Only on slashdot does a comment calling people stupid or liars if they don't agree with you get modded informative.
I'm not calling people stupid or liars because they disagree with me, I'm calling them stupid if they don't perform even basic research on a topic before making blanket assertions about it, or liars because they've done the research but chosen to lie about it.
I assume my post was modded informative because it had actual *information* in it, rather than rhetorical FUD.
AUD649 is US585. For a PC operating system! Get !@#$ed!!! I simply don't recall an operating system costing either of my parents over a week's wages when I was young.
How much attention were you paying ? How much were your parents earning in the early '90s ? How did you know how much they were spending on computer equipment ?
Stretching way back in my memory (yes, I'm Australian, yes I worked as a PC tech in the mid '90s), I seem to recall Windows 95 was around AU$300 for the "Full Retail" version and Windows 3.x + DOS was around AU$350.
From a very simplistic calculation, a take-home pay (I assume that's what you mean) of AU$600/wk today, works out to about AU$37k/yr. "Deflating", that's about AU$25k in 1993. AU$25k/yr in 1993 works out to around $380/wk in take-home pay. Now, that's a calculation with so many assumption in it that it's damn near useless, but it certainly shows that a "Full Retail" copy of Windows in the early '90s was potentially in the ballpark of a week's wages (I am not going to spend hours researching historical income statistics to resolve a tangential argument).
Further, Windows today is providing a *lot* more functionality than Windows did in the early '90s. It's easily worth more now than it was then, even in adjusted dollars. Windows is *not expensive* compared to the average piece of large commercial software (eg: Photoshop). Move into the realm of specialised software (eg: the company I work for pays ca. AU$10k *per seat* for Radworks) or server software (Oracle is ca. US$40k per CPU) and just how cheap Windows is (even at "Full Retail" - which hardly anyone actually pays) comes into perspective.
(As an aside, this is why OSS-advocate arguments about "how expensive" Windows is don't carry much weight amongst the people who actually pay the bills - because they know how cheap it is once the price is amortised over 3 years and tax deducted.)
Of course, it's just dumb to throw around the "Full Retail" price of Windows as if anything more than a tiny minority of consumers pay it, but that's something else which seems to escape a lot of people (presumably because it's the only way to make Windows look even remotely expensive)...
In a vacuum, you might be right. Unless you compare it to, say, the total cost of the computer + os, or the cost of Mac OS X today, or any other things. But those factors would undermine your argument, so it's alright not to include them.
Nope. The cost of the OS as a proportion to the entire computer irrelevant to this discussion. Further, given the massive functional improvements to OSes compared to hardware, one would expect it to make up a larger proportion of the overall cost today. Finally, comparing a Vista Home Premium Upgrade to OS X gives basically the same price, so you're wrong there as well.
What will I use the remote control that came with my Macbook Pro (and comes free with every Mac except for the Macbook Air) for? Ah wait, maybe you're completely full of shit and I'll use it with Front Row.
Front Row isn't Media Centre. In particular, it doesn't support TV viewing/recording.
But viewed as a percentage of the cost of the computer, Windows has easily tripled in price since the early '90s.
Firstly, that's not really true since buying Windows *with a computer* means an OEM copy, which is substantially cheaper than a "Full Retail" copy. Also, it's not particularly unusual for the OS "price" to be a larger proportion of the entire system:
Cheap Mac in 1993: US$1400
System 7.5 Retail Price: US$140
Percentage of system price: ~10%
Cheap Mac in 2008: US$600
Mac OS X 10.5: US$140
Percentage of system price: ~23%
(Had to use 1993 because I couldn't find MacOS pricing before 7.5.)
You can almost build an entire PC for the cost of a Windows license these days.
OEM Windows Vista Home Premium: US$110 (NewEgg)
What PC do you think you can build for US$110 ?
You may argue that Windows does a lot more than it used to, but the same is true of computer hardware.
Not really. Sure, processors are faster, hard disks are bigger, screens are higher resolution, and the like. But functional improvements are few and far between (ubiquitous builtin sound and networking are the only two that spring immediately to mind). In the realm of operating systems, however, *functional* improvements are extensive - pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, symmetric processing, hardware abstraction layers, hardware and software emulation, networking stacks, GUI improvements, web browsers, web servers, remote control, email, media players, home movie authoring, home theatre. That's just off the top of my head (talking about more than just Windows here).
Even if it were true, "desktop" OSes would *easily* be worth "double or triple" the price they were in the early 90s, based on functionality improvements alone. Given they're actually cheaper now than they were then, they're an absolutely bargain. Anyone suggesting Windows is expensive, clearly doesn't actually *buy* much software, because in the context of functionality and amortised over its lifetime, its *cheap*. How much does the average PC game cost ? How long does it get used for ? Ever priced a copy of Photoshop or other piece of major commercial software ? Ever had to buy specialised software (eg: Radworks) that costs *thousands* of US$ per seat ?
[...] and the only reason, the ONLY reason that microsoft throws in all those things you think are extra is because the competition (such that it is) includes it.
So you're saying the system is working exactly how it's supposed to and we're all getting more stuff, cheaper ? Why is this a problem ?
OS X is $199 for a 5 user license. And has more functionality than Vista Ultimate.
No, it doesn't have more functionality that Vista Ultimate. Hell, it doesn't even have more functionality than "Home Premium" (no Media Centre equivalent, for example).
So tell me again how that $400 for Vista Ultimate represents a bargain. That's the same kind of fuzzy math that keeps most people locked into Windows. They make stuff up simply because they don't know any better.
The math isn't in the slightest bit "fuzzy". It's clear, it's simple and it's repeatable by anyone with a web browser and a basic knowledge of operating systems. Vista (even the most basic version) does (vastly) more than Windows 3.1 did. Further, accounting for inflation, it costs less. Where's the "fuzziness" ?
I have a feeling you do know better but choose to ignore the massively high prices that forces Vista to be more expensive than the computer it comes on. What a joke.
Vista is not more expensive than the computer it comes on. If it comes on a computer it's an OEM version, not a Retail version, and probably "cost" less than US$50.
Wiat wait, are you actually claiming that vista is more functional than Windows 3.1?
Wait, wait. Are you actually claiming that Windows 3.1 is more functional than Vista ? Could you list some examples ?
When your operating system somehow manages to reverse Rx Tx signals, there is a problem...
It can't.
Additionally, have you used a Mac?
Extensively. I own two of them.
OsX comes with a huge software set that at the very least, rivals the software set that comes with Microsoft Windows.
And as such the price should be comparable, but its not.
as shown below, Mac OS-X pricing is far superior to vista pricing.
All retail copies of Mac OS X are priced as upgrades. Therefore, the only valid comparison to Vista is upgrade pricing. Using that, "Vista Home Premium" is both quite comparable, and more functional (eg: Media Centre).
Additionally take into Account that OS-X has a linux core at heart, and you prove that the Microsoft Windows Alternative is a joke.
Ah, as I suspected, you haven't a clue what you're talking about.
So much of your post is short-sighted. You are not seeing the big picture at all. The OP was essentially correct.
No, the OP is flat-out wrong. As demonstrated by known, verifiable facts.
Firstly, your rate of inflation is deeply suspect.
My "rate of inflation" is whatever is reported by the numerous inflation calculators. Which, given they're probably based on government figures, is likely to be much lower than actual inflation (ie: if anything Vista is even cheaper than the calculations above would suggest).
Secondly, "just how much more functionality vista delivers" -- actually not that much more utility at all, in all truth. Yes, there's the Networking and Internet tools now that 3.1 didn't have. But in reality Vista is essentially much the same set of tools (especially true if you compare 3.11 rather than 3.1). Which only goes to further prove how horrifically bloated it is.
If you think Vista doesn't deliver vastly more functionality than Windows 3.1, I can only conclude you've never used either, or can't remember anything about Windows 3.1. Judging by the "especially true if you compare 3.11 rather than 3.1", I'm going to bet on the former.
Do you think OS X has "not much more utility" than Mac OS 7.5.x ?
Thirdly, forget the DOS price. Then, as now, most machines came bundled with MS products, the only reason to pay for 3.1 or vista is to upgrade from the previous version. (despite MS attempts to squeeze more cash out of everyone with 7 versions of vista) You didn't need to upgrade DOS as well as windows. So that's a non sequitur.
You can't "forget" it, it was impossible to run Windows 3.1 without DOS. This means you have to account for its cost. Since we're comparing the Retail version of Vista (not OEM), the only way to do that is with the retail price of DOS (which is likely closer to US$100 than US$50).
Fourthly, hardware and software has -- almost exclusively -- become cheaper over the past 20 years. This is true for OSX and its predecessors.
MacOS 9 had a retail price of $99.
This is NOT true for Windows.
It is most certainly true for Windows.
No, sorry. As I said the OP is correct.
No, you're both wrong. As I have demonstrated and which anyone can verify with a few "retail price" web searches and an inflation calculator.
I didn't know Leopard was free upgrade for existing customers so paid around $200 for family license.
It wasn't (unless you happen to have bought a Mac within 30 days (I think - something like that) of its release).
It is NOT copy protected too. In fact- I did a local disk image of it to hard drive using Apple Disk Utility just in case a DVD accident happens.
It most certainly is copy protected. By a hardware dongle. You can only install it on a Mac which, by definition, a) you can only buy from Apple and b) already has a MacOS license.
It is basically "We trust you" attitude of Apple. They could be also SAVING money and prestige since no "My product serial doesn't work" or "My company clients shut themselves off" phone calls needed.
Sure, they "trust you", just like Microsoft "trusts you" - which is why the OS X EULA specifically forbids installation on non-Apple hardware. They just "trust you" with different methodologies. Mac OS X doesn't need a serial number because it has a foolproof way of verifying you've already paid for a previous copy of OS X - you own a Mac.
I love the way everything on a modern computer is cheaper than it used to be (mostly because the market sizes are so much larger that less per-unit profit is required) but you want the operating system to follow different rules than basically *everything* else in the computer world.
OS X is sold at retail as a full release, not an upgrade. Wipe the hard drive and it'll install with no problems and no checks for previous media.
For fuck's sake. Of course it doesn't "check for previous media". It doesn't *need* to. By virtue of the fact you're installing it onto a Mac, you've already paid for an OS X license.
I'm not getting into the argument of whether OS X or Vista is cheaper, because frankly I don't care, but it's not true that OS X retail boxes are upgrades and you shouldn't slant the numbers by comparing OS X retail to Vista upgrades.
Every version of OS X you can buy is priced as an upgrade. Period. This is irrefutable. IFF you are ever able to purchase a Mac without a bundled copy of OS X, or Apple allows you to install OS X on non-Apple hardware, then you might be able to argue that Retail versions of OS X are not priced as upgrades, but not before.
It is not the code quality we talk about. If you think about it, Leopard is the most rushed OS Apple ever released.
I'm thinking about it, but I cannot conceive of a single way it might be true.
There are some actual people (not at Digg etc, Usenet!) who asks where the hell is OS X Leopard DVD serial number since they can't imagine a company NOT asking them a serial number. Guess the OS they switched from?
It's easy to not need a serial number when you have the luxury of a hardware dongle.
It's only an expensive product because people have tricked themselves into believing there are no alternatives.
It's not an expensive product. Especially for the vast majority of people, who get it "free".
Windows 3.1 was $130 and commonly discounted to $80. That was for the whole OS, not split up so you have 4 different versions. The top price was $80. The cost was low because Microsoft had competition.
Ignoring for a second just how much more functionality Vista delivers over Windows 3.1, you need to a) include the price of DOS, and b) account for inflation. Windows 3.1 ("Full Version" retailed at US$150. I couldn't find a price for DOS 5.0 in 1991 with a cursory search, so I'll estimate it at about US$50.
US$200 in 1992, is worth about US$300 today. Looking at Microsoft's site, we see that Vista Home Premium ("Full Version") is US$239. Heck, even if you leave DOS out completely, US$150 inflates to US$225, only a hair cheaper.
Now that the installed based is two orders of magnitude greater, the price should be cheaper or maybe the same. Even the cost of Apple's computers dropped significantly. But for MS Windows, the cost doubled or tripled.
Utter crap. It's actually less (or, at worst, basically the same). Take into account the additional functionality (media player, movie maker, networking, web browser, media centre, etc) and it's massively cheaper. It's certainly not within a bull's roar of having "doubled or tripled".
All you people who keep saying Windows is getting more expensive over time are either a) stupid (because you haven't bothered to actually check), or b) liars (because you have worked it out and chose to ignore what you found). But, then again, 99% of the criticism levelled at Vista falls into the same cateogories, so its to be expected.
I think the biggest point everyone is missing here is how do you upgrade the desktops once their part of your storage network ? This is the type of added complexity that makes this solution just not worth it.
Again, this is the sort of problem that's so trivial it's strange anyone even brings it up. Any appropriate solution would have multiple copies of all data. If you want to "upgrade" one of these desktops, you just pull it out of the pool, do your work to it, then put it back in. Since the data on it is stored in multiple locations, the only potential impact is to a machine that is actively accessing data on that "server" at the time (and even avoiding that shouldn't be too difficult). Effectively, it's just a RAID array using multiple computers as component devices instead of disks.
I know exactly what the OP is after and I've contemplated trying to build such a system before (but never had the time to pursue it past block diagrams on paper). He wants to be able to run some "server" on all the client machines which presents some proportion of their unused local disk space into a big pool. A centralised "director" would then portion out any stored data to these various components, always making sure a certain level of redundancy is retained.
Like I said elsewhere, combine the data redundancy scheme used in Windows Home Server and DFS, and Microsoft are already 95% of the way to doing this.
The short version of the problem is that the level of service you can expect from each system is incredibly variable, so it's hard to offer a meaningful QoS for the system as a whole. [...] But it's also not as easy as having all your distributed nodes dedicated to just storage, and even that's a really hard problem to solve. (I should know; my company is one of the few vendors doing it.)
In a centrally-managed environment (like, say, a corporate network) it's so trivial a problem to solve with a combination of policy (always leave your computer on) and technology (Wake-On-LAN), that it hardly even seems worth bringing up.
This is the dumbest/. question I've seen. Decentralized network storage pooled together with no means of practical management? Sign me up! Oh yeah, let's rely on the ditzy end users to help make sure it doesn't crash. I'm sure everyone will leave their computers on 100% of the time so you can make use of it. Don't tell anyone at work of your idea, they might not ever stop laughing.
Actually, if you have a large amount of static data, it's a perfectly reasonable solution (the availability "problem" is trivial to work around). Given that this requirement is not at all unusual, that makes your post not only childish, but stupid as well.
Now a lot of people will start to question the cost of doing all of this and it isn't cheap, however you have to analyze the data correctly. We migrated 200 servers from DAS to a SAN and had our money back within 12 months.
Difficult to see how that could be true, given how much even a cheap SAN with suitable availability would cost and all you're talking about is replacing system drives that are so cheap they're practically free. How ?
Well, filling up is kinda the point of the entire exercise, but you're right - being shut off, crashing, or being otherwise disconnected is enough of a problem to make this a non-starter.
Actually, no, this is a relatively trivial issues easily handled by a) significant redundancy and b) internal policies that instruct users not to power off machines (or implementation of something like WOL to make it irrelevant even if they do).
The biggest problem in this idea is how to handle writing data. Either you have something that works at the block level (like RAID) and suffer horrible (no, even worse than you think) performance due to latency, or you have redundancy at the file level (multiple copies of the same file) and risk two people modify different copies simultaneously.
You also need some sort of centralised authority to co-ordinate all the different machines and redundancy between them, potentially introducing a single point of failure (although this is also fairly trivial to work around).
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this originate out of Microsoft, extended from their work with Windows Home Server and combined with DFS - most all of the groundwork is already laid there.
The most obvious application for it (at least in a corporate setting) is online backups and highly static data - both of which essentially circumvent the writing problem by very infrequent modification and only allowing writing under carefully controlled circumstances.
Though with the 8 hours it took to copy all the MP3's from my two 320GB external USB hard drives to my 1TB external Firewire hard drive, that 9% would certainly be noticable.
Only if you were measuring it (which is the point).
It's all about scale. You won't notice a 9% improvement in performance when you aren't doing much. But you most certainly will notice it when you're doing a lot.
No, it's about proportionality. The average person needs a "change" of between 10% and 20% before they'll notice it, unless they've got some sort of direct form of comparison available.
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated.
NT4 ran quite comfortably on 100Mhz-class Pentiums with 40MB+ of RAM. Windows 2000..... would not.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
What. The. Fuck.
Where does this sort of stupidity come from ? Windows Vista, even in full-blown Aero mode, runs fine *right now* on machines 5+ years old (anything Ghz-class, with 1GB+ RAM and what is today US$30 video card has the performance to do so - so you can feasibly go back around 7 years, with a cheap video card upgrade). XP will also run well on machines that were around *10 years ago* (300Mhz P2s with 384M-512M RAM).
(Of course, discussions like this completely miss the point that how well something runs on very old hardware is basically irrelevant.)
DRM results in far more then a lack of freedom, it results in higher hardware requirements which boost the requirements even more then it already needs to be and I am sure that you have noticed it, not just in not being able to copy but in slower performance and higher hardware costs.
Bollocks. If you have a machine that can play HD media, you have a machine fast enough to handle "DRM".
As for the movie studios, where else are they going to turn if MS doesn't include DRM?
The companies making commodity appliances. You know, the guys who make the hardware that 90% of the world consumes their media from ?
What makes you think Microsoft has any meaningful influence over movie studios ? Hardly anyone uses a Microsoft platform to watch movies.
Slashdot Mirror
Only on slashdot does a comment calling people stupid or liars if they don't agree with you get modded informative.
I'm not calling people stupid or liars because they disagree with me, I'm calling them stupid if they don't perform even basic research on a topic before making blanket assertions about it, or liars because they've done the research but chosen to lie about it.
I assume my post was modded informative because it had actual *information* in it, rather than rhetorical FUD.
AUD649 is US585. For a PC operating system! Get !@#$ed!!! I simply don't recall an operating system costing either of my parents over a week's wages when I was young.
How much attention were you paying ? How much were your parents earning in the early '90s ? How did you know how much they were spending on computer equipment ?
Stretching way back in my memory (yes, I'm Australian, yes I worked as a PC tech in the mid '90s), I seem to recall Windows 95 was around AU$300 for the "Full Retail" version and Windows 3.x + DOS was around AU$350.
From a very simplistic calculation, a take-home pay (I assume that's what you mean) of AU$600/wk today, works out to about AU$37k/yr. "Deflating", that's about AU$25k in 1993. AU$25k/yr in 1993 works out to around $380/wk in take-home pay. Now, that's a calculation with so many assumption in it that it's damn near useless, but it certainly shows that a "Full Retail" copy of Windows in the early '90s was potentially in the ballpark of a week's wages (I am not going to spend hours researching historical income statistics to resolve a tangential argument).
Further, Windows today is providing a *lot* more functionality than Windows did in the early '90s. It's easily worth more now than it was then, even in adjusted dollars. Windows is *not expensive* compared to the average piece of large commercial software (eg: Photoshop). Move into the realm of specialised software (eg: the company I work for pays ca. AU$10k *per seat* for Radworks) or server software (Oracle is ca. US$40k per CPU) and just how cheap Windows is (even at "Full Retail" - which hardly anyone actually pays) comes into perspective.
(As an aside, this is why OSS-advocate arguments about "how expensive" Windows is don't carry much weight amongst the people who actually pay the bills - because they know how cheap it is once the price is amortised over 3 years and tax deducted.)
Of course, it's just dumb to throw around the "Full Retail" price of Windows as if anything more than a tiny minority of consumers pay it, but that's something else which seems to escape a lot of people (presumably because it's the only way to make Windows look even remotely expensive)...
In a vacuum, you might be right. Unless you compare it to, say, the total cost of the computer + os, or the cost of Mac OS X today, or any other things. But those factors would undermine your argument, so it's alright not to include them.
Nope. The cost of the OS as a proportion to the entire computer irrelevant to this discussion. Further, given the massive functional improvements to OSes compared to hardware, one would expect it to make up a larger proportion of the overall cost today. Finally, comparing a Vista Home Premium Upgrade to OS X gives basically the same price, so you're wrong there as well.
Exactly what can Computer with VISTA Ultimate do that the standard OSX Leopard that comes with every new Mac or in every retail Leopard box?
Media Centre.
What does media centre do that the iLife programs that come with Macs cannot?
Watch and record TV (and do the same from media extenders).
Gee, no media centre with my copy of Leopard?
No.
What will I use the remote control that came with my Macbook Pro (and comes free with every Mac except for the Macbook Air) for? Ah wait, maybe you're completely full of shit and I'll use it with Front Row.
Front Row isn't Media Centre. In particular, it doesn't support TV viewing/recording.
But viewed as a percentage of the cost of the computer, Windows has easily tripled in price since the early '90s.
Firstly, that's not really true since buying Windows *with a computer* means an OEM copy, which is substantially cheaper than a "Full Retail" copy. Also, it's not particularly unusual for the OS "price" to be a larger proportion of the entire system:
Cheap Mac in 1993: US$1400
System 7.5 Retail Price: US$140
Percentage of system price: ~10%
Cheap Mac in 2008: US$600
Mac OS X 10.5: US$140
Percentage of system price: ~23%
(Had to use 1993 because I couldn't find MacOS pricing before 7.5.)
You can almost build an entire PC for the cost of a Windows license these days.
OEM Windows Vista Home Premium: US$110 (NewEgg)
What PC do you think you can build for US$110 ?
You may argue that Windows does a lot more than it used to, but the same is true of computer hardware.
Not really. Sure, processors are faster, hard disks are bigger, screens are higher resolution, and the like. But functional improvements are few and far between (ubiquitous builtin sound and networking are the only two that spring immediately to mind). In the realm of operating systems, however, *functional* improvements are extensive - pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, symmetric processing, hardware abstraction layers, hardware and software emulation, networking stacks, GUI improvements, web browsers, web servers, remote control, email, media players, home movie authoring, home theatre. That's just off the top of my head (talking about more than just Windows here).
Even if it were true, "desktop" OSes would *easily* be worth "double or triple" the price they were in the early 90s, based on functionality improvements alone. Given they're actually cheaper now than they were then, they're an absolutely bargain. Anyone suggesting Windows is expensive, clearly doesn't actually *buy* much software, because in the context of functionality and amortised over its lifetime, its *cheap*. How much does the average PC game cost ? How long does it get used for ? Ever priced a copy of Photoshop or other piece of major commercial software ? Ever had to buy specialised software (eg: Radworks) that costs *thousands* of US$ per seat ?
OSX Tiger comes complete and should be compared to Ultimate NOT Home.
OS X has less features than Ultimate (or even Home Premium - no Media Centre, for example).
Now photoshop is probably good.. but FFS do they actually sell any at that price?
Sure. To a business using it to make money, that's a piddling sum (and a tax deduction).
But the price has tripled, [...]
The price has not tripled. As I demonstrated.
[...] and the only reason, the ONLY reason that microsoft throws in all those things you think are extra is because the competition (such that it is) includes it.
So you're saying the system is working exactly how it's supposed to and we're all getting more stuff, cheaper ? Why is this a problem ?
OS X is $199 for a 5 user license. And has more functionality than Vista Ultimate.
No, it doesn't have more functionality that Vista Ultimate. Hell, it doesn't even have more functionality than "Home Premium" (no Media Centre equivalent, for example).
So tell me again how that $400 for Vista Ultimate represents a bargain. That's the same kind of fuzzy math that keeps most people locked into Windows. They make stuff up simply because they don't know any better.
The math isn't in the slightest bit "fuzzy". It's clear, it's simple and it's repeatable by anyone with a web browser and a basic knowledge of operating systems. Vista (even the most basic version) does (vastly) more than Windows 3.1 did. Further, accounting for inflation, it costs less. Where's the "fuzziness" ?
I have a feeling you do know better but choose to ignore the massively high prices that forces Vista to be more expensive than the computer it comes on. What a joke.
Vista is not more expensive than the computer it comes on. If it comes on a computer it's an OEM version, not a Retail version, and probably "cost" less than US$50.
Wiat wait, are you actually claiming that vista is more functional than Windows 3.1?
Wait, wait. Are you actually claiming that Windows 3.1 is more functional than Vista ? Could you list some examples ?
When your operating system somehow manages to reverse Rx Tx signals, there is a problem...
It can't.
Additionally, have you used a Mac?
Extensively. I own two of them.
OsX comes with a huge software set that at the very least, rivals the software set that comes with Microsoft Windows.
And as such the price should be comparable, but its not. as shown below, Mac OS-X pricing is far superior to vista pricing.
All retail copies of Mac OS X are priced as upgrades. Therefore, the only valid comparison to Vista is upgrade pricing. Using that, "Vista Home Premium" is both quite comparable, and more functional (eg: Media Centre).
Additionally take into Account that OS-X has a linux core at heart, and you prove that the Microsoft Windows Alternative is a joke.
Ah, as I suspected, you haven't a clue what you're talking about.
So much of your post is short-sighted. You are not seeing the big picture at all. The OP was essentially correct.
No, the OP is flat-out wrong. As demonstrated by known, verifiable facts.
Firstly, your rate of inflation is deeply suspect.
My "rate of inflation" is whatever is reported by the numerous inflation calculators. Which, given they're probably based on government figures, is likely to be much lower than actual inflation (ie: if anything Vista is even cheaper than the calculations above would suggest).
Secondly, "just how much more functionality vista delivers" -- actually not that much more utility at all, in all truth. Yes, there's the Networking and Internet tools now that 3.1 didn't have. But in reality Vista is essentially much the same set of tools (especially true if you compare 3.11 rather than 3.1). Which only goes to further prove how horrifically bloated it is.
If you think Vista doesn't deliver vastly more functionality than Windows 3.1, I can only conclude you've never used either, or can't remember anything about Windows 3.1. Judging by the "especially true if you compare 3.11 rather than 3.1", I'm going to bet on the former.
Do you think OS X has "not much more utility" than Mac OS 7.5.x ?
Thirdly, forget the DOS price. Then, as now, most machines came bundled with MS products, the only reason to pay for 3.1 or vista is to upgrade from the previous version. (despite MS attempts to squeeze more cash out of everyone with 7 versions of vista) You didn't need to upgrade DOS as well as windows. So that's a non sequitur.
You can't "forget" it, it was impossible to run Windows 3.1 without DOS. This means you have to account for its cost. Since we're comparing the Retail version of Vista (not OEM), the only way to do that is with the retail price of DOS (which is likely closer to US$100 than US$50).
Fourthly, hardware and software has -- almost exclusively -- become cheaper over the past 20 years. This is true for OSX and its predecessors.
MacOS 9 had a retail price of $99.
This is NOT true for Windows.
It is most certainly true for Windows.
No, sorry. As I said the OP is correct.
No, you're both wrong. As I have demonstrated and which anyone can verify with a few "retail price" web searches and an inflation calculator.
Hardware dongle?
Yes. It's called a Mac. No Mac, no Leopard.
I didn't know Leopard was free upgrade for existing customers so paid around $200 for family license.
It wasn't (unless you happen to have bought a Mac within 30 days (I think - something like that) of its release).
It is NOT copy protected too. In fact- I did a local disk image of it to hard drive using Apple Disk Utility just in case a DVD accident happens.
It most certainly is copy protected. By a hardware dongle. You can only install it on a Mac which, by definition, a) you can only buy from Apple and b) already has a MacOS license.
It is basically "We trust you" attitude of Apple. They could be also SAVING money and prestige since no "My product serial doesn't work" or "My company clients shut themselves off" phone calls needed.
Sure, they "trust you", just like Microsoft "trusts you" - which is why the OS X EULA specifically forbids installation on non-Apple hardware. They just "trust you" with different methodologies. Mac OS X doesn't need a serial number because it has a foolproof way of verifying you've already paid for a previous copy of OS X - you own a Mac.
I love the way everything on a modern computer is cheaper than it used to be (mostly because the market sizes are so much larger that less per-unit profit is required) but you want the operating system to follow different rules than basically *everything* else in the computer world.
Mac OS 9: $99
Mac OS X: $139
OS X is sold at retail as a full release, not an upgrade. Wipe the hard drive and it'll install with no problems and no checks for previous media.
For fuck's sake. Of course it doesn't "check for previous media". It doesn't *need* to. By virtue of the fact you're installing it onto a Mac, you've already paid for an OS X license.
I'm not getting into the argument of whether OS X or Vista is cheaper, because frankly I don't care, but it's not true that OS X retail boxes are upgrades and you shouldn't slant the numbers by comparing OS X retail to Vista upgrades.
Every version of OS X you can buy is priced as an upgrade. Period. This is irrefutable. IFF you are ever able to purchase a Mac without a bundled copy of OS X, or Apple allows you to install OS X on non-Apple hardware, then you might be able to argue that Retail versions of OS X are not priced as upgrades, but not before.
It is not the code quality we talk about. If you think about it, Leopard is the most rushed OS Apple ever released.
I'm thinking about it, but I cannot conceive of a single way it might be true.
There are some actual people (not at Digg etc, Usenet!) who asks where the hell is OS X Leopard DVD serial number since they can't imagine a company NOT asking them a serial number. Guess the OS they switched from?
It's easy to not need a serial number when you have the luxury of a hardware dongle.
It's only an expensive product because people have tricked themselves into believing there are no alternatives.
It's not an expensive product. Especially for the vast majority of people, who get it "free".
Windows 3.1 was $130 and commonly discounted to $80. That was for the whole OS, not split up so you have 4 different versions. The top price was $80. The cost was low because Microsoft had competition.
Ignoring for a second just how much more functionality Vista delivers over Windows 3.1, you need to a) include the price of DOS, and b) account for inflation. Windows 3.1 ("Full Version" retailed at US$150. I couldn't find a price for DOS 5.0 in 1991 with a cursory search, so I'll estimate it at about US$50.
US$200 in 1992, is worth about US$300 today. Looking at Microsoft's site, we see that Vista Home Premium ("Full Version") is US$239. Heck, even if you leave DOS out completely, US$150 inflates to US$225, only a hair cheaper.
Now that the installed based is two orders of magnitude greater, the price should be cheaper or maybe the same. Even the cost of Apple's computers dropped significantly. But for MS Windows, the cost doubled or tripled.
Utter crap. It's actually less (or, at worst, basically the same). Take into account the additional functionality (media player, movie maker, networking, web browser, media centre, etc) and it's massively cheaper. It's certainly not within a bull's roar of having "doubled or tripled".
All you people who keep saying Windows is getting more expensive over time are either a) stupid (because you haven't bothered to actually check), or b) liars (because you have worked it out and chose to ignore what you found). But, then again, 99% of the criticism levelled at Vista falls into the same cateogories, so its to be expected.
I think the biggest point everyone is missing here is how do you upgrade the desktops once their part of your storage network ? This is the type of added complexity that makes this solution just not worth it.
Again, this is the sort of problem that's so trivial it's strange anyone even brings it up. Any appropriate solution would have multiple copies of all data. If you want to "upgrade" one of these desktops, you just pull it out of the pool, do your work to it, then put it back in. Since the data on it is stored in multiple locations, the only potential impact is to a machine that is actively accessing data on that "server" at the time (and even avoiding that shouldn't be too difficult). Effectively, it's just a RAID array using multiple computers as component devices instead of disks.
I know exactly what the OP is after and I've contemplated trying to build such a system before (but never had the time to pursue it past block diagrams on paper). He wants to be able to run some "server" on all the client machines which presents some proportion of their unused local disk space into a big pool. A centralised "director" would then portion out any stored data to these various components, always making sure a certain level of redundancy is retained.
Like I said elsewhere, combine the data redundancy scheme used in Windows Home Server and DFS, and Microsoft are already 95% of the way to doing this.
The short version of the problem is that the level of service you can expect from each system is incredibly variable, so it's hard to offer a meaningful QoS for the system as a whole. [...] But it's also not as easy as having all your distributed nodes dedicated to just storage, and even that's a really hard problem to solve. (I should know; my company is one of the few vendors doing it.)
In a centrally-managed environment (like, say, a corporate network) it's so trivial a problem to solve with a combination of policy (always leave your computer on) and technology (Wake-On-LAN), that it hardly even seems worth bringing up.
This is the dumbest /. question I've seen. Decentralized network storage pooled together with no means of practical management? Sign me up! Oh yeah, let's rely on the ditzy end users to help make sure it doesn't crash. I'm sure everyone will leave their computers on 100% of the time so you can make use of it. Don't tell anyone at work of your idea, they might not ever stop laughing.
Actually, if you have a large amount of static data, it's a perfectly reasonable solution (the availability "problem" is trivial to work around). Given that this requirement is not at all unusual, that makes your post not only childish, but stupid as well.
Now a lot of people will start to question the cost of doing all of this and it isn't cheap, however you have to analyze the data correctly. We migrated 200 servers from DAS to a SAN and had our money back within 12 months.
Difficult to see how that could be true, given how much even a cheap SAN with suitable availability would cost and all you're talking about is replacing system drives that are so cheap they're practically free. How ?
Well, filling up is kinda the point of the entire exercise, but you're right - being shut off, crashing, or being otherwise disconnected is enough of a problem to make this a non-starter.
Actually, no, this is a relatively trivial issues easily handled by a) significant redundancy and b) internal policies that instruct users not to power off machines (or implementation of something like WOL to make it irrelevant even if they do).
The biggest problem in this idea is how to handle writing data. Either you have something that works at the block level (like RAID) and suffer horrible (no, even worse than you think) performance due to latency, or you have redundancy at the file level (multiple copies of the same file) and risk two people modify different copies simultaneously.
You also need some sort of centralised authority to co-ordinate all the different machines and redundancy between them, potentially introducing a single point of failure (although this is also fairly trivial to work around).
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this originate out of Microsoft, extended from their work with Windows Home Server and combined with DFS - most all of the groundwork is already laid there.
The most obvious application for it (at least in a corporate setting) is online backups and highly static data - both of which essentially circumvent the writing problem by very infrequent modification and only allowing writing under carefully controlled circumstances.
Though with the 8 hours it took to copy all the MP3's from my two 320GB external USB hard drives to my 1TB external Firewire hard drive, that 9% would certainly be noticable.
Only if you were measuring it (which is the point).
It's all about scale. You won't notice a 9% improvement in performance when you aren't doing much. But you most certainly will notice it when you're doing a lot.
No, it's about proportionality. The average person needs a "change" of between 10% and 20% before they'll notice it, unless they've got some sort of direct form of comparison available.
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated.
NT4 ran quite comfortably on 100Mhz-class Pentiums with 40MB+ of RAM. Windows 2000..... would not.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
What. The. Fuck.
Where does this sort of stupidity come from ? Windows Vista, even in full-blown Aero mode, runs fine *right now* on machines 5+ years old (anything Ghz-class, with 1GB+ RAM and what is today US$30 video card has the performance to do so - so you can feasibly go back around 7 years, with a cheap video card upgrade). XP will also run well on machines that were around *10 years ago* (300Mhz P2s with 384M-512M RAM).
(Of course, discussions like this completely miss the point that how well something runs on very old hardware is basically irrelevant.)
To ordinary people, even 'ordinary' slashdot-readers, a 'workstation' is some 'station' (a desk with a computer) that you do your 'work' on.
Truly, then, much has been lost...
In case you haven't noticed ... Vista is a new OS and _not_ an incremental update of XP.
Vista is Windows NT 6.0. XP was Windows NT 5.1. While it *is* a major update, it is most certainly not a "new OS".
DRM results in far more then a lack of freedom, it results in higher hardware requirements which boost the requirements even more then it already needs to be and I am sure that you have noticed it, not just in not being able to copy but in slower performance and higher hardware costs.
Bollocks. If you have a machine that can play HD media, you have a machine fast enough to handle "DRM".
As for the movie studios, where else are they going to turn if MS doesn't include DRM?
The companies making commodity appliances. You know, the guys who make the hardware that 90% of the world consumes their media from ?
What makes you think Microsoft has any meaningful influence over movie studios ? Hardly anyone uses a Microsoft platform to watch movies.