite against Microsoft even if the anti-trust trial does nothing? I assume they've known about this for a long time, but couldn't publicly act on it and now possibly could?
I think that Microsoft needs Intel as much as Intel needs Microsoft at the moment. AMD has a large market share but I doubt it has the larger one and Intel could theoretically exert a lot of pressure on OEMs as well, especially if they keep up their current lead in CPU clock cycles (good for the press and share price), in Notebooks and in servers.
Since kazaa probably has the means to monitor which songs get shared how often, they "could" pay the artists according to sharing popularity. Remains to be seen if they would though.
So you assume she knew what she was saying?
Not entirely true. Apple didn't have a unix system for a long time (A/UX was dropped many years ago in the early '90s) and all Macs these days have USB keyboards and mice.
What can one say that hasn't already been said in this case? What more other misdeeds can be brought to light? It seems MS can do anything they please - threaten, bribe, steal, cheat, extort, lie in court - and nothing is ever done to them. Is the reason Enron and Anderson are in court because they went broke or because they broke they law and swindled other people's money away? It seems as long as these huge companies are churning out campaign contributions and employing people, nothing will ever be done to them.
So sad if one isn't a huge corporation. So sad to see a whole county's justicial system be turned into an empty shell of mockery.
Firstly, hats off to Apple. It looks good (and that is a selling point, especially in design companies). It has enough power, the group of researchers (there was a story here on them wanting to use G4's but the tower couldn't be stacked) can now stack them. And above all (this is redundant, has been posted already) the admin software and unlimited seats licence will be selling points in those places (schools, design companies etc) where there is no one who has the technical capability to setup a linux box (and the Cobalts from Sun are not very good in terms of software admin and cost more with far less power) who probably thought that they were stuck with Windows servers.
Nice to see that Apple has finally introduced DDR. means that this will trickle down to the desktop sonner or later.
I liked the OF hack: eject cd
Very simple and very nice in an emergency, since it runs before the computer boots. Maybe some ingenious person will be able to write a little forth code for OF to disable the copy protection mechanism since AFAIK OpenFirmware conrols I/O.
Flash started off as a very interesting technology about 6 years ago, and gained popularity amongst users because it was small (142k download or so), relatively innocuous (Only two exploits so far AFAIK) and it brought those things to the web that java applets had promised but failed to do. There was a huge demand for Flash coders in the middle of the Dotcom boom, especially when Flash 4 hit the scene with scripting abilities, allowing developers to make fancy interactive sites, and even more so when Flash 5 came around which improved the scripting and performance yet still remained small and relatively safe.
What happened?
Thousands of dotcommers made enormous flash intro animations to their sites (about half of them forgetting to make a "skip intro" link), which rapidly irritated many many visitors to said sites (a study on the irritation factor of flash intros and banners would be *very* interessting). At the same time as the dotcom scene started crashing around everyone's ears, desperate internet marketing whizzes decided that flash would be a brilliant vehicle for advertising, pushed along by an equally desperate Macromedia, whose products were no longer selling like hot cakes. The results of those ideas can be seen on almost every portal on the web (ZDNet is my favourite with slashdot also not doing too badly), and visitors reactions are known to everybody it seems except for the mindless marketing people who push it. In this way it is very similar to spam.
Macromedia spent a fortune on making Flash a tool that would liven up the web and make colourful, interactive, animated, dynamic sites possible especially in conjunction with macromedia's backend flash application server, generator. Apart from a host of sites early on this trend has died out almost completely, because what macromedia didn't realise is that just like web designers/coders have to cope with different browsers, they also have to cope with users who haven't and won't use the plugin, and therefore go for the lowest common denominator in websites:html with one or two pics etc. Flash didn't save a single dotbomb from going under.
Now, just like any other large company (ahem), they need to add "features" in order to carry on making money with their product. Flash 6(MX) now has built in video, microphone and cookies. I very much doubt this is suddenly going to improve the content of all the Flash we've been getting, although it may kill one or two other companies' media players(Quicktime, WMP, Real) but, in moving out of the traditional small player that they've had, it will fast become larger, and someone is sooner or later going to find some hole in their player (actionscript getting access to the drive while ostensibly looking for cookies? Exploiting a hardware driver(keylogger)?). For all my irritation with Sun's Applet saga and java on windows, Sun worked very hard to make the language and VM design secure (and the fact that of the few exploits with browser JVM's being mostly in MS' JVM does show this). Macromedia doesn't AFAIK have that much experience in security wrt clientside technologies and time will tell what will happen with this player.
I used to be a Director programmer and with Director you could pretty much do anything on the client machine with no checks and shockwave, director's browser plugin went in the same direction as flash is going: first a straight player and then with laetr versions you could download all sort's of xtras onto the client machine. I once, as a security test, wrote a screensaver with shockwave, that everybody in the company loved (it even won an award for design). What no one realised until we tald them, was that the screensaver had been merrily scanning people's drives in the background and uploading filelists to us.
Probably what will happen will be somewhere in the middle. Companies will become more connected in general and more users will have broadband but I think it wil take many more than 5 years before all the current technical incompatibilities and problems are ironed out, if ever. One simple reason is that, while e-mail and normal html over http web browsing have become ubiquitous, hundreds of other net tevhnologies have started and died. Another reason is the simple commercial competition between companies. Microsoft and AOL will not agree on a common IM format for instance. So, probably, some technologies will gain acceptance but most defintely won't.
This reminds me of the theatrical play "Faust" where the main character sells his soul to the devil in order to advance his standing in life, career, love etc. In the end the devil comes for his soul...
In ASCII, this means I have no sympathy with this man. Microsoft has a long record of screwing it's partners and to be honest, these people should know better. Microsoft was caught stealing code by Apple, the makers of Softimage and others and regularly works "with" "partners" in order to "embrace and extend" the product once they have sent the former "partner"(e.g. IBM) off into the wilderness. There would have been hundreds if not thousands of people in the business world that would have warned him not to trust Microsoft, IF he would have bothered to stop checking his bank account every 5 minutes and listend to what they had to say, but greed is a powerful motivating factor. Microsoft could not find find any partners for it's hailstorm/passport strategy for a reason: No one trusts them.
This man would have had a better chance of long term success if he had worked with the opensource crowd to get the technology accepted.
I sort of think it's things like this that make slashdot so worth reading. These gems of pure geekness. +5 to /.
I discovered BrainFuck by chance two years ago and immediately got lost in two nights of trying to get my first quine to compile in the interactive JavaScript BF interpreter. For some perverse reason it is fun. It brings out the little boy in me who used to build model airplanes out of toothpicks: Little unimportant things that become something when you stick them together. perhaps this would also be a possible real world language for programming Nanobots, whose processors wouldn't yet cope with a P4 strapped to their backs.
I am not in any way a C++ programmer. The only thing I've ever read my way through is the Bruce Eckel's book. That was enough for me. I know some Java and C and was starting to learn how to go further on Mac OSX (which uses GCC) and was wondering whether to go with C++ or ObjC. One little trial programme in both and I went with ObjC. It *is* a lot easier, especially if you know some Java and has similar dynamic features. I don't know enough to comment on whther C++ is faster or not but it defintely has a very difficult syntax for beginners.
Although I agree with the OSS crowd that Java should also be opensourced, it is at least a standard and this is a godsend for someone learning the language. In C++ the problem with learning it is whose version do you learn? Microsoft's? GCC? What are the fine points of symantic differences inbetween the differing versions? ObjC has this problem as well but since it's only heavily used on OSx at the moment it is not so critical, but if GNUStep were to more successful for instance there might arise differnces there as well (infighting over GCC ObjC compilation with Apple etc). I personally wish for more standards in these heavily used languages although I don't suppose it'll happen anytime soon.
I can't belive posts like this one where an MS troll actually thinks that someone is going to believe things like "GCC is obscured from us by the marketing people at the FSF" or "Java's source seems to be under the monopolistic thumb of Sun" and "Microsoft's "shared source" under which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair and reasonable of all the licenses in existance" and "harsh restrictions of the BSD license".
I get so flabbergasted that I'm actually speechless when I see some say that the BSD licence is harsh. Or that GCC is obscured. Not only this but you have the sources of Java in every JDK downlowd and this troll actually thinks that the world is going to suddenly switch to VB??? And he hasn't actually ever coded in C++?? Has he coded at all I ask myself, because it seems he's actually better at repeating Microsoft press propaganda statements than anything else.
First I must say that my story is a long time ago (like the author of the article). I was an operator on an IBM 3083 17 years ago and left a few months after they had installed VM. We had the mainframe connected to the comanies bottlings plants across the whole country (running system 36 minis) and during the day, especially later in the afternoon most of the various plant's accounts/processing data would come in. The night shift would then start the accounting and processing jobs around 7PM and run them through the night and a few hours before the morning shift came in the Storage backup system would run (HSM) and then during the day the coders would do their thing etc.
The whole point of VM (and the mainframe) was that it is optimised for business systems, AFAIK, and unlike heavy scientific computing loads, there is seldom a need for incredible processing power in the CPU, but there is a need for distributed processes and extremely good I/O since most business tasks are often thrashing around on the disk getting and updating customer/financial info etc.
I don't think the zSeries would be doing as well as it is (eBay, Swedish and Japanese telcos etc) if there wasn't some advantage to this system. Probably, what sways a lot of these deals is that if your machine has any problems IBM will have a technician there pronto and their staff (at least in those days) were very professional and well trained.
Wow! You tell me to consider myself fortunate for trying to make a comment on Apples present success. Do you think the word "present success" has anything to do with what was happening to Apple in the mid '90s under Scully, Spindler or Amelio? This is 2002 and not 1995. The company has changed, as has the OS. I was trying to be somewhat positive and don't really understand your need to attack me. But if you need it and it solves some of your problems -fine.
http://www.friends-partners.org/mwade/craft/buran. htm
If you restrict the topic to Mac OSX only and exclude Newtons, WinCE etc OSX has had the technology since the days of the Developers Preview releases. In the public beta days, just before OSX 10.0 came out Apple announced that it had "developed" handwriting recognition for the OS (No, I can't remember where, possibly Maccentral archives?) but didn't include it in the product at the time. The lack of tablet drivers and applications made it completely useless at the time. In XP it is also useless unless you have a tablet or a TabletPC. I assume that Apple will release it's own version of a tabletPC this year sometime.
"Well if by "few" you mean "twenty" then yeah :)"
Apple was doing very badly in the mid '90s and losing a lot of money and customers until Jobs turned the company around. He did this mostly with the iMac at the time. He refined and simplified the product line which also helped a lot and introduced OSX which has done more to get users of other OS's to switch to Macs than any other previous OS (which tended to do the opposite)
"Um...Again it sounds like you are unaware that Apple has been all about ease-of-use for the last two decades"
OF course I know this, and agree that the classic Mac OS was easy to use. But the OS was very unstable and crash prone and quite backward. I sort of include not having to reboot your Mac three or four times a day under ease of use.
"Yet again...this feature has been available for years in previous versions of the Mac OS. Quite useful, I'm told, for very young children.
"
Again, I know this. I was referring to OSX, which hasn't had this until now.
OSX is the future on Macs. Classic Mac OS is not.
While the idea of some Hollywood start having one of these is ridiculous, the idea of selling one to a private enterprise company would be a huge boost for breaking the monopoly that governments hold on space travel. I'm sure that in the US it should not be too difficult for a space industries startup to gather $6 million from investors. The problem of course would be infrastructure (boosters, fuel, launchpads, tracking stations) but it would be a lot further down the road than current efforts are.
The Buran actually flew and according to most reports is very reliable compared to the space shuttle (12 years of testing, can fly automatically).
The ability for smaller firms to get into space would surely be paid back in terms of travel, industry etc.