In the original anti-trust suit against Microsoft in which they were found to have monopoly status, the industry over which they were found to have a monopoly was explicitly defined by the court as Intel based PCs.
Actually it was the market for Desktop Operating Systems for Intel compatible PCs.
Now that Apple has made the transition to Intel, supports loading Windows onto their hardware via bootcamp and makes an Intel x86 compatible operating system, they are a competitor of Microsoft according to the court's definition.
No, they're not, because Apple doesn't compete in the OS market, it competes in the computer market.
Some might argue that since Apple doesn't support OS X on non-Apple kit and, therefore, doesn't compete with Microsoft.
They don't. At least not from a legal perspective, relevant to Windows.
But (a) OS X can be installed and run quite nicely on non-Apple kit [...]
No, it can't. It can certainly be installed, if you don't mind downloading warez, breaking the licensing agreement (not to mention possibly copyright law, depending on your jurisdiction) and spending hours screwing around with it, but it doesn't run anything close to "nicely".
[...] and (b) users of newer Apple hardware have a clear choice to continue the OS X upgrade path or the Windows upgrade path (or both).
This is irrelevant, because you can't buy a Mac without OS X in the first place.
If Apple is competing in the same OS market as Microsoft, then they are clearly guilty of illegal product tying.
Not to mention that many new Apple products compete head to head with Microsoft products. iTunes vs. Media Player, iPod vs Zune, Keynote vs Powerpoint, Pages vs Word, OS X Server vs Windows Server, Apple Developer Tools vs Visual Studio...
Great. But none of those have anything to do with the (supposed) "Microsoft monopoly", which is the context of this discussion.
What they're saying really is that Vista is going to blow the RAM on all of the existing PCs out there, and this is a kludge to get round spending the extra £20 for the RAM rather than a USB stick.
No, they're saying if you do this, your system will be faster, because it will.
Even on machines with multiple gigabytes of RAM, it will *still* provide a performance boost (albeit a relatively small one) because in many cases reading from a USB flash disk is faster than reading from a hard disk.
Read about what this technology is, how it works and what it's objectives are, rather than commenting from ignorance.
They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.
Without Microsoft, you would probably still be using MacOS Classic on a PowerPC, dreaming of the day you could smoothly run multiple tasks and not have one crashing program bring down the whole OS with it.
The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original?
It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff".
Especially when the TCO for Apple systems are a fraction of those for equivalent Windows systems.
Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ?
Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...
No, they're not. Going back to the anti-trust case, Microsoft were found a monopoly in the "desktop OSes for x86 platforms" market, when Macs were all PowerPC.
Even today, from a market definition perspective they don't compete. Microsoft sells Operating Systems, Apple sells computers.
Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.
In no legal fashion or finding, are - or have - Microsoft and Apple ever been competitors. Apple's existence has _zero_ bearing on whether or not Microsoft is(/was) considered a monopoly.
(Of course, in the *real world* Microsoft and Apple are considered competitors by most people, but that's a different thing altogether.)
Backspace switches to the parent folder; it doesn't open a new window.
Actually backspace performs the equivalent of clicking on the "Back" button - takes you to whatever view you were last in. That may or may not be the parent folder of the current view.
It sounds like Windows Explorer may finally be settling with the "spatial" navigation paradigm of one window per folder, as used by Mac Finder (and Amiga Workbench, and recent versions of Nautilus).
As John Siracusa over at Ars likes to remind us, the current OS X Finder is *not* spatial.
Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, [...]
That's exactly what LUA _is_.
LUA does the same thing as the graphical sudo prompts in OS X and some Linux distros, only without the need to type a password.
Basically, you put in a USB drive and it says something like "would you like to use this drive to supplement your virtual memory" (it's called ReadyBoost I think).
I daresay they're assuming people doing this won't just rip the USB drive out randomly;).
I guess I will just have to wait to see some benchmarks to see how it performs.
I would expect, faster than a hard disk but slower than real RAM.
I imagine the theory is to offer people who are either unable or unwilling to add real RAM to their systems an easy way of improving performance.
USB sticks are not as fast as a hard drive, unless you have an ancient 190 MB paper weight laying around somewhere. The best reading speed you're going to get from USB are around 22 MB/sec. An average SATA drive will read data up in the neighborhood of 40-80 MB/sec. The write speeds have even more seperation.
The advantage comes not from the bandwith, but from the latency.
Windows NT started from the OS/2 3.0 codebase which was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM... so Microsoft cannot receive full credits for it.
No, Windows NT *was* the OS/2 3.0 (ne: NT) codebase. Microsoft alone worked on OS/2 3.0, although by that time most of the work in OS/2 2.x was IBM's.
What went on to become OS/2 3.0 was a further development of OS/2 2.x by IBM, *not* the codebase that went on to become Windows NT. Even a cursory examination of their architectures should make it obvious that Windows NT and OS/2 have next to nothing in common.
IBM were still paying Microsoft royalties for their code in OS/2 *4.0*.
Windows 9x had pre-emtive multitasking for 32 bit applications, and cooperative multitasking for 16 bit applications, at least theoretically. And everyone here knows that Windows 9x provided real quality, especially Windows Millennium;)
Relatively, it was competitive.
Mac OS Classic sucked, yes, but it was much better than Windows 9x which was replaced by Windows XP in late 2001.
Er, no. MacOS of the day couldn't hold a candle to Windows 9x in anything except UI (and even that is debatable). Windows NT utterly eclipsed it.
NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.
This would be more convincing if there had ever been even the slightest hint that NT would ever have been targeted at the 286.
(IE is integrated into, and cannot be abstracted from, the OS,etc.)
Bollocks.
Do not confuse the lack of a retail product sans IE, with IE not be modular. Business and marketing != software engineering.
NT seems to have met its design goals quite well. That you can't personally build yourself a patchwork quilt of an OS based on it like you can with Linux, is a business decision, not a technical limitation.
You must not have looked very hard. Actually there have been substantive changes as regards security, not the least of which is that the user is *not*, by default, running with administrator privileges. This is the #1 reason *nix types criticize Windows as insecure and it has been fixed. Now, I'm sure with all the bloat and "rushed" schedules, problems will creep in, but the very fact that the average home user is no longer an admin should have a huge effect on overall security.
It won't.
Well, it probably will in the short term, as all the old bits of malware that fail on unprivileged accounts get worked out of the system, but the simple fact is that, for the vast bulk of things the average piece of malware wants to do, elevated privileges are a luxury, not a necessity. Not to mention elevating privileges is not especially difficult ("Click here to see b00bies"), even *without* any behdn-the-scenes trickery with buffer overflows and the like.
Which is not to say an unprivileges account is a _bad_ thing, but it's a long, long way from a silver bullet. I can't foresee it making much of a difference.
I believe the AV vendors are quite concerned, and rightfully so. As regards your statement that it's all a "marketing battle", you are correct. However, it is the AV vendors waging that battle, trying to convince users they are still necessary. Time will tell.
AV Vendors have little to be really afraid of. AV software will remain an important part of "securing" the average end user's computer for as long as they're able to execute arbitrary code.
In short, I evaluated, found it non-productive, and reverted to my TWO alternate choices. (Office 2003 and OpenOffice 2.)
Maybe I'm just weird, but if I were evaluate something as big as Office 2007, I'd take at least on the order of days, preferably weeks, of full-time use to do so.
As for browsers, I am a medium-heavy user of the menu commands. Most of the file menu, Edit-Find, View-Source, Tools-Internet Options, and more, for IE7. The equivalents are a little different in Firefox. I use them interchangeably as features require. Viewing source in IE7 is still a little different than in Firefox. I haven't tried Opera yet though.
Sounds to me like you're complaining because something's different, not because it's worse.
So you're saying people aren't running Windows XP because it's descended from DOS; but instead they're running it because RMS' campaign for it was so awesome? No, really, they're running Windows XP because they ran Windows 98 because they ran Windows 95 because they ran Windows 3.1 because they ran DOS and Windows 3.1 ran on top DOS.
So you would argue that Linux is descended from DOS because of WINE ?
I haven't tried Vista yet, but at work I only use Windows 2000. I think it's much faster and even more stable than XP.
Depending on your hardware, XP may be faster than 2000. XP introduced numerous kernel-level improvements to increase scalability, so the bigger your machine is (# CPUs/cores, amount of RAM) the better (relatively) XP will perform on it. On the lower end of the scale single processor, P1/P2/P3, <512M-1G RAM, 2000 is probably faster.
I have seen several anti-productive results out of Vista. The champion is... MS Office 2007! I peeked at an example beta copy our other IT guy was experimenting with - and I find it utterly unusable.
Doesn't really seem like the best way to evaluate a product...
IE7 is almost as silly. Here I only use 7 functions, but I waste time and displeasure at the jarring interface. (I did finally stumble on someone's registry patch that replaces the menu bar as the top row of the app.) Result: I use FireFox except in specific cases where FF crashes, typically with Flash.
I don't use IE7, but I just have to ask - what do you regularly use the menu for in a web browser ?
Signed drivers would be ok if I get to decide whose signatures to trust. What's wrong is when that decision is reserved for Microsoft, thus taking freedom away from the user.
If it weren't, 99% of the point in having driver signing would disappear.
I'm don't think MS could, or probably wants to, take them to court. It seems to be a free product made using a tool released by MS themselves. Where's the lawsuit?
Does IE's license allow public redistribution by third parties without a contract ?
(I haven't checked - although I'd assume Google's lawyers did).
If there are buffer overflows, isn't the solution to fix the buffer overflows?
Certainly. It's not always _possible_ though.
Shouldn't the idea be to keep your machine from having hostile code run on it at all??
Yes. As in most things, however, theory != practice. As long as users are allowed to execute arbitrary code, ther is no way to stop them executing hostile code.
Antivirus software seems like the same kind of deal. Why do I want a resource-hogging process running all the time on my machine to scan the disk and memory for viruses?
Because users have a nasty habit of running malicious code.
By then it's too late.
Not if the AV software has hooked into the OS (many do) and stopped the virus from actually doing anything nasty.
In BSD or SELinux, the code base has always been of the kind where apps didn't often try to get root or a root authenticated app to do things with.
Say what ? Only a few short years ago pretty much ever single daemon on a typical unix system would have "required" running as root. Why do you think kludges like chroot exist ? Not to mention things like SUID...
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In the original anti-trust suit against Microsoft in which they were found to have monopoly status, the industry over which they were found to have a monopoly was explicitly defined by the court as Intel based PCs.
Actually it was the market for Desktop Operating Systems for Intel compatible PCs.
Now that Apple has made the transition to Intel, supports loading Windows onto their hardware via bootcamp and makes an Intel x86 compatible operating system, they are a competitor of Microsoft according to the court's definition.
No, they're not, because Apple doesn't compete in the OS market, it competes in the computer market.
Some might argue that since Apple doesn't support OS X on non-Apple kit and, therefore, doesn't compete with Microsoft.
They don't. At least not from a legal perspective, relevant to Windows.
But (a) OS X can be installed and run quite nicely on non-Apple kit [...]
No, it can't. It can certainly be installed, if you don't mind downloading warez, breaking the licensing agreement (not to mention possibly copyright law, depending on your jurisdiction) and spending hours screwing around with it, but it doesn't run anything close to "nicely".
[...] and (b) users of newer Apple hardware have a clear choice to continue the OS X upgrade path or the Windows upgrade path (or both).
This is irrelevant, because you can't buy a Mac without OS X in the first place.
If Apple is competing in the same OS market as Microsoft, then they are clearly guilty of illegal product tying.
Not to mention that many new Apple products compete head to head with Microsoft products. iTunes vs. Media Player, iPod vs Zune, Keynote vs Powerpoint, Pages vs Word, OS X Server vs Windows Server, Apple Developer Tools vs Visual Studio ...
Great. But none of those have anything to do with the (supposed) "Microsoft monopoly", which is the context of this discussion.
That's what filesystem cache is for.
Indeed. When you have RAM to spare for caching.
What they're saying really is that Vista is going to blow the RAM on all of the existing PCs out there, and this is a kludge to get round spending the extra £20 for the RAM rather than a USB stick.
No, they're saying if you do this, your system will be faster, because it will.
Even on machines with multiple gigabytes of RAM, it will *still* provide a performance boost (albeit a relatively small one) because in many cases reading from a USB flash disk is faster than reading from a hard disk.
Read about what this technology is, how it works and what it's objectives are, rather than commenting from ignorance.
They'd have nobody to copy. Microsoft don't do anything unless they're forced to. Without Apple you would still be using MS DOS.
Without Microsoft, you would probably still be using MacOS Classic on a PowerPC, dreaming of the day you could smoothly run multiple tasks and not have one crashing program bring down the whole OS with it.
The question to ask, is, why use a knockoff like Windows when you can have the original?
It's faster, cheaper and runs more software. Oh, and it's not a "knockoff".
Especially when the TCO for Apple systems are a fraction of those for equivalent Windows systems.
Are you Mac Zealots still talking about that TCO study that compared Windows 3.1 and System 7 ?
Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...
No, they're not. Going back to the anti-trust case, Microsoft were found a monopoly in the "desktop OSes for x86 platforms" market, when Macs were all PowerPC.
Even today, from a market definition perspective they don't compete. Microsoft sells Operating Systems, Apple sells computers.
Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.
In no legal fashion or finding, are - or have - Microsoft and Apple ever been competitors. Apple's existence has _zero_ bearing on whether or not Microsoft is(/was) considered a monopoly.
(Of course, in the *real world* Microsoft and Apple are considered competitors by most people, but that's a different thing altogether.)
Backspace switches to the parent folder; it doesn't open a new window.
Actually backspace performs the equivalent of clicking on the "Back" button - takes you to whatever view you were last in. That may or may not be the parent folder of the current view.
It sounds like Windows Explorer may finally be settling with the "spatial" navigation paradigm of one window per folder, as used by Mac Finder (and Amiga Workbench, and recent versions of Nautilus).
As John Siracusa over at Ars likes to remind us, the current OS X Finder is *not* spatial.
Seriously, I hope there is some sort of privilege separation, only requiring password authentication for applications that need escalated privileges, [...]
That's exactly what LUA _is_.
LUA does the same thing as the graphical sudo prompts in OS X and some Linux distros, only without the need to type a password.
I am curious as to how microsoft did this.
Basically, you put in a USB drive and it says something like "would you like to use this drive to supplement your virtual memory" (it's called ReadyBoost I think).
I daresay they're assuming people doing this won't just rip the USB drive out randomly ;).
I guess I will just have to wait to see some benchmarks to see how it performs.
I would expect, faster than a hard disk but slower than real RAM.
I imagine the theory is to offer people who are either unable or unwilling to add real RAM to their systems an easy way of improving performance.
USB sticks are not as fast as a hard drive, unless you have an ancient 190 MB paper weight laying around somewhere. The best reading speed you're going to get from USB are around 22 MB/sec. An average SATA drive will read data up in the neighborhood of 40-80 MB/sec. The write speeds have even more seperation.
The advantage comes not from the bandwith, but from the latency.
Of course they love Apple. Without Apple, they would have a desktop monopoly.
According to antitrust law, Microsoft and Apple are not competitors.
I wish I was the copyright holder, and protected by the applicable laws, of my own personal information.
Copyright is fucked up enough already. I shudder to think how legislation trying to do this would make it worse.
Windows NT started from the OS/2 3.0 codebase which was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM ... so Microsoft cannot receive full credits for it.
No, Windows NT *was* the OS/2 3.0 (ne: NT) codebase. Microsoft alone worked on OS/2 3.0, although by that time most of the work in OS/2 2.x was IBM's.
What went on to become OS/2 3.0 was a further development of OS/2 2.x by IBM, *not* the codebase that went on to become Windows NT. Even a cursory examination of their architectures should make it obvious that Windows NT and OS/2 have next to nothing in common.
IBM were still paying Microsoft royalties for their code in OS/2 *4.0*.
Windows 9x had pre-emtive multitasking for 32 bit applications, and cooperative multitasking for 16 bit applications, at least theoretically. And everyone here knows that Windows 9x provided real quality, especially Windows Millennium ;)
Relatively, it was competitive.
Mac OS Classic sucked, yes, but it was much better than Windows 9x which was replaced by Windows XP in late 2001.
Er, no. MacOS of the day couldn't hold a candle to Windows 9x in anything except UI (and even that is debatable). Windows NT utterly eclipsed it.
NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.
This would be more convincing if there had ever been even the slightest hint that NT would ever have been targeted at the 286.
(IE is integrated into, and cannot be abstracted from, the OS,etc.)
Bollocks.
Do not confuse the lack of a retail product sans IE, with IE not be modular. Business and marketing != software engineering.
NT seems to have met its design goals quite well. That you can't personally build yourself a patchwork quilt of an OS based on it like you can with Linux, is a business decision, not a technical limitation.
You must not have looked very hard. Actually there have been substantive changes as regards security, not the least of which is that the user is *not*, by default, running with administrator privileges. This is the #1 reason *nix types criticize Windows as insecure and it has been fixed. Now, I'm sure with all the bloat and "rushed" schedules, problems will creep in, but the very fact that the average home user is no longer an admin should have a huge effect on overall security.
It won't.
Well, it probably will in the short term, as all the old bits of malware that fail on unprivileged accounts get worked out of the system, but the simple fact is that, for the vast bulk of things the average piece of malware wants to do, elevated privileges are a luxury, not a necessity. Not to mention elevating privileges is not especially difficult ("Click here to see b00bies"), even *without* any behdn-the-scenes trickery with buffer overflows and the like.
Which is not to say an unprivileges account is a _bad_ thing, but it's a long, long way from a silver bullet. I can't foresee it making much of a difference.
I believe the AV vendors are quite concerned, and rightfully so. As regards your statement that it's all a "marketing battle", you are correct. However, it is the AV vendors waging that battle, trying to convince users they are still necessary. Time will tell.
AV Vendors have little to be really afraid of. AV software will remain an important part of "securing" the average end user's computer for as long as they're able to execute arbitrary code.
Windows timekeeping requires you to run the hardware clock in local time.
Why this is done.
(Note that internally, Windows uses UTC).
In short, I evaluated, found it non-productive, and reverted to my TWO alternate choices. (Office 2003 and OpenOffice 2.)
Maybe I'm just weird, but if I were evaluate something as big as Office 2007, I'd take at least on the order of days, preferably weeks, of full-time use to do so.
As for browsers, I am a medium-heavy user of the menu commands. Most of the file menu, Edit-Find, View-Source, Tools-Internet Options, and more, for IE7. The equivalents are a little different in Firefox. I use them interchangeably as features require. Viewing source in IE7 is still a little different than in Firefox. I haven't tried Opera yet though.
Sounds to me like you're complaining because something's different, not because it's worse.
So you're saying people aren't running Windows XP because it's descended from DOS; but instead they're running it because RMS' campaign for it was so awesome? No, really, they're running Windows XP because they ran Windows 98 because they ran Windows 95 because they ran Windows 3.1 because they ran DOS and Windows 3.1 ran on top DOS.
So you would argue that Linux is descended from DOS because of WINE ?
I haven't tried Vista yet, but at work I only use Windows 2000. I think it's much faster and even more stable than XP.
Depending on your hardware, XP may be faster than 2000. XP introduced numerous kernel-level improvements to increase scalability, so the bigger your machine is (# CPUs/cores, amount of RAM) the better (relatively) XP will perform on it. On the lower end of the scale single processor, P1/P2/P3, <512M-1G RAM, 2000 is probably faster.
I have seen several anti-productive results out of Vista. The champion is... MS Office 2007! I peeked at an example beta copy our other IT guy was experimenting with - and I find it utterly unusable.
Doesn't really seem like the best way to evaluate a product...
IE7 is almost as silly. Here I only use 7 functions, but I waste time and displeasure at the jarring interface. (I did finally stumble on someone's registry patch that replaces the menu bar as the top row of the app.) Result: I use FireFox except in specific cases where FF crashes, typically with Flash.
I don't use IE7, but I just have to ask - what do you regularly use the menu for in a web browser ?
People are ... running Windows, the OS built on top of DOS by the people that brought you DOS.
No version of Windows has been "built on top of DOS" for over half a decade.
Signed drivers would be ok if I get to decide whose signatures to trust. What's wrong is when that decision is reserved for Microsoft, thus taking freedom away from the user.
If it weren't, 99% of the point in having driver signing would disappear.
I'm don't think MS could, or probably wants to, take them to court. It seems to be a free product made using a tool released by MS themselves. Where's the lawsuit?
Does IE's license allow public redistribution by third parties without a contract ?
(I haven't checked - although I'd assume Google's lawyers did).
If there are buffer overflows, isn't the solution to fix the buffer overflows?
Certainly. It's not always _possible_ though.
Shouldn't the idea be to keep your machine from having hostile code run on it at all??
Yes. As in most things, however, theory != practice. As long as users are allowed to execute arbitrary code, ther is no way to stop them executing hostile code.
Antivirus software seems like the same kind of deal. Why do I want a resource-hogging process running all the time on my machine to scan the disk and memory for viruses?
Because users have a nasty habit of running malicious code.
By then it's too late.
Not if the AV software has hooked into the OS (many do) and stopped the virus from actually doing anything nasty.
That's Microsoft's fault to begin with.
No, it's the users' fault.
Running arbitrary code like that has always been considered bad practice.
Running arbitrary code is also considered essential functionality by 99% of users.
In BSD or SELinux, the code base has always been of the kind where apps didn't often try to get root or a root authenticated app to do things with.
Say what ? Only a few short years ago pretty much ever single daemon on a typical unix system would have "required" running as root. Why do you think kludges like chroot exist ? Not to mention things like SUID...