Aww, just flamebait. You and Trip Hawkings (3DO's CEO) are the only people who believe that. Oops, Trip just changed his mind - you are completely alone now.
Have you ever played any XBox games? The games are gorgeous, the machine has 4 times the resolution of a PS2, 5 times the poly count, hardware tables for reflection models etc etc. It also has a hard drive which makes a big difference.
Well, why is XBox outsold by a 2-year old design at least 2:1 in all 3 markets? (7:1 in Japan! In Europe sales are so bad that Microsoft doesn't even release numbers. Around here most stores have stopped displaying XBoxes after a few days. (Last time I checked there was a small sign "for XBox ask employees") No, it was not outsold. The store slashed the price by 80 Euro at launch date to be able to sell at least some.)
Note that this is about new consoles sold, if you talk about installed base, the difference is even a lot greater. (But the gap is widening - see above)
Even the Dreamcast had a better start.
Now you tell me how the XBox is not dead. Nobody cares about 4 times the resolution because everybody has a usual TV anyway. Nobody cares about poly count except PC-gamers who will abandon the XBox as soon as the next gen of PC-cards are out.
Compared to IIS it dominates even more - in the unweigthed results, Apache runs about twice as many sites, in the weighted results about 3 to 4 times as many sites as IIS.
While Microsoft is good at bribing big hosting sites to tweak statistics, the reality looks a bit different, IIS marketshare declined significantly since the Code-Red attacks:
First, you don't need a database because you just have to fetch pages, the search-index is either unrelated to this or needs it anyway.
Secondly, downloading gigabytes of data is not free, it costs bandwidth. Consumer-prices around here are about 0.05 $ per Megabyte, let's assume that Teoma pays 0.01 $ per Megabyte (Yes, I know that they probably don't pay on a per-megabyte basis, nevertheless they have to pay for their bandwidth one way or the other. If anybody knows how much this costs more exactly, please feel free to correct me).
To download 10 Terabytes would cost 100000 $, cheap IDE-harddrives cost about 2$/GB, so storing 10 Terabytes would cost about 20000, or 5 times less. (Please note that 2$/GB are retail prices, if you actually buy 10Terabytes of harddisks, I guess you will get some kind of discount;-)
If you also take into account that you have to reindex sites frequently, (let's assume monthly), the yearly cost of operating the search engine is 60 times the cost of "storing the web".
So unless I'm completely off-scale with my assumtions, the cost to maintain a cache is actually neglegtible compared to the cost of basic search-engine operation.
Yeah, that's probably the reason why they run Windows2000 which contains Diskeeper, a program with full access to the hard disk which was written by a company that hires exclusively Scientologists. (Executive Software)
Even Microsoft doesn't have the source code of Diskeeper, so Teoma and millions of other people run a binary-only program which innards that have never been seen by a single non-Scientologist.
The lack of a single, consistent GUI for the operating system.
Just because this classical FUD is heard often does not make it true.
Just look at Windows. Is WMP consistent with the GUI? What about ICQ? What about Winamp?
What about Windows95 which was the greatest success of Microsoft despite being very inconsistent? (Win3.11 and DOS apps were very widespread at this time)
Look at the Mac which was everytime sooooo consistent and now Apple threw the whole system away and developing very inconsistent apps like Quicktime.
I'm not saying that consistency is not a factor, I'm saying it's just one among many and it's not a decisive factor, it's just "nice to have" and not really important at the end of the day.
1. Microsoft has a much freer pricing structure than most other component makers. Since they employ monopoly pricing they are able to price the product exactly at the point where it maximizes profit. Futher, since their marginal cost is essentially zero (as opposed to chips, disks, and other hardware components), they have a lot of downward headroom in their prices should this ever become an issue.
Look, Bill Gates has essentially 2 options:
a) Gradually slash prices and watch the MSFT-stock become worthless (In the 90ies, they had 50% to 90% growth PER YEAR. Shareholders expect them to grow at least at 20%. If they slash prices, they would immediately lose much revenue and essentially admit to shareholders that the years of big growth is over. With a P/E rating of over 30 (which is worse than some savings books BTW), MSFT-stock would lose most of it's value. And we talk about Bill Gates' stock here.
or
b) gradually sell MSFT-stock, get even richer (yes, I don't agree to the richness ratings, I only count real hard cash) and retire.
With Bill Gates selling thousands of shares every month and having already sold more than half of his stock, I think it's choice b).
What is good for Bill Gates (or his stock) need not be good for Microsoft - especially in the long run.
2. There is little evidence that cheaper wins out. A classic example is the IBM PC (and clones) which were substantially more expensive than home PC's (such as C64, Atari 400/800, Apple II, etc.) but won over the market big time.
Cheaper than Apple? I seriously doubt that. The success secret of the PC is openness.
Like in Linux, you can buy a PC from different vendors which means a saver investment.
Like in Linux, there is heavy competition which keeps prices low and performance high.
If anything, the PC's success is a hint for Linux' success.
How come we arrogantly assume that M$ is somehow unable to deal with the GPL when it got to where it is today by crushing other open software projects during its very beginnings.
Oh, no, not the next MS-whiner. (The $ in MS is a sure sign)
Just look at what the open-source community has done. It has written drivers, apps, kernels a complete computing environment. Compare that to the Windows-world: Microsoft created the central technologies, yes, but is heavily dependent on 3rd party companies creating drivers and apps for Windows. Microsoft couldn't write all drivers - even if they wanted to.
Now with IBM (4 times the revenue as MS), Sony (3 times the revenue in USA alone, probably more than 10 times worldwide) and a lot of other companies on our side....
Microsoft has a great position on the desktop, but all trends are working against them. Time is on our side.
It has nothing to do with "morals", "principles" or "ideology" - not much anyway.
Linux users are just sick of the Windows tax (every computer seller sells PCs without monitor, but very few without Windows.)
And Linux people are sick of not being able to run all software and hardware.
Cheap hardware prices will take care of the former, the Wine-project and CodeWeavers are taking care of the latter.
It's a bright future for Linux, especially CodeWeaver's efforts will solve a lot of problems for me and many other Linux users.
With everything getting better all the time (I remember 4 years ago having to recompile the kernel to get sound, I remember the dark years with no good browser - now we have 2 excellent (Konqueror and Mozilla) ones. Almost all hardware works and CodeWeavers is on a good way to make almost all software work.) I just don't understand why everybody is so pessimistic. The Microsoft case may prolong or shorten Microsoft's rule, but it won't decide the fate of the computing industry.
Well I think prior to the tabbed browsing feature (which was introduced in 0.9.6 or 7 AFAIR) there was simply no compelling reason to use it over Konqueror or IE.
OK, now imagine a car that explodes when you try and use a standard gas pump. It's not a stretch to imagine that it's better to block those cars and give them a warning rather than let them go on.
What nonsense.
Browsers don't explode. Probably some semi-useful feature like colored scrollbars might not work or the worst that can happen is that the page is displayed inproperly.
And in the next version it might be fixed - do you try every browser version that is coming out and test it against your webpage?
This kind of attitude is very shortsighted and just plain stupid.
"Yes, Mary? I am going to e-mail you a tarball...What?...No, it's OK, you won't have to get your fingers dirty. Now upen up a shell...yes, that little thingy that looks like a TV. Now type tar -xzvf....What? No, that's xz...as in zebra...vf. Yes...that's right."
Blah, blah, blah.
Now *YOU* tell me why it should be any more difficult to click on an attachement in KMail (yes KMail supports this, and it also opens tarballs in the right application) than it is in Outlook.
Let me plead again with the KDE/Gnome (and MicroSoft) designers: NEVER NEVER NEVER raise a window unless the user clicks ON THE TITLE BAR of THAT WINDOW
Funny, that's exactly the reason why I switched over to KDE1 in the bad old days. (Like you I didn't like the way Windows raises windows)
I totally agree on both counts. Steve Ballmer has already stated that every Windows app will eventually be re-written to run in the.NET framework. And I certainly don't trust that.NET will be forever platform independant. In fact they only submitted a small portion to the standards committee. So support for the Win32 api will eventually be a moot point.
Oh, come on, a very, very long time will pass until every app is rewritten for.NET..NET doesn't exist yet and more than half of Windows-users are running Windows98. (and some even Windows95).
What does that tell you? If you want to sell something you better make sure it works in Win98 and probably even in Win95 too.
That won't change for at least 5 years. With the PC-market decelerating, it will probably be even longer...
First of all, for me the Windows GUI doesn't cut it. I need my 16 KDE desktops, I need Unix-style copy/paste, I need respawning Konqui windows.
Secondly, Microsoft's latest EULA-clauses - for example Microsoft having the right to scan and install everything they want on your computer - is not that pleasing to some people. Of course you might say "Bill Gates knows better what is good for my computer than me", but some people might not want that. WPA is also not the most popular feature of Windows.
Thirdly, you get vendor independence. You can choose among many supporters and vendors like SuSE, Mandrake and debian. If you don't like one, you can switch to another.
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Have you ever played any XBox games? The games are gorgeous, the machine has 4 times the resolution of a PS2, 5 times the poly count, hardware tables for reflection models etc etc. It also has a hard drive which makes a big difference.
Well, why is XBox outsold by a 2-year old design at least 2:1 in all 3 markets? (7:1 in Japan! In Europe sales are so bad that Microsoft doesn't even release numbers. Around here most stores have stopped displaying XBoxes after a few days. (Last time I checked there was a small sign "for XBox ask employees") No, it was not outsold. The store slashed the price by 80 Euro at launch date to be able to sell at least some.)
Note that this is about new consoles sold, if you talk about installed base, the difference is even a lot greater. (But the gap is widening - see above)
Even the Dreamcast had a better start.
Now you tell me how the XBox is not dead. Nobody cares about 4 times the resolution because everybody has a usual TV anyway. Nobody cares about poly count except PC-gamers who will abandon the XBox as soon as the next gen of PC-cards are out.
Exactly. And we all know that no PC-gamer will buy the XBox anymore as soon as NVidia comes out with the next generation chips.
On the contrary, the XBox-hype about game consoles has caused 30% HIGHER PS2-sales in Europe in the week of XBoxes launch!!
In Germany, vendors had to reduce the price to 400 Euros (instead of 480), some even to 300 Euros to sell any XBoxes at all.
XBox is dead already.
Compared to IIS it dominates even more - in the unweigthed results, Apache runs about twice as many sites, in the weighted results about 3 to 4 times as many sites as IIS.
Apache is in all 3 categories at or near the all-time high!
BTW, all sites on securityspace are referred sites, so there are no parked domains in the other statistics either.
look for yourself
Nice is Japan and Germany
People who actually have to pay for IIS *are* switching to Apache, and only very few new companies start with IIS.
Come on, big marketing bucks coming from Redmond is more important than security.
Secondly, downloading gigabytes of data is not free, it costs bandwidth. Consumer-prices around here are about 0.05 $ per Megabyte, let's assume that Teoma pays 0.01 $ per Megabyte (Yes, I know that they probably don't pay on a per-megabyte basis, nevertheless they have to pay for their bandwidth one way or the other. If anybody knows how much this costs more exactly, please feel free to correct me).
To download 10 Terabytes would cost 100000 $, cheap IDE-harddrives cost about 2$/GB, so storing 10 Terabytes would cost about 20000, or 5 times less. (Please note that 2$/GB are retail prices, if you actually buy 10Terabytes of harddisks, I guess you will get some kind of discount ;-)
If you also take into account that you have to reindex sites frequently, (let's assume monthly), the yearly cost of operating the search engine is 60 times the cost of "storing the web".
So unless I'm completely off-scale with my assumtions, the cost to maintain a cache is actually neglegtible compared to the cost of basic search-engine operation.
So they have the money, they just think that spending it on ads is getting them farther than implementing a cache feature.
Maybe you need an IQ above 50 to realize that something doesn't automagically become great if you rename it.
Even Microsoft doesn't have the source code of Diskeeper, so Teoma and millions of other people run a binary-only program which innards that have never been seen by a single non-Scientologist.
Great, isn't it?
Just because this classical FUD is heard often does not make it true.
Just look at Windows. Is WMP consistent with the GUI? What about ICQ? What about Winamp?
What about Windows95 which was the greatest success of Microsoft despite being very inconsistent? (Win3.11 and DOS apps were very widespread at this time)
Look at the Mac which was everytime sooooo consistent and now Apple threw the whole system away and developing very inconsistent apps like Quicktime.
I'm not saying that consistency is not a factor, I'm saying it's just one among many and it's not a decisive factor, it's just "nice to have" and not really important at the end of the day.
BTW, KDE can give you consistency.
Look, Bill Gates has essentially 2 options:
a) Gradually slash prices and watch the MSFT-stock become worthless (In the 90ies, they had 50% to 90% growth PER YEAR. Shareholders expect them to grow at least at 20%. If they slash prices, they would immediately lose much revenue and essentially admit to shareholders that the years of big growth is over. With a P/E rating of over 30 (which is worse than some savings books BTW), MSFT-stock would lose most of it's value. And we talk about Bill Gates' stock here.
or
b) gradually sell MSFT-stock, get even richer (yes, I don't agree to the richness ratings, I only count real hard cash) and retire.
With Bill Gates selling thousands of shares every month and having already sold more than half of his stock, I think it's choice b).
What is good for Bill Gates (or his stock) need not be good for Microsoft - especially in the long run.
2. There is little evidence that cheaper wins out. A classic example is the IBM PC (and clones) which were substantially more expensive than home PC's (such as C64, Atari 400/800, Apple II, etc.) but won over the market big time.
Cheaper than Apple? I seriously doubt that. The success secret of the PC is openness.
Like in Linux, you can buy a PC from different vendors which means a saver investment.
Like in Linux, there is heavy competition which keeps prices low and performance high.
If anything, the PC's success is a hint for Linux' success.
Oh, no, not the next MS-whiner. (The $ in MS is a sure sign)
Just look at what the open-source community has done. It has written drivers, apps, kernels a complete computing environment. Compare that to the Windows-world: Microsoft created the central technologies, yes, but is heavily dependent on 3rd party companies creating drivers and apps for Windows. Microsoft couldn't write all drivers - even if they wanted to.
Now with IBM (4 times the revenue as MS), Sony (3 times the revenue in USA alone, probably more than 10 times worldwide) and a lot of other companies on our side....
Microsoft has a great position on the desktop, but all trends are working against them. Time is on our side.
Linux users are just sick of the Windows tax (every computer seller sells PCs without monitor, but very few without Windows.)
And Linux people are sick of not being able to run all software and hardware.
Cheap hardware prices will take care of the former, the Wine-project and CodeWeavers are taking care of the latter.
It's a bright future for Linux, especially CodeWeaver's efforts will solve a lot of problems for me and many other Linux users.
With everything getting better all the time (I remember 4 years ago having to recompile the kernel to get sound, I remember the dark years with no good browser - now we have 2 excellent (Konqueror and Mozilla) ones. Almost all hardware works and CodeWeavers is on a good way to make almost all software work.) I just don't understand why everybody is so pessimistic. The Microsoft case may prolong or shorten Microsoft's rule, but it won't decide the fate of the computing industry.
What nonsense.
Browsers don't explode. Probably some semi-useful feature like colored scrollbars might not work or the worst that can happen is that the page is displayed inproperly.
And in the next version it might be fixed - do you try every browser version that is coming out and test it against your webpage?
This kind of attitude is very shortsighted and just plain stupid.
Blah, blah, blah.
Now *YOU* tell me why it should be any more difficult to click on an attachement in KMail (yes KMail supports this, and it also opens tarballs in the right application) than it is in Outlook.
For people who bought Crossover Plugin it's only 40$, so it's not that much.
Funny, that's exactly the reason why I switched over to KDE1 in the bad old days. (Like you I didn't like the way Windows raises windows)
KDE can be configured that way and always could.
I hope you are reading this.. Could you check if DirectX stuff works in Internet Explorer?
I have a customer that needs to run one site that requires Flash5 and works *ONLY* in Internet Explorer. (Probably because of DirectX) p Thanks a lot!
Oh, come on, a very, very long time will pass until every app is rewritten for .NET. .NET doesn't exist yet and more than half of Windows-users are running Windows98. (and some even Windows95).
What does that tell you? If you want to sell something you better make sure it works in Win98 and probably even in Win95 too.
That won't change for at least 5 years. With the PC-market decelerating, it will probably be even longer...
Secondly, Microsoft's latest EULA-clauses - for example Microsoft having the right to scan and install everything they want on your computer - is not that pleasing to some people. Of course you might say "Bill Gates knows better what is good for my computer than me", but some people might not want that. WPA is also not the most popular feature of Windows.
Thirdly, you get vendor independence. You can choose among many supporters and vendors like SuSE, Mandrake and debian. If you don't like one, you can switch to another.
For crossover-plugin owners it's only 40$.