All Apple need to do is release OS X for Intel PCs before Vista ships and Microsoft could be completely sunk in months.
*Months* ? You're delusional. Heck, it'd be months before anyone outside of Slashdot & Co. even comperehended what it meant.
3 - 5 *years*, maybe - and even that's only if Vista is a disaster on the order of Wordperfect for Windows or Netscape 4. Even then, Microsoft as a company would be far from "sunk".
Too bad MS decided to strangle BeOS in the cradle with their illegal threats against PC manufacturers who showed an interest in offering it on their systems.
Not nearly as unfortunate as BeOS's almost total unsuitability for the mass market at the time.
It might feel nice to point the finger at Microsoft as usual, but I really think the facts that BeOS was basically beta, had bugger-all software available for it and miserable hardware support had a lot more to do with lack of vendor interest than any conspiracy.
That's why the desktops on Win31, Win95, NT, W2k, and XP all work the same way....
The only really big change there is from 3.1 -> 95 (which happened *over ten years ago*). The functional differences between the others are all relatively minor, with the exception of XP, and even it's not a huge change (certainly not a fundamental one).
They'll throw it out the window for pretty much any new bit of shiny chrome or feature.
Right. I guess that's why I can still use keyboard shortcuts dating from Windows 2.0 in Windows XP. Because they just throw that old stuff out all the time.
No. OS/2 2.0 proved otherwise. More functional than Win 3.1 (Win95 wasn't out yet), more functional (it even ran Win 3.1 app), and it had big money behind it (IBM). People wanted Windows.
OS/2 was very poorly marketed by IBM. Added to that, it had some pretty hefty hardware requirements (for the time).
Linux is more modular in that, for example, Firefox is not embedded into the core of the operating system, as Internet Explorer is. You can swap one component out (say GNOME for KDE) and not affect the rest of the system.
Except when the product you're trying to finish inherently *requires* certain components, leaving them out because they aren't finished isn't an option, even if doing so doesn't "break" other bits of functionality.
Second, that's not what he was talking about anyway -- Firefox and OpenOffice do not have hooks into the Linux kernel, and.Mac and iTunes are not inextricably connected to the core of Mac OS.
Are you oen of these idiots who think IE has hooks into the Windows kernel ?
There was a point a few years ago where MS had the choice-- build a modular architecture similar to WinCE & Linux. If one component was delayed, it wouldn't necessarily add to the delay of the core OS or other components.
Windows *is* modular. That's precisely why delays in the modules cause delays in the overall product.
The other choice was to continue along the monolithic line, which means that the core OS is more likely to be delayed by a delay amongst the smaller components.
Except they're trying to release a single product, not a Linux-like patchwork quilt for the user to sew together on their own time.
Software most certainly falls into the category as well. Any process where an advancement is used to produce further advancements gets an exponential nature.
I'm struggling to think of any advancement (at least in recorded history) that *doesn't* build on prior advancements.
In software it couldn't be more clearer. After you write your first compiler in machine code, writing your next compiler will be much easier as you base it on the previous step.
Right. But that doesn't mean the 6th revision of that compiler will be as quick to develop as the second.
Indeed, based on the history of software development thus far, the chances of it taking anything less than an order of magnitude *more* time to develop are quite small.
When they started the development of Vista, they had already an operating system to build on and a variety of advanced development tools. With that as a starting point it should have been an order of magnitude faster than the previous step.
Your theory sounds nice, but I'm not aware of any mature software projects for which it has actually happened. In pretty much every case, the more developed a codebase is, the *longer* it takes for subsequent versions to appear (assuming the changes are on the same scale).
I think it would have been perfectly reasonable for Vista to have taken on the order of 3 - 4 years to develop (in line with Win2k from NT4). In fact, if you take into account that they basically "started from scratch" again around 2003, that's about how long it *will* have taken. The real reason Vista (NT 6.0) is late is because of the "lost" 2 years of work between XP (NT 5.1) and Windows 2003 (NT 5.2). Arguably, Microsoft should have released an "XP second edition" (NT 5.3) in 2003/4 - but since the obvious differences between it and XP wouldn't have been large, it was probably considered a waste of time.
Basically, the recent NT family tree looks like this (it's rather difficult to do ASCII art on Slashdot, I hope you can understand):
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
..............V
............Windows XP (NT 5.1)
.............V..............V
Windows 2003 (NT 5.2).....Longhorn (NT 6.0)
...V.......................V
...V..........(Code discarded)
...V.............V
Windows Vista (NT 6.0)
Basically, XP branched off into Windows 2003 and Vista (then Longhorn). But around the time Windows 2003 was released, they decided that it was a much better codebase to develop Vista from, so the existing Vista codebase was scrapped and the project started afresh from Windows 2003 (more accurately, a lot of the "Vista" development and "Windows 2003" development was the same and, technically, kept).
It's interesting to note FreeBSD had similar problems around their 4.x, 5.x and 6.x codebases. Arguably, the VM fiasco in the early 2.6 kernels was along similar principles, if not scale (but then again, the Linux kernel is a dramatically smaller project than Windows, so in relative scale they might be somewhat comparable).
The point here is that software development is not a field where advancement is anything close to "exponetial". If anything, it's the exact opposite - the more mature a codebase gets, the *slower* releases become. The "software development" curve looks more like a bell, than anything linear or exponential.
It is a wider problem: technological development is supposed to progress exponentially.
Hardware, maybe - but this is software. Software "engineering" is a field where on-time delivery is the exception, not the rule and advancement is rarely "exponential" in anything except brand new products.
Vista took them five years to make, longer than any other release - and it certainly isn't a monumental release in terms of technology.
Vista is certainly later than it should be, but the changes - particularly at the lower levels - are significant. It's easily one of the biggest revisions Windows NT has ever had, even if a lot of those changes will not be obvious to casual examination.
No, they're not. Mac zealots often lament the lack of Classic support in new Intel Macs, in fact. You're actually making stuff up here. It's amazing.
"Lamenting the lack of Classic support" and touting a lack of legacy code as an advantage are not mutually exclusive.
The amount of new stuff in OS X and it's relative lack of legacy cruft are *often* stated as reasons why OS X is better. You can lie and say this isn't true, but that doesn't change it. Nor does it change the criticism often levelled that Windows is "crufty" because of its legacy code (heck, you even make it yourself).
OS X's touted advantages are its lack of spyware, antiviruses, and its vastly superior interface and infrastructure (Cocoa totally rapes Win32/.NET, and OS X's hardware Quartz compositing was released way back in 2002...congrats to Microsoft for catching up four years later).
Were you congratulating Apple for taking ~7 years to catch up to Microsoft when they released OS X, or was there too much at stake in admitting maybe Apple was a bit behind the times with that one ?
Ah, the "rhetoric" dismissal again. See, here's what's silly. You call Windows XP a 13-year-old product and OS X a 5-year-old product. Windows XP was the first consumer release of NT, just as OS X was the first consumer release of OpenStep merged with the Mac Toolbox.
You shouldn't stretch so much, you might hurt yourself.
However, for the sake of entertainment, let's look at what you're suggesting, because only when it's spelt out does the stupidity of it really shine:
Since Windows NT 5.1 was the first "consumer" version of Windows - mostly a marketing thing - then we should consider the fact it's a fairly minor incremental update from Windows 2000 (not even having as many changes as the typical OS X.1 upate) to be *equivalent* to the massive changes from NeXTSTEP to OS X and, hence, Windows NT and OS X should both be considered the same age.
Look, if you're going to try and compare the changes between different NT revisions to the changes between NeXTSTEP and OS X, at least apply a few minutes thought to use versions of NT that have changes on something close to that scale. Like NT 3.51 to NT 5.0.
By your logic, Windows XP is only 5 years old, but you've decided to count Windows 2000, NT, and Workgroups in the lineage of XP, yet you purposely don't count OpenStep and NeXTStep in the lineage of OS X. It's a clearly biased premise that you require for your argument to look like it holds water.
No, it's because the changes between the various NT releases are incremental and spread over a period of 8 - 10 years, whereas the changes from NeXTSTEP to OS X are major and happened over a period of about 3 - 5 years (and that's not including the changes OS X has undergone since its initial release.
Ah, the "market share" rhetoric of the typical Microsoft fanboi. Lacking anything else, you have to resort to this tired cliche.
Not nearly as tired as the "impotent foot stamping and talking about how much Microsoft sucks" cliche.
Quantity apparently equals quality in the Windows user's mind.
And the "I know better than everyone else" attitude apparently still sits foremost in your mind.
Of course, Ashlee Simpson sells more CDs than concert recordings of Mozart, and McDonald's sells more Big Macs than health food stores sell salads. And cancer kills more people than the common cold.
Speaking of tired cliches, I'm unsurprised you're full of them. Where's the "eat shit, a million flies can't be wrong" ?
The most amusing part of this cliche is that it ignores the situations that lead to the market dominance of Microsoft, up to and including its illegally coercive OEM deals that prevented superior competing products from having a chance on the market.
Products so superior no-one wanted to buy them. Strange.
In your mind, any monopoly automatically means it's a good monopoly, n
That is an awful lot of code to do what can be done in a single line. Don't take this personally but if you were a sysadmin in my shop and I asked you to rename some files, and you went about it by writing up that script, I'd fire you for stealing time from the company.
This is a silly thing to say in the first place (because the perl script is more efficient in the long run), and even sillier considering your one liner is more complex than it needs to be:
$ for file in *JPG ; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed -e 's/JPG/jpg/' -e 's/MVCD/Vacation/'`" ; done
No need for that NEW variable to be there, it's just more typing (as is using $file instead of $i, or similar).
A bit OT, but let me play devil's advocate, and ask: Why? What is so bad about using mail to transfer arbitrarily large files - other than that current software doesn't expect it to happen and might not cope?
Because it's a horribly inefficient way to transfer large amounts of binary data (on multiple levels).
MS had security right with NT, they just gave up security for application compatibility by not forcing the Win32 subsystem and applications to adhere to the NT security model.
Win32 applications are completely at the mercy of the NT security model.
The *problem* is that most users run as Administrator, a user with a very high privilege level. This is a completely different thing to what you're talking about.
Although UNIX kernels certainly make it possible for users to run processes as other user ids, I've never seen a *nix installation make it easy, much less make it the default.
Whilst not the default, and not the equivalent of what Vista will do, any remotely modern unix comes with both su and sudo, two tools that make it trivial to run an arbitrary process as an arbitrary user.
Now, OS X has been using eye-candy for years with minimal system specs. I had bouncing icons, expose, and genie effect running on a 6 year old Powerbook. So, it isn't the resource hog as he paints it.
I'd have to say it is. OS X brings all but the fastest Macs to their knees. I'd kill for a release of OS X that had the responsiveness of Windows.
What would be really slick is a single, consistent GUI that doesn't remind one of Windows 3.1 or Fisher Price but still runs smoothly, auto-downsizing effects if the system can't handle it. OS X has that [...]
No, it doesn't. OS X is sluggish on all but the fastest Macs.
I say OS6 would be worlds faster than 10.4.5 if it could run on the same computer.
OS9 on, say, a Rev A iMac is snappier than OS X on anything - right up until the point it either crashes, or anything vaguely resembling multitasking happens.
I'm currently running an iBook 600MHz with 640MB ram. If I tried to do the same with XP (and I have recently) on a system of the same specs, it's really sluggish. Default installs for both all the way. Changing XP's look back to classic really doesn't solve much of the problem.
I'm stunned you find OS X on such a slow iBook faster (hell, even *usable* in the first place) than Windows on an equivalent PC. My 1Ghz/768M iBook is noticably more sluggish with OS X than my 550Mhz/384M laptop running Windows 2003 (at least until the RAM or CPU in the PC is maxed out).
Windows spends a lot of effort trying to convey the illusion that there is a 1-1 correspondence between processes and open windows, but that is NOT the case.
No, the Windows GUI is based around the concept of each window being discrete, whereas the OS X GUI is based around the concept of groups of windows belonging to applications. This is why in Windows you alt+tab between *windows* and in OS X you alt+tab between *applications* (and then cmd+tab between windows). It has nothing whatsoever to do with mapping "processes" to "windows".
Can anyone explain to me why I'd want anything other than Windows Classic though?
No. You need to try it for yourself (for a reasonable time period - several weeks at least - and on suitably powerful hardware) and see if you prefer it.
Slashdot Mirror
*Months* ? You're delusional. Heck, it'd be months before anyone outside of Slashdot & Co. even comperehended what it meant.
3 - 5 *years*, maybe - and even that's only if Vista is a disaster on the order of Wordperfect for Windows or Netscape 4. Even then, Microsoft as a company would be far from "sunk".
Not nearly as unfortunate as BeOS's almost total unsuitability for the mass market at the time.
It might feel nice to point the finger at Microsoft as usual, but I really think the facts that BeOS was basically beta, had bugger-all software available for it and miserable hardware support had a lot more to do with lack of vendor interest than any conspiracy.
The link you posted does not appear to support your assertion.
The only really big change there is from 3.1 -> 95 (which happened *over ten years ago*). The functional differences between the others are all relatively minor, with the exception of XP, and even it's not a huge change (certainly not a fundamental one).
They'll throw it out the window for pretty much any new bit of shiny chrome or feature.
Right. I guess that's why I can still use keyboard shortcuts dating from Windows 2.0 in Windows XP. Because they just throw that old stuff out all the time.
OS/2 was very poorly marketed by IBM. Added to that, it had some pretty hefty hardware requirements (for the time).
Except when the product you're trying to finish inherently *requires* certain components, leaving them out because they aren't finished isn't an option, even if doing so doesn't "break" other bits of functionality.
Are you oen of these idiots who think IE has hooks into the Windows kernel ?
Windows *is* modular. That's precisely why delays in the modules cause delays in the overall product.
The other choice was to continue along the monolithic line, which means that the core OS is more likely to be delayed by a delay amongst the smaller components.
Except they're trying to release a single product, not a Linux-like patchwork quilt for the user to sew together on their own time.
Software most certainly falls into the category as well. Any process where an advancement is used to produce further advancements gets an exponential nature.
I'm struggling to think of any advancement (at least in recorded history) that *doesn't* build on prior advancements.
In software it couldn't be more clearer. After you write your first compiler in machine code, writing your next compiler will be much easier as you base it on the previous step.
Right. But that doesn't mean the 6th revision of that compiler will be as quick to develop as the second.
Indeed, based on the history of software development thus far, the chances of it taking anything less than an order of magnitude *more* time to develop are quite small.
When they started the development of Vista, they had already an operating system to build on and a variety of advanced development tools. With that as a starting point it should have been an order of magnitude faster than the previous step.
Your theory sounds nice, but I'm not aware of any mature software projects for which it has actually happened. In pretty much every case, the more developed a codebase is, the *longer* it takes for subsequent versions to appear (assuming the changes are on the same scale).
I think it would have been perfectly reasonable for Vista to have taken on the order of 3 - 4 years to develop (in line with Win2k from NT4). In fact, if you take into account that they basically "started from scratch" again around 2003, that's about how long it *will* have taken. The real reason Vista (NT 6.0) is late is because of the "lost" 2 years of work between XP (NT 5.1) and Windows 2003 (NT 5.2). Arguably, Microsoft should have released an "XP second edition" (NT 5.3) in 2003/4 - but since the obvious differences between it and XP wouldn't have been large, it was probably considered a waste of time.
Basically, the recent NT family tree looks like this (it's rather difficult to do ASCII art on Slashdot, I hope you can understand):
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
..............V
............Windows XP (NT 5.1)
.............V..............V
Windows 2003 (NT 5.2).....Longhorn (NT 6.0)
...V.......................V
...V..........(Code discarded)
...V.............V
Windows Vista (NT 6.0)
Basically, XP branched off into Windows 2003 and Vista (then Longhorn). But around the time Windows 2003 was released, they decided that it was a much better codebase to develop Vista from, so the existing Vista codebase was scrapped and the project started afresh from Windows 2003 (more accurately, a lot of the "Vista" development and "Windows 2003" development was the same and, technically, kept).
It's interesting to note FreeBSD had similar problems around their 4.x, 5.x and 6.x codebases. Arguably, the VM fiasco in the early 2.6 kernels was along similar principles, if not scale (but then again, the Linux kernel is a dramatically smaller project than Windows, so in relative scale they might be somewhat comparable).
The point here is that software development is not a field where advancement is anything close to "exponetial". If anything, it's the exact opposite - the more mature a codebase gets, the *slower* releases become. The "software development" curve looks more like a bell, than anything linear or exponential.
Hardware, maybe - but this is software. Software "engineering" is a field where on-time delivery is the exception, not the rule and advancement is rarely "exponential" in anything except brand new products.
Vista took them five years to make, longer than any other release - and it certainly isn't a monumental release in terms of technology.
Vista is certainly later than it should be, but the changes - particularly at the lower levels - are significant. It's easily one of the biggest revisions Windows NT has ever had, even if a lot of those changes will not be obvious to casual examination.
"Lamenting the lack of Classic support" and touting a lack of legacy code as an advantage are not mutually exclusive.
The amount of new stuff in OS X and it's relative lack of legacy cruft are *often* stated as reasons why OS X is better. You can lie and say this isn't true, but that doesn't change it. Nor does it change the criticism often levelled that Windows is "crufty" because of its legacy code (heck, you even make it yourself).
OS X's touted advantages are its lack of spyware, antiviruses, and its vastly superior interface and infrastructure (Cocoa totally rapes Win32/.NET, and OS X's hardware Quartz compositing was released way back in 2002...congrats to Microsoft for catching up four years later).
Were you congratulating Apple for taking ~7 years to catch up to Microsoft when they released OS X, or was there too much at stake in admitting maybe Apple was a bit behind the times with that one ?
Ah, the "rhetoric" dismissal again. See, here's what's silly. You call Windows XP a 13-year-old product and OS X a 5-year-old product. Windows XP was the first consumer release of NT, just as OS X was the first consumer release of OpenStep merged with the Mac Toolbox.
You shouldn't stretch so much, you might hurt yourself.
However, for the sake of entertainment, let's look at what you're suggesting, because only when it's spelt out does the stupidity of it really shine:
Since Windows NT 5.1 was the first "consumer" version of Windows - mostly a marketing thing - then we should consider the fact it's a fairly minor incremental update from Windows 2000 (not even having as many changes as the typical OS X .1 upate) to be *equivalent* to the massive changes from NeXTSTEP to OS X and, hence, Windows NT and OS X should both be considered the same age.
Look, if you're going to try and compare the changes between different NT revisions to the changes between NeXTSTEP and OS X, at least apply a few minutes thought to use versions of NT that have changes on something close to that scale. Like NT 3.51 to NT 5.0.
By your logic, Windows XP is only 5 years old, but you've decided to count Windows 2000, NT, and Workgroups in the lineage of XP, yet you purposely don't count OpenStep and NeXTStep in the lineage of OS X. It's a clearly biased premise that you require for your argument to look like it holds water.
No, it's because the changes between the various NT releases are incremental and spread over a period of 8 - 10 years, whereas the changes from NeXTSTEP to OS X are major and happened over a period of about 3 - 5 years (and that's not including the changes OS X has undergone since its initial release.
Ah, the "market share" rhetoric of the typical Microsoft fanboi. Lacking anything else, you have to resort to this tired cliche.
Not nearly as tired as the "impotent foot stamping and talking about how much Microsoft sucks" cliche.
Quantity apparently equals quality in the Windows user's mind.
And the "I know better than everyone else" attitude apparently still sits foremost in your mind.
Of course, Ashlee Simpson sells more CDs than concert recordings of Mozart, and McDonald's sells more Big Macs than health food stores sell salads. And cancer kills more people than the common cold.
Speaking of tired cliches, I'm unsurprised you're full of them. Where's the "eat shit, a million flies can't be wrong" ?
The most amusing part of this cliche is that it ignores the situations that lead to the market dominance of Microsoft, up to and including its illegally coercive OEM deals that prevented superior competing products from having a chance on the market.
Products so superior no-one wanted to buy them. Strange.
In your mind, any monopoly automatically means it's a good monopoly, n
This is a silly thing to say in the first place (because the perl script is more efficient in the long run), and even sillier considering your one liner is more complex than it needs to be:
$ for file in *JPG ; do mv "$file" "`echo $file | sed -e 's/JPG/jpg/' -e 's/MVCD/Vacation/'`" ; done
No need for that NEW variable to be there, it's just more typing (as is using $file instead of $i, or similar).
Because it's a horribly inefficient way to transfer large amounts of binary data (on multiple levels).
It's more than any other platform has...
Win32 applications are completely at the mercy of the NT security model.
The *problem* is that most users run as Administrator, a user with a very high privilege level. This is a completely different thing to what you're talking about.
Whilst not the default, and not the equivalent of what Vista will do, any remotely modern unix comes with both su and sudo, two tools that make it trivial to run an arbitrary process as an arbitrary user.
I'd have to say it is. OS X brings all but the fastest Macs to their knees. I'd kill for a release of OS X that had the responsiveness of Windows.
No, it doesn't. OS X is sluggish on all but the fastest Macs.
OS9 on, say, a Rev A iMac is snappier than OS X on anything - right up until the point it either crashes, or anything vaguely resembling multitasking happens.
rm -f a*.wibble or del a*.wib if you like - painful on a desktop given the ease of a command line.
No, it's trivial. Perhaps *marginally* longer, depending on your proficiency.
There are a few things commandlines do substantially better than GUIs. Most of them, very few people will ever do.
I'm stunned you find OS X on such a slow iBook faster (hell, even *usable* in the first place) than Windows on an equivalent PC. My 1Ghz/768M iBook is noticably more sluggish with OS X than my 550Mhz/384M laptop running Windows 2003 (at least until the RAM or CPU in the PC is maxed out).
Oops, got my wires crossed. In OS X you Cmd+Tab between applications and then Cmd+` between windows.
No, the Windows GUI is based around the concept of each window being discrete, whereas the OS X GUI is based around the concept of groups of windows belonging to applications. This is why in Windows you alt+tab between *windows* and in OS X you alt+tab between *applications* (and then cmd+tab between windows). It has nothing whatsoever to do with mapping "processes" to "windows".
No. You need to try it for yourself (for a reasonable time period - several weeks at least - and on suitably powerful hardware) and see if you prefer it.
That's assuming anyone outside of Adelaide even notices...