So the question remains, why is the Aero UI such a pig when it has been demonstrated by both Apple and Linux distros that the same sort of effects can be done with garbage hardware.
Because the base video card to get decent Aero performance is five years old and costs US$30.
What _possible_ ROI benefit is there to optimising an OS for people who won't even prepared to spend US$50ish upgrading their 5 year old PCs with a better video card an a gig of RAM ? Because they sure as hell aren't going to buy Vista if they're that tight.
OS X runs (badly - anything less than a G5 is awful at running OS X) on old hardware because *it has to* - it was released back when that hardware was common. Vista is being released when an "old and slow" machine is a 1Ghz+ P3 class box (which, with a gig of RAM and a cheap video card, runs Vista better than a 1Ghz G4 runs OS X) and a brand new PC - where the bulk of Vista installs are going to come from anyway - costs less than US$500. Why on earth would Microsoft expect developer time and effort on making it work on anything less ? Where's the benefit ?
It happens everywhere (and has been for a good 5+ years now).
Basically, low-end/crap jobs are being given fancier (and fancier still) job titles because:
* They attract poseurs who can handle the low pay that goes with them as long as their job sounds impressive to their peers.
* They look impressive in a Resume (thus being an acceptable stepping-stone job - used to attract people to low-skill, high-turnover positions)
* It's easier to get people to work a bad job if it sounds important
* The cotton-wool generation just starting to get into the workforce, who have been brought up being told they can never lose and never having had their feelings hurt, don't get all depressed about "only" being a "Secretary" or something similarly mundane.
Isn't this the tail wagging the dog? Shouldn't the video card industry have hardware API standards and shouldn't the software vendors be releasing stuff compatible with the hardware?
Sure, if you want to go back to the bad old days of games only supporting a small number of very specific video cards.
[setting the wayback machine to the 1990s]...lessee, Microsoft here. What are we going to do next? I see, let's do a web browser. Let's put it into the kernel! Yeah, that'll impress the Department of Justice!
No version of Windows has ever had any version of IE in its kernel.
And hey, let's move some multimedia stuff into the kernel.
I don't know what you're referring to by "multimedia stuff", but I'd be fairly willing to bet you're wrong about that as well.
And of course the whole graphical subsystem should be in the kernel....
Most (especially on x86) OSes trying to get high performance video run the drivers in kernel space, so this was hardly unusual, unexpected or unreasonable.
Though I used mostly Macs back then, only using DOS/Win 3.x on the college's PCs used in programming classes, I knew a few people who bought and used PCs with DOS, and a couple had trouble trying to install 3.x on top of DRDOS.
Maybe they did, but it wasn't because of that problem.
DRDOS was famous for it's "99%" compatibility with MSDOS - and I say this as someone who used it fairly extensively.
As far as compatibility issues, the only reason there should be any is because you want to require something like MSDOS. It shouldn't be any trouble to have the installer check to see is there are any dependencies missing and if so to have them installed. Though I haven't used them that's what I understand rmp, get-apt, and other installation managers do for Linux programs.
You misunderstand. This wasn't a matter of "is X file there". By 3.x, Windows was well on the way to being a standalone operating system and on startup, it would replace, pre-empt and in many other ways modify, the DOS it was running on to install its own memory manager, scheduler, hardware drivers, etc. It did much of this by modifying various runtime in-memory data structures and utilising various other horrible(/ingenious) hacks, most of which were undocumented and highly DOS-version-specific. Which is why testing for those specific versions of DOS and warning of possible incompatibilities was a reasonable thing to do.
It is - very, very roughly - analagous to how even minor linux kernel revisions typically require kernel modules to be recompiled, because the various kernel internals they depend on change slightly between each release. OS X has also had this problem in the past, although I believe the kernel ABI has since been declared "stable".
Windows wasn't the only thing doing this either - a significant amount of third party software depended on similar techniques and would also have "weird" compatibility problems with not-quite-100% compatible DOSes. Games, in particular, were big offenders in the early-mid '90s and the mess of extended/expanded memory and slightly different memory managers only exacerbated the problem.
For the first time in MS history, an OS release will make all your hardware obsolete.
Vista RC2 is quite usable on a ~900Mhz P3 with 768M of RAM and a GeForce 5200. That's ~5 year old hardware, with extremely modest (ca. US$50) upgrades. How exactly is Vista going to "obselete" all my hardware ?
(And it's faster than OS X on a comparable Mac, as well.)
Then there were other DOS version available such as DRDOS. MS started running into problems when they release 3.x which was installed on top of DOS. While it could theoretically work with other DOSes MS made it check to see if it was being stalled on MSDOS and if it wasn't it wouldn't install.
No non-beta version of Windows 3.x did this. Additionally, the message was informational only - it didn't actually _stop_ anyone using Windows 3.x betas on DRDOS.
Given that Windows 3.1 did a lot of runtime twiddling with DOS's internal's, checking to make sure that a _known_ version of DOS was present was hardly unreasonable. Many other pieces of software that similarly played fast and loose with documented interfaces (eg: high end games) also frequently had compatibility issues with non-Microsoft DOSes and/or were only supported on MS-DOS.
Macs are IBM (or intel x86, if you prefer) compatible computers and also a brand - is that really so hard to understand?
Macs aren't 100% PC compatible. If they were, this discussion wouldn't be happening.
"PCs" can be either "personal computers", or "x86 PCs". Is that so hard to understand ? Because you sure seemed to be having trouble with.
What are you saying? Because you can't use all generic hardware on a Dell with a riser card (due to physical restraints) that its not a PC?
Physical dimensions aren't under discussion, unless they're part of a PC standard that a "PC" or component is claiming to support.
That a PC that's fussy with its RAM requirements is no longer a PC?
Only if it refuses to work with parts that are within specification, or requires ostensibly standard components be specifically manufactured to meet its non-standard requirements.
That Sony vaio Desktop series (which feature some werid compatability issues) are also not PCs?
Probably. Depends on the "issues", how much you're making up about them and whether they're just a common (and defined) variation of a parent standard.
Face it - by your own definition, a mac is a PC.
Which is a funny thing for you to say, because by several of *your* definitions thus far, a Mac _isn't_ a PC.
Like I said. When I can do things like drop a bog-standard PCIe video card into a Mac and having it not work is an unusual and noteworthy event, rather than par for the course, you can say Macs are PCs. Until then, however, and while in some cases you still need to purchase Mac-specific hardware to have even a fighting chance at it working, they're still Macintoshes.
Incidentally, if you want the definitive last word, why don't you ask Apple if they consider "Macintoshes" to be "PCs" ?
There was no counterargument to make. Your statement was wrong.
The same does hold true for non-Mac PCs. Can you buy any video card & drop it in any x86 machine? No. You've got to check AGP, PCI-X, etc compatability. Same holds for RAM, other cards, in fact nearly everything.
The sorts of "compatibility issues" being discussed arise even when appropriate physical and electrical connections are being used.
The x86 architecture has fragmented hugely, you cannot buy any piece of hardware, drop it into an x86 and expect it to work
Of course not. Nor did I suggest you could.
However, if, for example, your hardware states it meets certain industry standard specifications and you mate it with other hardware that meets the same industry standard specifications, then it will work (or it is broken).
Utterly stupid. A Mac is a brand. It has no dictionary definition.
So is comparing a "brand" to a physical device - as you did - equally stupid ? Exactly how does one install hardware into a "brand" ?
"PC" is a generic term, it does have a dictionary definition - "Personal Computer"
"PC", used in context (as it was previously), also has a specific meaning - it refers to IBM (or intel x86, if you prefer) compatible computers. Numerous words and phrases in the English language (and probably others) have this sort of duality in meaning.
Here's some counter-point. My friend has a PC and he wants a new graphics card. He has an AGP motherboard. So now he has to get a PCI-E board, new memory and a new CPU (possibly).
No, he doesn't. There are quite high-end AGP video cards available new, and buying the last generation's top-end used from eBay will also give excellent performance, even in cutting-edge games.
I know, because I'm in the same position and had to make the same decisions.
He priced out the parts and ended up getting a completely new rig.
I doubt the price difference lent itself to particularly high quality replcement parts. It certainly wouldn't here in Australia. Now, if you only had dirt-cheap components to start with, then replacing the whole thing is probably a reasonable economic decision, instead of upgrading - but then compared to a Mac, a PC with such cheap parts probably only cost half as much in the first place.
I understand drop-in and I understand the weird Mac video Bios reality. But another reality is, PCs are not always a case of "drop any piece of standard PC hardware". Worrying about weird compatibility issues could also mean PC-y things like DDR vs DDR2, cpu socket type and other upgrade path eventualities.
All of which are extremely well documented and add little, if anything, to the price unless you wait _far_ too long between upgrades (in which case, you're better off replacing anyway).
The point remains, though, that barring some weird Finder-network behavior, Macs running OS X are faster and more responsive in perceived user feel than Windows Vista, Ubuntu, or Mandriva 2007--its primary competitors.
No, they're not. OS X is *by far* the most sluggish UI to use out of the relatively mainstream OSes - especially on "average" hardware. I've yet to sit down in front of any Mac without having the beachball appear within 15 minutes of "typical" workload. Not to mention the general slowness of application and context menus, window resizing and task switching (although Expose neatly hides much of the latter).
I installed Vista RC2 on an old 933Mhz P3 (768M RAM, 20G 5400rpm hard disk, GeForce 5200 - a whopping 1.5 on the "Windows Experience Index") just to see how bad it would be on a "slow" PC. It's quite usable and stomps all over my 1Ghz iBook (768M RAM, 5400rpm 40G drive) in terms of "perceived user feel". Quite frankly, after using it, I've downgraded my "minimum Vista PC estimate" from a 1Ghz+, 1GB+ machine to any P3 with 768M of RAM and an Aero-capable video card.
I *wish* OS X was as responsive as Windows. It would make it that much easier to justify spending the extra $$$ on a Mac. I will never understand where some people get this idea that OS X is "faster" from, but I can only assume it's because many of the flashy graphical effects (which are almost entirely done by the video card anyway) remain responsive even though the rest of the UI has ground to a halt. I guess for some people still being able to watch those Dock icons resize as you wipe the mouse over them is a reasonable consolation prize to multi-second waits for a context menu to appear and incessant beachballing trying to switch tabs in Safari, but personally I find it nothing more than infuriating.
People who say Mac vs PC in the age of wintel macs are self deluded.
When you can buy a Mac without OS X, and drop any piece of standard PC hardware in into it without having to worry about weird compatibility issues (eg: "non-Mac" video cards), then you can call it a PC.
Yes, it is. There are numerous functional equivalents to Windows, always has been, and they have always been trivial to find.
At least not for companies who are dependent on compatibility with their partners. Very few companies are in the fortunate position to choose their applications and simply set the standard and protocol. Also, a lot of companies have specialized software that cannot be ported to alternative systems easily, usually this is a very costy process.
You are saying that Microsoft has a monopoly on Windows. I hope you realise this is a silly argument.
It certainly isn't about you or me, and, let's be honest here, we're not the big market. Neither for MS nor for other software companies. The big markets are companies that buy licenses in 100+ bundles. And that are also the companies that can't simply switch over night.
No IT infrastructure of any size can switch any OS overnight, monopoly or otherwise. Indeed, non-trivial IT infrastructure is hard-pressed to switch to a different version of the same OS in under a year.
I personally don't read all the code; not enough time, but I do prefer if it is possible, and if I can get a proxy to do it. I don't run "binary only" software, unless it is in a sandbox (and not directly connected to the internet or internal network).
What hardware devices are you using which all have open source firmware ?
Again, FYI: As long as this is the custom, you will see malware of various sorts.
You will see malware so long as ignorant people can run arbitrary code on their machines.
If they won't let you read the source code, it's because there's something in there they don't want you to see. If they don't want you to see it, that means they're ashamed of it. Avoid it.
Is there anyone who thinks it's a little unfair for a big monopoly to hide the programming interface, locking out a whole bunch of software providers? Yes, I think that's unfair. I should think the EU have an opinion too. Cutting out the AV providers doesn't count as a security measure.
I find it amazing after all the times this has been reported on Slashdot in the last few months, there are *still* people out there who haven't yet managed to pick up that Microsoft aren't "hiding" any necessary "programming interface", and that this whole thing is just groundless whining by the two big AV developers who don't want to have to rewrite their software _properly_.
MS has the de facto monopoly on the OS market (and please spare me the "no they don't, they don't have 100% and thus it's not a monopoly" dodgeball).
They don't have a monopoly because choosing an alternate product of equivalent functionality is - and always has been - trivial for anyone who could be bothered.
Don't get me wrong, I love toolbars, and I was one of the original complainers when Microsoft decided to convert toolbars and menus to ribbons in Office 2007.
Have you spent any significant amount of time actually using them ?
It's great that it's getting easier on Linux, but don't you think using something released only a few days ago as an example is just a wee bit unreasonable ?
If the user's sitting down at the computer for the first time, chances are, they have no clue if the system has 01 drive or 10 (ha!). So, if it has C:, D:, E: and F:, which one is correct chuck stuff on? I think it works a bit better to say "Hay user, put your crap in/home/username!", and have the user not need to worry about which drive the data is on.
How is this any different from putting "stuff" on the Desktop and into My Documents in Windows ?
Slashdot Mirror
So the question remains, why is the Aero UI such a pig when it has been demonstrated by both Apple and Linux distros that the same sort of effects can be done with garbage hardware.
Because the base video card to get decent Aero performance is five years old and costs US$30.
What _possible_ ROI benefit is there to optimising an OS for people who won't even prepared to spend US$50ish upgrading their 5 year old PCs with a better video card an a gig of RAM ? Because they sure as hell aren't going to buy Vista if they're that tight.
OS X runs (badly - anything less than a G5 is awful at running OS X) on old hardware because *it has to* - it was released back when that hardware was common. Vista is being released when an "old and slow" machine is a 1Ghz+ P3 class box (which, with a gig of RAM and a cheap video card, runs Vista better than a 1Ghz G4 runs OS X) and a brand new PC - where the bulk of Vista installs are going to come from anyway - costs less than US$500. Why on earth would Microsoft expect developer time and effort on making it work on anything less ? Where's the benefit ?
Just sitting at the desktop with nothing open windows was using 40-50% of ram.
This metric is utterly worthless. Why do people continue to use it ?
It happens everywhere (and has been for a good 5+ years now).
Basically, low-end/crap jobs are being given fancier (and fancier still) job titles because:
* They attract poseurs who can handle the low pay that goes with them as long as their job sounds impressive to their peers.
* They look impressive in a Resume (thus being an acceptable stepping-stone job - used to attract people to low-skill, high-turnover positions)
* It's easier to get people to work a bad job if it sounds important
* The cotton-wool generation just starting to get into the workforce, who have been brought up being told they can never lose and never having had their feelings hurt, don't get all depressed about "only" being a "Secretary" or something similarly mundane.
Isn't this the tail wagging the dog? Shouldn't the video card industry have hardware API standards and shouldn't the software vendors be releasing stuff compatible with the hardware?
Sure, if you want to go back to the bad old days of games only supporting a small number of very specific video cards.
[setting the wayback machine to the 1990s] ...lessee, Microsoft here. What are we going to do next? I see, let's do a web browser. Let's put it into the kernel! Yeah, that'll impress the Department of Justice!
No version of Windows has ever had any version of IE in its kernel.
And hey, let's move some multimedia stuff into the kernel.
I don't know what you're referring to by "multimedia stuff", but I'd be fairly willing to bet you're wrong about that as well.
And of course the whole graphical subsystem should be in the kernel....
Most (especially on x86) OSes trying to get high performance video run the drivers in kernel space, so this was hardly unusual, unexpected or unreasonable.
Though I used mostly Macs back then, only using DOS/Win 3.x on the college's PCs used in programming classes, I knew a few people who bought and used PCs with DOS, and a couple had trouble trying to install 3.x on top of DRDOS.
Maybe they did, but it wasn't because of that problem.
DRDOS was famous for it's "99%" compatibility with MSDOS - and I say this as someone who used it fairly extensively.
As far as compatibility issues, the only reason there should be any is because you want to require something like MSDOS. It shouldn't be any trouble to have the installer check to see is there are any dependencies missing and if so to have them installed. Though I haven't used them that's what I understand rmp, get-apt, and other installation managers do for Linux programs.
You misunderstand. This wasn't a matter of "is X file there". By 3.x, Windows was well on the way to being a standalone operating system and on startup, it would replace, pre-empt and in many other ways modify, the DOS it was running on to install its own memory manager, scheduler, hardware drivers, etc. It did much of this by modifying various runtime in-memory data structures and utilising various other horrible(/ingenious) hacks, most of which were undocumented and highly DOS-version-specific. Which is why testing for those specific versions of DOS and warning of possible incompatibilities was a reasonable thing to do.
It is - very, very roughly - analagous to how even minor linux kernel revisions typically require kernel modules to be recompiled, because the various kernel internals they depend on change slightly between each release. OS X has also had this problem in the past, although I believe the kernel ABI has since been declared "stable".
Windows wasn't the only thing doing this either - a significant amount of third party software depended on similar techniques and would also have "weird" compatibility problems with not-quite-100% compatible DOSes. Games, in particular, were big offenders in the early-mid '90s and the mess of extended/expanded memory and slightly different memory managers only exacerbated the problem.
For the first time in MS history, an OS release will make all your hardware obsolete.
Vista RC2 is quite usable on a ~900Mhz P3 with 768M of RAM and a GeForce 5200. That's ~5 year old hardware, with extremely modest (ca. US$50) upgrades. How exactly is Vista going to "obselete" all my hardware ?
(And it's faster than OS X on a comparable Mac, as well.)
Then there were other DOS version available such as DRDOS. MS started running into problems when they release 3.x which was installed on top of DOS. While it could theoretically work with other DOSes MS made it check to see if it was being stalled on MSDOS and if it wasn't it wouldn't install.
No non-beta version of Windows 3.x did this. Additionally, the message was informational only - it didn't actually _stop_ anyone using Windows 3.x betas on DRDOS.
Given that Windows 3.1 did a lot of runtime twiddling with DOS's internal's, checking to make sure that a _known_ version of DOS was present was hardly unreasonable. Many other pieces of software that similarly played fast and loose with documented interfaces (eg: high end games) also frequently had compatibility issues with non-Microsoft DOSes and/or were only supported on MS-DOS.
Macs are IBM (or intel x86, if you prefer) compatible computers and also a brand - is that really so hard to understand?
Macs aren't 100% PC compatible. If they were, this discussion wouldn't be happening.
"PCs" can be either "personal computers", or "x86 PCs". Is that so hard to understand ? Because you sure seemed to be having trouble with.
What are you saying? Because you can't use all generic hardware on a Dell with a riser card (due to physical restraints) that its not a PC?
Physical dimensions aren't under discussion, unless they're part of a PC standard that a "PC" or component is claiming to support.
That a PC that's fussy with its RAM requirements is no longer a PC?
Only if it refuses to work with parts that are within specification, or requires ostensibly standard components be specifically manufactured to meet its non-standard requirements.
That Sony vaio Desktop series (which feature some werid compatability issues) are also not PCs?
Probably. Depends on the "issues", how much you're making up about them and whether they're just a common (and defined) variation of a parent standard.
Face it - by your own definition, a mac is a PC.
Which is a funny thing for you to say, because by several of *your* definitions thus far, a Mac _isn't_ a PC.
Like I said. When I can do things like drop a bog-standard PCIe video card into a Mac and having it not work is an unusual and noteworthy event, rather than par for the course, you can say Macs are PCs. Until then, however, and while in some cases you still need to purchase Mac-specific hardware to have even a fighting chance at it working, they're still Macintoshes.
Incidentally, if you want the definitive last word, why don't you ask Apple if they consider "Macintoshes" to be "PCs" ?
Idiot. A mac is an IBM (or intel x86, if you prefer) compatible computer.
Please make up your mind.
You can run windows, linux, and all your standard IBM (or intel x86, if you prefer) compatible software with it!
But you can't always use PC standard hardware with it. Ergo, it's not a PC in the colloqial sense - as pointed out in my first post.
By your own definition, a mac is a subset of PC.
Then, by the definition of "subset", a Mac is not a PC.
False? Just like that? With no counterargument?
There was no counterargument to make. Your statement was wrong.
The same does hold true for non-Mac PCs. Can you buy any video card & drop it in any x86 machine? No. You've got to check AGP, PCI-X, etc compatability. Same holds for RAM, other cards, in fact nearly everything.
The sorts of "compatibility issues" being discussed arise even when appropriate physical and electrical connections are being used.
The x86 architecture has fragmented hugely, you cannot buy any piece of hardware, drop it into an x86 and expect it to work
Of course not. Nor did I suggest you could.
However, if, for example, your hardware states it meets certain industry standard specifications and you mate it with other hardware that meets the same industry standard specifications, then it will work (or it is broken).
Utterly stupid. A Mac is a brand. It has no dictionary definition.
So is comparing a "brand" to a physical device - as you did - equally stupid ? Exactly how does one install hardware into a "brand" ?
"PC" is a generic term, it does have a dictionary definition - "Personal Computer"
"PC", used in context (as it was previously), also has a specific meaning - it refers to IBM (or intel x86, if you prefer) compatible computers. Numerous words and phrases in the English language (and probably others) have this sort of duality in meaning.
Well, it's not often we see such an apt username.
PC is short for "Personal Computer" - all your compatibility issues hold true for any pc.
False.
Macs are Personal Computers - PCs. Change the dictionary definition of PC if you think differently.
Please post the dictionary definition of "Mac". Don't forget to cite your source.
Here's some counter-point. My friend has a PC and he wants a new graphics card. He has an AGP motherboard. So now he has to get a PCI-E board, new memory and a new CPU (possibly).
No, he doesn't. There are quite high-end AGP video cards available new, and buying the last generation's top-end used from eBay will also give excellent performance, even in cutting-edge games.
I know, because I'm in the same position and had to make the same decisions.
He priced out the parts and ended up getting a completely new rig.
I doubt the price difference lent itself to particularly high quality replcement parts. It certainly wouldn't here in Australia. Now, if you only had dirt-cheap components to start with, then replacing the whole thing is probably a reasonable economic decision, instead of upgrading - but then compared to a Mac, a PC with such cheap parts probably only cost half as much in the first place.
I understand drop-in and I understand the weird Mac video Bios reality. But another reality is, PCs are not always a case of "drop any piece of standard PC hardware". Worrying about weird compatibility issues could also mean PC-y things like DDR vs DDR2, cpu socket type and other upgrade path eventualities.
All of which are extremely well documented and add little, if anything, to the price unless you wait _far_ too long between upgrades (in which case, you're better off replacing anyway).
The point remains, though, that barring some weird Finder-network behavior, Macs running OS X are faster and more responsive in perceived user feel than Windows Vista, Ubuntu, or Mandriva 2007--its primary competitors.
No, they're not. OS X is *by far* the most sluggish UI to use out of the relatively mainstream OSes - especially on "average" hardware. I've yet to sit down in front of any Mac without having the beachball appear within 15 minutes of "typical" workload. Not to mention the general slowness of application and context menus, window resizing and task switching (although Expose neatly hides much of the latter).
I installed Vista RC2 on an old 933Mhz P3 (768M RAM, 20G 5400rpm hard disk, GeForce 5200 - a whopping 1.5 on the "Windows Experience Index") just to see how bad it would be on a "slow" PC. It's quite usable and stomps all over my 1Ghz iBook (768M RAM, 5400rpm 40G drive) in terms of "perceived user feel". Quite frankly, after using it, I've downgraded my "minimum Vista PC estimate" from a 1Ghz+, 1GB+ machine to any P3 with 768M of RAM and an Aero-capable video card.
I *wish* OS X was as responsive as Windows. It would make it that much easier to justify spending the extra $$$ on a Mac. I will never understand where some people get this idea that OS X is "faster" from, but I can only assume it's because many of the flashy graphical effects (which are almost entirely done by the video card anyway) remain responsive even though the rest of the UI has ground to a halt. I guess for some people still being able to watch those Dock icons resize as you wipe the mouse over them is a reasonable consolation prize to multi-second waits for a context menu to appear and incessant beachballing trying to switch tabs in Safari, but personally I find it nothing more than infuriating.
People who say Mac vs PC in the age of wintel macs are self deluded.
When you can buy a Mac without OS X, and drop any piece of standard PC hardware in into it without having to worry about weird compatibility issues (eg: "non-Mac" video cards), then you can call it a PC.
Unfortunately it is not.
Yes, it is. There are numerous functional equivalents to Windows, always has been, and they have always been trivial to find.
At least not for companies who are dependent on compatibility with their partners. Very few companies are in the fortunate position to choose their applications and simply set the standard and protocol. Also, a lot of companies have specialized software that cannot be ported to alternative systems easily, usually this is a very costy process.
You are saying that Microsoft has a monopoly on Windows. I hope you realise this is a silly argument.
It certainly isn't about you or me, and, let's be honest here, we're not the big market. Neither for MS nor for other software companies. The big markets are companies that buy licenses in 100+ bundles. And that are also the companies that can't simply switch over night.
No IT infrastructure of any size can switch any OS overnight, monopoly or otherwise. Indeed, non-trivial IT infrastructure is hard-pressed to switch to a different version of the same OS in under a year.
If he'd put on his robe and wizard hat first...
I personally don't read all the code; not enough time, but I do prefer if it is possible, and if I can get a proxy to do it. I don't run "binary only" software, unless it is in a sandbox (and not directly connected to the internet or internal network).
What hardware devices are you using which all have open source firmware ?
Again, FYI: As long as this is the custom, you will see malware of various sorts.
You will see malware so long as ignorant people can run arbitrary code on their machines.
If they won't let you read the source code, it's because there's something in there they don't want you to see. If they don't want you to see it, that means they're ashamed of it. Avoid it.
Your logic is broken.
Is there anyone who thinks it's a little unfair for a big monopoly to hide the programming interface, locking out a whole bunch of software providers? Yes, I think that's unfair. I should think the EU have an opinion too. Cutting out the AV providers doesn't count as a security measure.
I find it amazing after all the times this has been reported on Slashdot in the last few months, there are *still* people out there who haven't yet managed to pick up that Microsoft aren't "hiding" any necessary "programming interface", and that this whole thing is just groundless whining by the two big AV developers who don't want to have to rewrite their software _properly_.
Isn't it a little late in the process to ask the developer team to make Vista modular?
It's already modular.
MS has the de facto monopoly on the OS market (and please spare me the "no they don't, they don't have 100% and thus it's not a monopoly" dodgeball).
They don't have a monopoly because choosing an alternate product of equivalent functionality is - and always has been - trivial for anyone who could be bothered.
Don't get me wrong, I love toolbars, and I was one of the original complainers when Microsoft decided to convert toolbars and menus to ribbons in Office 2007.
Have you spent any significant amount of time actually using them ?
[On Ubuntu Edgy:]
It's great that it's getting easier on Linux, but don't you think using something released only a few days ago as an example is just a wee bit unreasonable ?
If the user's sitting down at the computer for the first time, chances are, they have no clue if the system has 01 drive or 10 (ha!). So, if it has C:, D:, E: and F:, which one is correct chuck stuff on? I think it works a bit better to say "Hay user, put your crap in /home/username!", and have the user not need to worry about which drive the data is on.
How is this any different from putting "stuff" on the Desktop and into My Documents in Windows ?