Apple computers are not great for their technological achievements. Neither are PCs. Macs are defined by their superiorly engineered user interfaces. I'm not just talking about the apple menu or the pop-up folder tabs. Macs are engineered to be easy to use from hardware to software.
The G4 campaign is just a way for Apple, a publicly held company, to give more dividends to its stockholders and raise its stock price. Who cares if it is technologically superior. Well, as Katz says, geeks do. This is not what a Mac is, was, or ever has been.
Just like a Saab or a Bang and Olfson stereo, the Mac is a cool toy that has an incredible user experience. Apple has also cornered the market in audio, video, MIDI, and graphics production.
So if you want a car that is a little different, a stereo that comes alive when you wave your hand in front of it, or a computer that allows you to do your work without worrying about changing the way you work every five minutes, then you should get a Saab, a B&O Stereo system, and a Mac. If you want a car that is really fast, a stereo that is really loud, or a computer that works, then you can get a Corvette, a Pioneer, and a Wintel. (Oh wait, I said works...make that a Lintel(r)
I must say that voter fraud will happen no matter how the people vote.
Take Landreau vs Jenkins for US Senate. there was evidence of massive voter fraud. Jenkins thought it was enough where he would have actually won, even though he was 10,000 votes behind.
We have the same controls as any other place for voting. We use electromechanical voting machines that are verified by a clerk of court in the open. But, we still have people voting twice in two different parishes (counties) and getting away with it. We also have people getting paid from "anonymous sources" for voting one way or the other.
Voting on the internet will not change the amount of voter fraud, at least here. It will get rid of voter anonymity, though. Currently, there is no way to tell who voted what because the machines contain only counters.
I didn't know that that was the only one. Assumed that was the difference between ordering/download. I downloaded 5.2.
So, we should buy the disto because it supports the company that created it. Sort of like why you buy a music CD (although the record company gets its 80% or so!)
Official Red Hat has Metro X (???) and other propriatary software that requires a license. It also comes with support.
The distribution is all GNU and other free software.
I guess book writers will have to get permission to use the name Red Hat(tm) or say something like "The Linux Distribution created by Red Hat Software". I don't think someone can say "Hey, you can't print the name of our company!"
Every non-commercial graphics program that compresses GIFs must get the license. I use Graphic Converter (a mighty nice program), and T. Lemke must pay a portion of the $35 he charges for his shareware. Every copy of Photoshop, Canvas, etc. gives Uni$y$ more money. They are just flexing their legal rights. Now, they don't want a for-profit, such as VA Research, to make a web site with the Gimp and not get a piece of the pie.
I wouldn't call them morons, just greedy people. Anyway, if you can get a program that handles 100 different file formats, and by the way handles GIF, for $35, Unisys can't be asking for much.
Hey, who's to know. It is a waste of time to do this anyway. If someone was sending/receiving porn, it would often be caught by other means--peering eyes or noticing that some people have a large e-mail file/DB, but few messages.
We caught one guy when we were checking our web logs to see what was taking up so much of our pathetic bandwith. The guy was demoted.
E-mail is different from a phone. For one thing, you can't send pictures over the phone. Also, all e-mail is routed through public networks. Sysadmins at many points have access to these e-mails. E-mail is far from private at any level. If users want privacy with their e-mail, they should use their personal accounts on their own time.
I hate their damned web pages. They are always giving errors.
When I have a bug in an MS product, I've found that they have a giant database of all bugs and all fixes in Support and Knowledge Base on their search page.
Their search site's ASP pages always give errors or sometimes say that no data is available. Hit Refresh, and there are 7 or 8 links. Gotta love IIS + SQL 7.0
Micro$ost is to Ford (or Renault rather) as Linux is to Toyota
My Mac crashed constantly: A typical web dev session: Open Photoshop, Open Illustrator, Open EMACS, do some stuff, Open Navigator, Open Graphics Converter, Close Illustrator (low on memory), Close Graphic Converter, Open Illustrator, Go to Navigator and hit refresh....Error of Type 2 occurred...Reload Navigator, [continue in a similar fashion], THE POINTER FREEZES, Reboot (5 minutes), start all over again
Of course, I saved before I switched between applications, so I didn't loose anything major, but the Mac does crash often when you are using it.
I develop for the Web using Linux now, and it never crashes or gives me trouble. I did have to cut some flips to get the Gimp to work, though, so it's not perfect.
the operating system...the Kernel...is a very stable and solid product. My desktop crashes periodically, but if you're smart, you just restart it (a.k.a. kill the explorer process.) The active desktop is crap (web page desktop). It kept crashing my desktop process. The desktop process I guess would be analagous to an X window manager???
It's all of the other MS crap that causes so much trouble. Excel is constantly crashing. Access has the ability to bring a system to a halt. I was glad to see that the new Access is multithreaded, but I'm sure it has the same problems. Internet Explorer I find is a solid program.
But, take some mission critical software:
Exchange Server freaks out all the time.
SQL Server 7.0 is S#1T. It's got a gigantic memory leak. Download a table in access and used memory goes up by a couple hundred megabytes! I guess we'll have to wait until service pack 5,000 to fix that one.
Proxy Server is not too good either. It's a pain to configure, for one thing.
etc. etc.
So, the point is that those NT Kernel people at Microsoft are doing a decent job and balme the OS when the real problem is the OS.
What I am referring to is that ICQ as well as AOL make money off of advertisements. Somehow, they make money. ICQ makes it off of advertisements on their web site and probably from other sources. Eventually, they may put ads in the program.
I am not an IRC user, so I was making assumptions. I went to irchelp.org and found that it is basically Talk++ with a server and that servers are around the world run by non-profits or schools. I guess it would not hurt IRC, but it would reduce the potential user base.
My friends like ICQ because it has advanced functions like sending pictures/files as well as having the function to send 15 second audio files. (That and they just think it's cool. They are WinDoze users:( ) I'm not much for chat rooms, so I use ICQ only to send instant messages and the occasional file to my friends online.
Re:Software Suite for Ancient PCs:Non-Profit
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High Tech Junk
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It seems like the organization that is promoting this software, the not-for-profit (www.newdeal.org) would do better if their software had open source code. That way, there could be better auditing and more ease finding bugs.
Oooh, Aaah, assembly language! I remember that from back in the day.
There are always a ton for sale here in Southern Louisiana. There is even a store in Baton Rouge! Check your local thrifty paper.
Re:Old macs are great machines too.
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High Tech Junk
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Are you kidding, I used my Mac Plus until three years ago when I bought a PowerMac 6100/66 DOS. (Tried to load Linux/x86 on the DOS card...couldn't find the floppy or hard disk!) Anyway, I used the Mac Plus for everything: word processing, budget spreadsheets, drawing maps, and doing MIDI sequencing. It worked great. I had one MIDI sequence that had so much data that my poor 68000 would crawl to its knees and MacOS 6.0.8 would crash. Ah, the joys of MultiFinder (lament). That computer's UI was as fast as my 233/128MB NT machine is now (of course, I'm running SQL Server 6.5 for dev.:0 ). My Linux box makes it eat dust though. Even MKLinux on the PPC made it eat dust, and made MacOS eat dust. Oh, and the 9" screen!
Long live the 8/16's and 16/32's! They are just damn fine for word processing, spreadsheets, drawing figures and bitmaps, and maybe doing some miscellaneous tasks.
Breaking down a proprietary system may be good if we are breaking down the Win32 API, but we are talking about AOL's IM system and one company who will probably break its protocol: M$.
The only good that will come of this is AOL will possibly lose control of its IM system. M$ is probably using this to hurt AOL in some kind of underhanded way. Who the heck uses AOL's IM anyway? AOL subscribers. And who else?
All I hear is raves about ICQ and IRC and none about IM. It seems like AOL is way behind on this front. BTW, if M$ would build IM into their OS, it would crush ICQ and IRC financially. This is how M$ uses their monopoly power to kill companies, they buy into a technology and give it away for free.
For example, I heard about how several companies were offering (if I remember correctly) a video game audio technology. They were competing and were selling their technology. The software was continuously getting better and competetion was fierce. Micro$oft bought one of the companies. They took their software development kit and bundled it with another M$ development kit as a free add on. The other companies went out of business, competition has ceased, and development toward a mature product has ceased.
It is not necessairly good to have developing technologies as open source because it diverts revenues from these emerging markets. In the case of Operating Systems, the market has stagnated and this is why we see KDE and GNOME comming up from the rear with systems almost as user friendly as a Mac.
There is also the case where systems are not commercially viable. For example, EMACS is not a comercially viable product (Try to sell it to someone;), but is very useful for the many people that use it. So, it has become open source.
A market where I see that open source is not ready is digital audio and MIDI. If you look at Studio Vision, it is very hard to imagine developing such a product through open source. It is extremely complex and highly integrated. Only a highly talented development team who has access to tons of research can produce such a easy to use and robust program. Other examples are Photoshop, Canvas (compare to GIMP), Adobe Illustrator, and Macromedia Freehand (compare to xfig and killustrator).
On the other hand, anyone who has taken a comprehensive Operating Systems course and has some talent could write Linux or the Windows Kernel or even the Mac Kernel. (The NT kernel, from what I have read, is radically different. different != better)
So, what I am trying to say is that competition+venture capital feeds progress and M$=monopoly=kill progress. Also open source cannot compete with radical commercial software products.
than my 95 users. 98 is crap, because they've broken power management. Every 98 computer that I've bought, without and with changing default settings, has gone to sleep only to never wake up a great (20-80%) percentage of the time.
Users come to me, "My computer always goes to sleep and won't wake up." I always ask, "Are you running Windows 98?" And amazingly they say, "Yes." A: Disable power management.
Or, "When I shut down, I get a black screen and the computer hangs." I ask: "Win98?" And the answer is always (GUESS?)
Of course, NT almost never crashes. My laptop has never crashed since SP4. I have to reboot (because NT has no way to go into administrative mode without logging out--a pain in my ass) for convienience sake to restart all of my services when the SQL Server 6.5 (Dev. Ed.) memory leak creaps up, and that's only once a week. (i.e. faster than logging out, logging in as Admin, restarting MSSQLServer, logging out again, and logging back in.
I was reading about the 19,000 NT versions in the latest issues of NT Magazine. (load ballancing edition, terminal server edition, cluster edition, enterprise server edition,...) Maybe if they opened the source, people could compile their own editions. (musique edition - Run afterstep as the window manager:)
AND of course, my Linux box is faster and never crashes with a slower processor and less RAM than my laptop.
If you want MS S#1t to get better, E-mail MS and let them know that they suck. Eventually they will get the point and maybe, just maybe, make a descent OS product.
Re:Single click...more user oriented.
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Some KDE news
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I personally prefer single click. I started experimenting with "buttons" on my Mac. I find it easier: rubberband to select (or click the name) and click the button to open.
Now with NT/IE 5.0, you don't even have to click to select, just pause over a file and it is selected. Hold shift to select multiple files or control to select non-contiguous files.
KDE's single click is going with the trend. It is easier and less confusing for a naive user. Lots of users that I work with do not know if they have double clicked fast enough. I see it all the time...users double click, waits 10 seconds and wonders why nothing happened and double clicks again.
Double click should be an option though: I've seen die-hard Mac and PC users double click URL links on an HTML page.
KDE is designed to be a users UI, and single click is the simplest and easiest UI (IMHO). I DO think that they should default close to be on the opposite side of maximize/minimize as on the Mac--Much superior (how many times have you accidentily clicked the X instead of maximize? How many times on a Mac?)
I've had personal experience with biasing ethics for self interest. I was working for a company that was a major contributor to a not-for-profit. A major competitor of theirs wanted to place an event listing in the NFP's newsletter. I was also a member of the NFP (a bike club). We came to a meeting and let everyone know (employees of the company and others) that we should not put for-profit rides in the newsletter. The club officers agreed and the rides were not put in future newsletter (they had appeared in one rogue one). Also, the company paid for the newsletter distribution, so they would in effect be paying for their competitor's advertisement.
Ethically, this type of behavior is questionable. It's like the MS-NBC site trying to publish objective commentary on MS's pseudo-competitors (pseudo because Linux and BSD are not companies, they are entities). It doesn't work. Our newsletter exceuded all for-profit events, even by our sponsor. (But, our sponsor had access to our mailing list, so...)
Only a truly independent media organization can objectively report news. Even the non-profits, NPR, PBS, and PRI are biased by their sponsors. The writers will think (perhaps not consciously): "Helping my company (i.e. the MS part of MS-NBC) will help me."
The biggest security hole with Windows is that it is too easy to run programs that open security holes. It is too difficult to protect a system when your executables are read/write by users and executables have so much control over resources. It's too easy to attach trojan horses to e-mails (aka Melissa).
I was shocked when many of my NT programs did not run or gave warning/error messages when I protected their directories (i.e. \Program Files) as read only. Unix has it right in this department--protecting the/usr tree from the user!
The license for this project is not exactly "Open Source", but it is free for educational institutions. The neural net takes as input 5 LPC constants and has as output biphones (hundreds of them.) It's written in C. You can download it, play with it, and learn stuff. The license for commercial use requires payment.
I actually tried to make modifications to it in a class, but due to time constraints and lack of documentation I was unable to finish my changes. I think I made an A anyway and I learned a good deal about AI.
Windows NT is compiled to run on the Intel 80386 instruction set, just like Linux x86. It will run on it, but it needs sufficent RAM. 1MB won't cut it. I think that NT needs at least 16MB of RAM.
Running NT on a 386 would be an exercise in futility and somewhat akin to the Chineese Water Torchure. Heck, NT on my 233 Pentium MMX when it had 64MB wasn't very pleasant. 128MB...Ahh, much better. Linux, on the other hand, on my 66MHz PowerPC and on my 200MHz AMD-K6 and even on a 25MHz 486 was/is quite pleasant.
Boy, as an ex-6502 programmer (Atari 8-bit, for fun only:), I think it would be pretty damned difficult to port a multiprogramming OS to the 6502.
1. 64K maximum address space (apple ][ had up to 128K, paged I assume--Atari had Fredie). 2. 1 8-bit general purpose register 3. 2 8-bit index registers 4. A 256 byte stack fixed at locations 256-511 5. No memory paging (only external paging). 6. No indirect addressing (only indirect+index) 7. A bug that if a jump address was on a 256 byte boundary, that the first byte and second byte were taken from the same page (can't remember which jump, though). 8. 1MHz 9. One interrupt level 10. One 8-bit IO port
Having a single OS is a great idea. I'd love all applications to run on the same platform. (serious note-)The problem is that this can only exist in a legitemate way if there are independent national and/or international standards governing the OS. The OS cannot have a propriatary API.(/serious note)
Windows has a propriatary API: MFC/WFC/etc. MacOS has a propriatary API: Carbon (but, OS X will be (or could easily become) POSIX compliant). Linux has a standard API: POSIX
Perhaps Windows should be POSIX compliant, THEN we can have one OS API: POSIX (plus the necessary recompile). Leave your MFC/WFC/COM/Whatever and call it "value added" (i.e. portability subtracted) and there you go, Windoze bassackward compatability.
(P.S. Not even all Windows apps will run on all Windows machines out of the box: NT Alpha--NT i386, so HA!)
(P.P.S. Lets see some embedded computers running real time processing run Windozzze.)
Here's what I had to say to Mindcraft. I think that this s#!t is getting out of hand:
To whom it may concern,
I was reading your Net Rage article after reading about it on Slash Dot. I must say that I am offended that you would reprint such garbage on your web site. Some Linux advocates are teenagers and don't even know what they are talking about and are usually expressing some sort of angst...posting these e-mails will probably give you more flack than the original study that you did.
On the benchmarks, I never give much credit to any--especially across platforms. My 66MHz Mac continuously outperformed my 233MHz Windows NT box when the NT box had only 64MB of RAM and the Mac had 72MB of RAM from the standpoint of the user interface, such menu reaction time and application launch time. This is completely irrelevant to anything else, because the NT box is really faster at doing more things in the same amount of time (I would hope).
It seems pointless to argue that Linux or NT is better based on one set of benchmarks on one machine. I seriously doubt that NT would outperform Linux on a 16MHz i386 with 16MB of RAM! For fairness sake, why don't you benchmark Linux and NT on a full spectrum of computer hardware from a 386 to the fastest multi-processor NT machine. And not just Linux, why not Solaris, SCO Unix, Rhapsody, and FreeBSD? Your tests make it seem that you are biased, and people will respond accordingly, though not appropriately. MacWorld benchmarks show that NT+IIS is very fast--much faster than Solaris and MacOS X! Posting a full set of benchmarks will give you more credibility kudos than posting offensive e-mail.
Sincerely,
#MY REAL NAME#
Re:Microsoft will be seen in a positive light?...
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Salon on Mindcraft II
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If I remember correctly, NT Server outperformed Linux by a significant amount--more than 2 times (???). It would take some serious optimization to create a performance increase of that magnitude, especially since, I'm sure, M$ is doing more optimization of their own.
I don't doubt that NT would outperform Linux on such a beast of a machine, but I certainly wouldn't run NT or Linux on it (4 processors, 2GB RAM, a RAID). Isn't the SMP in Linux very new? I'd probably, well first shop and compare, then choose something like Solaris or another web server and OS optimized for that many processors, which would outperform both. Linux and NT, I would think, would be best at doing general purpose computing.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple computers are not great for their technological achievements. Neither are PCs. Macs are defined by their superiorly engineered user interfaces. I'm not just talking about the apple menu or the pop-up folder tabs. Macs are engineered to be easy to use from hardware to software.
The G4 campaign is just a way for Apple, a publicly held company, to give more dividends to its stockholders and raise its stock price. Who cares if it is technologically superior. Well, as Katz says, geeks do. This is not what a Mac is, was, or ever has been.
Just like a Saab or a Bang and Olfson stereo, the Mac is a cool toy that has an incredible user experience. Apple has also cornered the market in audio, video, MIDI, and graphics production.
So if you want a car that is a little different, a stereo that comes alive when you wave your hand in front of it, or a computer that allows you to do your work without worrying about changing the way you work every five minutes, then you should get a Saab, a B&O Stereo system, and a Mac. If you want a car that is really fast, a stereo that is really loud, or a computer that works, then you can get a Corvette, a Pioneer, and a Wintel. (Oh wait, I said works...make that a Lintel(r)
I must say that voter fraud will happen no matter how the people vote.
Take Landreau vs Jenkins for US Senate. there was evidence of massive voter fraud. Jenkins thought it was enough where he would have actually won, even though he was 10,000 votes behind.
We have the same controls as any other place for voting. We use electromechanical voting machines that are verified by a clerk of court in the open. But, we still have people voting twice in two different parishes (counties) and getting away with it. We also have people getting paid from "anonymous sources" for voting one way or the other.
Voting on the internet will not change the amount of voter fraud, at least here. It will get rid of voter anonymity, though. Currently, there is no way to tell who voted what because the machines contain only counters.
I didn't know that that was the only one. Assumed that was the difference between ordering/download. I downloaded 5.2.
So, we should buy the disto because it supports the company that created it. Sort of like why you buy a music CD (although the record company gets its 80% or so!)
Official Red Hat has Metro X (???) and other propriatary software that requires a license. It also comes with support.
The distribution is all GNU and other free software.
I guess book writers will have to get permission to use the name Red Hat(tm) or say something like "The Linux Distribution created by Red Hat Software". I don't think someone can say "Hey, you can't print the name of our company!"
Every non-commercial graphics program that compresses GIFs must get the license. I use Graphic Converter (a mighty nice program), and T. Lemke must pay a portion of the $35 he charges for his shareware. Every copy of Photoshop, Canvas, etc. gives Uni$y$ more money. They are just flexing their legal rights. Now, they don't want a for-profit, such as VA Research, to make a web site with the Gimp and not get a piece of the pie.
I wouldn't call them morons, just greedy people. Anyway, if you can get a program that handles 100 different file formats, and by the way handles GIF, for $35, Unisys can't be asking for much.
My $.02 (or is it for Unisys:)
Hey, who's to know. It is a waste of time to do this anyway. If someone was sending/receiving porn, it would often be caught by other means--peering eyes or noticing that some people have a large e-mail file/DB, but few messages.
We caught one guy when we were checking our web logs to see what was taking up so much of our pathetic bandwith. The guy was demoted.
E-mail is different from a phone. For one thing, you can't send pictures over the phone. Also, all e-mail is routed through public networks. Sysadmins at many points have access to these e-mails. E-mail is far from private at any level. If users want privacy with their e-mail, they should use their personal accounts on their own time.
I hate their damned web pages. They are always giving errors.
When I have a bug in an MS product, I've found that they have a giant database of all bugs and all fixes in Support and Knowledge Base on their search page.
Their search site's ASP pages always give errors or sometimes say that no data is available. Hit Refresh, and there are 7 or 8 links. Gotta love IIS + SQL 7.0
Micro$ost is to Ford (or Renault rather) as Linux is to Toyota
...one of the first Woman admirals.
She just invented the compiler, that's all;-)
Not to mention 50% of my CS professors...
My Mac crashed constantly:
A typical web dev session:
Open Photoshop, Open Illustrator, Open EMACS, do some stuff, Open Navigator, Open Graphics Converter, Close Illustrator (low on memory), Close Graphic Converter, Open Illustrator, Go to Navigator and hit refresh....Error of Type 2 occurred...Reload Navigator, [continue in a similar fashion], THE POINTER FREEZES, Reboot (5 minutes), start all over again
Of course, I saved before I switched between applications, so I didn't loose anything major, but the Mac does crash often when you are using it.
I develop for the Web using Linux now, and it never crashes or gives me trouble. I did have to cut some flips to get the Gimp to work, though, so it's not perfect.
the operating system...the Kernel...is a very stable and solid product. My desktop crashes periodically, but if you're smart, you just restart it (a.k.a. kill the explorer process.) The active desktop is crap (web page desktop). It kept crashing my desktop process. The desktop process I guess would be analagous to an X window manager???
It's all of the other MS crap that causes so much trouble. Excel is constantly crashing. Access has the ability to bring a system to a halt. I was glad to see that the new Access is multithreaded, but I'm sure it has the same problems. Internet Explorer I find is a solid program.
But, take some mission critical software:
Exchange Server freaks out all the time.
SQL Server 7.0 is S#1T. It's got a gigantic memory leak. Download a table in access and used memory goes up by a couple hundred megabytes! I guess we'll have to wait until service pack 5,000 to fix that one.
Proxy Server is not too good either. It's a pain to configure, for one thing.
etc. etc.
So, the point is that those NT Kernel people at Microsoft are doing a decent job and balme the OS when the real problem is the OS.
What I am referring to is that ICQ as well as AOL make money off of advertisements. Somehow, they make money. ICQ makes it off of advertisements on their web site and probably from other sources. Eventually, they may put ads in the program.
:( ) I'm not much for chat rooms, so I use ICQ only to send instant messages and the occasional file to my friends online.
I am not an IRC user, so I was making assumptions. I went to irchelp.org and found that it is basically Talk++ with a server and that servers are around the world run by non-profits or schools. I guess it would not hurt IRC, but it would reduce the potential user base.
My friends like ICQ because it has advanced functions like sending pictures/files as well as having the function to send 15 second audio files. (That and they just think it's cool. They are WinDoze users
It seems like the organization that is promoting this software, the not-for-profit (www.newdeal.org) would do better if their software had open source code. That way, there could be better auditing and more ease finding bugs.
Oooh, Aaah, assembly language! I remember that from back in the day.
There are always a ton for sale here in Southern Louisiana. There is even a store in Baton Rouge! Check your local thrifty paper.
Are you kidding, I used my Mac Plus until three years ago when I bought a PowerMac 6100/66 DOS. (Tried to load Linux/x86 on the DOS card...couldn't find the floppy or hard disk!) Anyway, I used the Mac Plus for everything: word processing, budget spreadsheets, drawing maps, and doing MIDI sequencing. It worked great. I had one MIDI sequence that had so much data that my poor 68000 would crawl to its knees and MacOS 6.0.8 would crash. Ah, the joys of MultiFinder (lament).
That computer's UI was as fast as my 233/128MB NT machine is now (of course, I'm running SQL Server 6.5 for dev.:0 ). My Linux box makes it eat dust though. Even MKLinux on the PPC made it eat dust, and made MacOS eat dust. Oh, and the 9" screen!
Long live the 8/16's and 16/32's! They are just damn fine for word processing, spreadsheets, drawing figures and bitmaps, and maybe doing some miscellaneous tasks.
Breaking down a proprietary system may be good if we are breaking down the Win32 API, but we are talking about AOL's IM system and one company who will probably break its protocol: M$.
The only good that will come of this is AOL will possibly lose control of its IM system. M$ is probably using this to hurt AOL in some kind of underhanded way. Who the heck uses AOL's IM anyway? AOL subscribers. And who else?
All I hear is raves about ICQ and IRC and none about IM. It seems like AOL is way behind on this front. BTW, if M$ would build IM into their OS, it would crush ICQ and IRC financially. This is how M$ uses their monopoly power to kill companies, they buy into a technology and give it away for free.
For example, I heard about how several companies were offering (if I remember correctly) a video game audio technology. They were competing and were selling their technology. The software was continuously getting better and competetion was fierce. Micro$oft bought one of the companies. They took their software development kit and bundled it with another M$ development kit as a free add on. The other companies went out of business, competition has ceased, and development toward a mature product has ceased.
It is not necessairly good to have developing technologies as open source because it diverts revenues from these emerging markets. In the case of Operating Systems, the market has stagnated and this is why we see KDE and GNOME comming up from the rear with systems almost as user friendly as a Mac.
There is also the case where systems are not commercially viable. For example, EMACS is not a comercially viable product (Try to sell it to someone;), but is very useful for the many people that use it. So, it has become open source.
A market where I see that open source is not ready is digital audio and MIDI. If you look at Studio Vision, it is very hard to imagine developing such a product through open source. It is extremely complex and highly integrated. Only a highly talented development team who has access to tons of research can produce such a easy to use and robust program. Other examples are Photoshop, Canvas (compare to GIMP), Adobe Illustrator, and Macromedia Freehand (compare to xfig and killustrator).
On the other hand, anyone who has taken a comprehensive Operating Systems course and has some talent could write Linux or the Windows Kernel or even the Mac Kernel. (The NT kernel, from what I have read, is radically different. different != better)
So, what I am trying to say is that competition+venture capital feeds progress and M$=monopoly=kill progress. Also open source cannot compete with radical commercial software products.
than my 95 users. 98 is crap, because they've broken power management. Every 98 computer that I've bought, without and with changing default settings, has gone to sleep only to never wake up a great (20-80%) percentage of the time.
...) Maybe if they opened the source, people could compile their own editions. (musique edition - Run afterstep as the window manager :)
Users come to me, "My computer always goes to sleep and won't wake up." I always ask, "Are you running Windows 98?" And amazingly they say, "Yes." A: Disable power management.
Or, "When I shut down, I get a black screen and the computer hangs." I ask: "Win98?" And the answer is always (GUESS?)
Of course, NT almost never crashes. My laptop has never crashed since SP4. I have to reboot (because NT has no way to go into administrative mode without logging out--a pain in my ass) for convienience sake to restart all of my services when the SQL Server 6.5 (Dev. Ed.) memory leak creaps up, and that's only once a week. (i.e. faster than logging out, logging in as Admin, restarting MSSQLServer, logging out again, and logging back in.
I was reading about the 19,000 NT versions in the latest issues of NT Magazine. (load ballancing edition, terminal server edition, cluster edition, enterprise server edition,
AND of course, my Linux box is faster and never crashes with a slower processor and less RAM than my laptop.
If you want MS S#1t to get better, E-mail MS and let them know that they suck. Eventually they will get the point and maybe, just maybe, make a descent OS product.
I personally prefer single click. I started experimenting with "buttons" on my Mac. I find it easier: rubberband to select (or click the name) and click the button to open.
Now with NT/IE 5.0, you don't even have to click to select, just pause over a file and it is selected. Hold shift to select multiple files or control to select non-contiguous files.
KDE's single click is going with the trend. It is easier and less confusing for a naive user. Lots of users that I work with do not know if they have double clicked fast enough. I see it all the time...users double click, waits 10 seconds and wonders why nothing happened and double clicks again.
Double click should be an option though: I've seen die-hard Mac and PC users double click URL links on an HTML page.
KDE is designed to be a users UI, and single click is the simplest and easiest UI (IMHO). I DO think that they should default close to be on the opposite side of maximize/minimize as on the Mac--Much superior (how many times have you accidentily clicked the X instead of maximize? How many times on a Mac?)
I've had personal experience with biasing ethics for self interest. I was working for a company that was a major contributor to a not-for-profit. A major competitor of theirs wanted to place an event listing in the NFP's newsletter. I was also a member of the NFP (a bike club). We came to a meeting and let everyone know (employees of the company and others) that we should not put for-profit rides in the newsletter. The club officers agreed and the rides were not put in future newsletter (they had appeared in one rogue one). Also, the company paid for the newsletter distribution, so they would in effect be paying for their competitor's advertisement.
/. be biased????? Nah!
Ethically, this type of behavior is questionable. It's like the MS-NBC site trying to publish objective commentary on MS's pseudo-competitors (pseudo because Linux and BSD are not companies, they are entities). It doesn't work. Our newsletter exceuded all for-profit events, even by our sponsor. (But, our sponsor had access to our mailing list, so...)
Only a truly independent media organization can objectively report news. Even the non-profits, NPR, PBS, and PRI are biased by their sponsors. The writers will think (perhaps not consciously): "Helping my company (i.e. the MS part of MS-NBC) will help me."
Could
The biggest security hole with Windows is that it is too easy to run programs that open security holes. It is too difficult to protect a system when your executables are read/write by users and executables have so much control over resources. It's too easy to attach trojan horses to e-mails (aka Melissa).
/usr tree from the user!
I was shocked when many of my NT programs did not run or gave warning/error messages when I protected their directories (i.e. \Program Files) as read only. Unix has it right in this department--protecting the
http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/
The license for this project is not exactly "Open Source", but it is free for educational institutions. The neural net takes as input 5 LPC constants and has as output biphones (hundreds of them.) It's written in C. You can download it, play with it, and learn stuff. The license for commercial use requires payment.
I actually tried to make modifications to it in a class, but due to time constraints and lack of documentation I was unable to finish my changes. I think I made an A anyway and I learned a good deal about AI.
Windows NT is compiled to run on the Intel 80386 instruction set, just like Linux x86. It will run on it, but it needs sufficent RAM. 1MB won't cut it. I think that NT needs at least 16MB of RAM.
Running NT on a 386 would be an exercise in futility and somewhat akin to the Chineese Water Torchure. Heck, NT on my 233 Pentium MMX when it had 64MB wasn't very pleasant. 128MB...Ahh, much better. Linux, on the other hand, on my 66MHz PowerPC and on my 200MHz AMD-K6 and even on a 25MHz 486 was/is quite pleasant.
Boy, as an ex-6502 programmer (Atari 8-bit, for fun only:), I think it would be pretty damned difficult to port a multiprogramming OS to the 6502.
1. 64K maximum address space (apple ][ had up to 128K, paged I assume--Atari had Fredie).
2. 1 8-bit general purpose register
3. 2 8-bit index registers
4. A 256 byte stack fixed at locations 256-511
5. No memory paging (only external paging).
6. No indirect addressing (only indirect+index)
7. A bug that if a jump address was on a 256 byte boundary, that the first byte and second byte were taken from the same page (can't remember which jump, though).
8. 1MHz
9. One interrupt level
10. One 8-bit IO port
Now, imagine trying to port Linux to that!
(Place tounge in cheek)
Having a single OS is a great idea. I'd love all applications to run on the same platform.
(serious note-)The problem is that this can only exist in a legitemate way if there are independent national and/or international standards governing the OS. The OS cannot have a propriatary API.(/serious note)
Windows has a propriatary API: MFC/WFC/etc.
MacOS has a propriatary API: Carbon (but, OS X will be (or could easily become) POSIX compliant).
Linux has a standard API: POSIX
Perhaps Windows should be POSIX compliant, THEN we can have one OS API: POSIX (plus the necessary recompile). Leave your MFC/WFC/COM/Whatever and call it "value added" (i.e. portability subtracted) and there you go, Windoze bassackward compatability.
(P.S. Not even all Windows apps will run on all Windows machines out of the box: NT Alpha--NT i386, so HA!)
(P.P.S. Lets see some embedded computers running real time processing run Windozzze.)
Here's what I had to say to Mindcraft. I think that this s#!t is getting out of hand:
To whom it may concern,
I was reading your Net Rage article after reading about it on Slash Dot. I must say that I am offended that you would reprint such garbage on your web site. Some Linux advocates are teenagers and don't even know what they are talking about and are usually expressing some sort of angst...posting these e-mails will probably give you more flack than the original study that you did.
On the benchmarks, I never give much credit to any--especially across platforms. My 66MHz Mac continuously outperformed my 233MHz Windows NT box when the NT box had only 64MB of RAM and the Mac had 72MB of RAM from the standpoint of the user interface, such menu reaction time and application launch time. This is completely irrelevant to anything else, because the NT box is really faster at doing more things in the same amount of time (I would hope).
It seems pointless to argue that Linux or NT is better based on one set of benchmarks on one machine. I seriously doubt that NT would outperform Linux on a 16MHz i386 with 16MB of RAM! For fairness sake, why don't you benchmark Linux and NT on a full spectrum of computer hardware from a 386 to the fastest multi-processor NT machine. And not just Linux, why not Solaris, SCO Unix, Rhapsody, and FreeBSD? Your tests make it seem that you are biased, and people will respond accordingly, though not appropriately. MacWorld benchmarks show that NT+IIS is very fast--much faster than Solaris and MacOS X! Posting a full set of benchmarks will give you more credibility kudos than posting offensive e-mail.
Sincerely,
#MY REAL NAME#
If I remember correctly, NT Server outperformed Linux by a significant amount--more than 2 times (???). It would take some serious optimization to create a performance increase of that magnitude, especially since, I'm sure, M$ is doing more optimization of their own.
I don't doubt that NT would outperform Linux on such a beast of a machine, but I certainly wouldn't run NT or Linux on it (4 processors, 2GB RAM, a RAID). Isn't the SMP in Linux very new? I'd probably, well first shop and compare, then choose something like Solaris or another web server and OS optimized for that many processors, which would outperform both. Linux and NT, I would think, would be best at doing general purpose computing.