Microsoft had (in fact still has) a lot of power over the OEMs that allowed them to effectively "force" the OEMs into only selling Windows, and selling Windows with every computer sold.
Largely due to either the lack of any alternatives, or massive incompetence from those who did have alternatives.
Well, there's a fundamental difference in that the Mac "monopoly" is actually in competition with Windows and the rest of the x86 market. Mac can't be a monopoly because it's part of a large market in which it holds a very "nichey" share.
According to the Microsoft antitrust trial, this is not true. Apple and Microsoft were(/are) *not* in the same market.
It doesn't have to do with natural selection, because it has nothing to do with biology.
How do you figure a psychological issue isn't biology ?
Natural selection is about the genetic traits that get passed on to the next generation.
Indeed. So clearly traits that tend toward suicide aren't going a terribly good thing to pass along.
Suicide is about social problems.
No, suicide is typically about psychological problems. Most people's minds don't fall apart dealing with social problems. Those whose do have "undesirable traits" that natural selection can "select" on.
All else being equal, if person A decides to top themselves and person B does not, then clearly person B is the better bet for prolonging the species.
Only because one who "suicides" (is that really a verb?) is DEAD and is INCAPABLE of prolonging the species...
Which is entirely my point. If they haven't got sufficient mental toughness to deal with life, then from an evolutionary perspective they're a failure.
Ie: Natural selection in action - elimination of undesirable traits.
There are a lot of living people with the social skills that make them capable of continuing the species, but I'd rather they be escorted out of the gene pool before the water becomes suddenly warm.
None of which is relevant in an evolutionary context. Natural selection chooses traits which are favourable to the survival and expansion of the species - goals a tendency towards suicide most certainly does not further.
(This is not a judgement on whether someone who kills themselves deserved to die.)
It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life.
I'd have to say that the notion of "every life is sacred" is a very recent development, rather than something "archaic".
This is not "natural selection." That means something different than what you think it does.
How on Earth is suicide not natural selection ? All else being equal, a person who suicides is clearly not the better candidate for prolonging the species.
No. Not hardly. Increasingly complex and powerful apps come on the scene all the time, and it generally doesn't matter much what Window Manager you run them under.
Which is relevant if all you're interested in is how that individual application application works on its own.
Personally, I find HCI and application integration to be *vastly* more interesting technology than drawing a box with some widgets - no matter how fancy they might be - around the output of an application, something that was mastered 20+ years ago.
Now, if you're concerned with 'eye candy' and how the 'desktop' looks, the situation differs.
No, I'm interested in the technology of user interface, of which "eye candy" is an integral part.
Why it bothers you so much that Microsoft will, in some ways, have the best technology for the next few years is a mystery to me.
The design of such a system is important, and the people who brought you net send possibly aren't the ones you want to trust in creating a global network.
By that measure, since pretty much every networked and/or multiuser OS in existence has an equivalent to 'net send', who could you trust ?
Windows represents CPUs using the bits in a machine word. On 64-bit hardware, you're limited to 64 CPUs. This is exposed in the ABI. Not that Windows would scale well for such a system, of course.
Why not ?
Specific, technical details with references, please - not just rhetoric.
That's why I been wondering for years, why not just prevent something from using 100% of the CPU?
Because almost all the time, you *want* a process to be using 100% of the CPU.
I mean, if we let a process only take up to let's say 99% of the CPU, we'd still have a system reactive enough to get to the task manager and eventually put and end to the process that would otherwise make anything else so slow that you'd have to reboot. It's not even about priority, just about preventing a process from using 100%, and depriving it from a non-significant processing time, but that would be significiant for the other tasks.
I have often said a big problem with MS Windows is it's inability to install an OS suitable for business use. Why do we need solitaire, minesweeper, and media cores on a machine that will be used to run billing software, for instance?
It is so trivially easy to remove or disable access to this sort of software, that it boggles the mind anyone would even consider trying to make an issue out of it.
When the tech is all you're really interested in, what a bunch of 'graphic design' flakes think becomes instantly irrelevant.
I'm sure you think this is somehow relevant to the discussion, but I really don't see how...
So you continually install more and better apps, and add them to your GUI by editing ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc . Or ~/.twm if you really are only interested in the tech.
Er, no. That's what you do if you're an old-skool [wannabe] unix hacker, in which case you're probably not interested in "tech" newer than tcsh and pipes.
The fact that Microsoft's display tech will be marginally ahead by the end of this year does not invalidate the fact that it has been laughably behind for the past five, which I believe was the point being made.
Which does not invalidate the "fact" that MacOS was laughably behind for the 5 - 7 years prior to that. Nor does it make either of those things relevant.
At any given time, someone has the better tech. For the last few years, it's been Apple (although IMHO they dramatically underestimated how well their hardware platform would be able to utilise it, lessening its impressiveness). For the next few, it'll be Microsoft. When the tech is all you're really interested in, who's making it is irrelevant.
Jeez, it seems to me that Microsoft should be very careful about the marketing of this, because if ya gotta buy a new box to run Vista, then why not just simply make the switch?
Because a PC will be cheaper.
After all Aero Glass is mostly based on developments seen quite a while ago in OS X.
Everything I've seen suggests that Vista's display system is technologically better (resolution indepependent, for example).
As for your actual point, the advantages of Vista over Windows XP seem to me to be roughly equivalent to the advantages of OS X Tiger over OS X Panther: eye candy and some upgraded OS components. In which case, a lot of people will be quite happy without it. But then the majority of the Mac users I know haven't seen the point in upgrading to Tiger either, and that doesn't stop Apple fanboys proclaiming it like teh greatest OS evar.
Actually, it would be more like the difference between 10.1 and the upcoming 10.5.
A friend of mine (who is an IT pro) installed a machine with Win XP, installed SP2 and enabled the firewall and then connected the machine to the internet and got infected within 20 seconds - which at least proves that the internet contain some really bad things.
Either you're lying, or leaving out some rather important details.
I agree. What really gets me is that Microsoft is basically admitting their product is shoddy. They sell a defective product and then charge additional money for the repairs.
Virus scanners aren't "repairs" they're extra defenses.
It's like buying a window, having the window arrive with a big crack in it, the manufacturer charging extra to fix the crack, and then finally saying that, for an annual fee, they will help prevent other cracks (not a guarantee).
Actually it's more like buying a window, then hiring a large man to stand in front of it making sure no-one throws any stones through it and fix it for you if they do.
The problem is, Windows started out as a layer to run on top of the MS-DOS operating system. Over the years, they kept adding to it and adding to it. Then they branched off another direction (Windows NT) when they realized building on the MS-DOS foundation was rather like constructing an office building on top of a sand pit.
Windows (from 3.0 onwards) didn't so much use DOS as a "foundation" as it knocked the whole building down (sans maybe the water and electricity connections) and erected a new one in its place.
Starting from Windows 3.0, DOS was not much more than a boot loader - Windows replaced nearly _all_ OS level functionality (processor scheduling, hardware access, memory management, etc).
The reason Linux is even harder to target is you have several different e-mail apps to choose from & everybody isn't using the same app with the same secuirity flaw. This makes it harder to target Linux users although not impossible as I mentioned earlier. One package that seems to be in many flavors of Linux is the Apache web server which was targeted by several viruses.
Every Linux distribution the typical end user is ever likely to see comes with the same set of basic tools providing all the functionality any virus or other piece of malware could ever need.
Windows Vista is supposed to fix the issue with users always running around as an admin evven though they almost never need it.
This issue is extremely overplayed. Certainly, running as a non-Admin works _now_ as a decent defense because most malware is written to assume the user is Administrator. However, there's very little - if anything - it really needs Administrator privileges to do. Expect to see a fresh round of malware in the next 12 - 18 months that doesn't make the Administrator assumption and that running as a regular user provides no defense for.
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Largely due to either the lack of any alternatives, or massive incompetence from those who did have alternatives.
According to the Microsoft antitrust trial, this is not true. Apple and Microsoft were(/are) *not* in the same market.
Sounds like the House of Lords will have to mod it (-1, Redundant)...
How do you figure a psychological issue isn't biology ?
Natural selection is about the genetic traits that get passed on to the next generation.
Indeed. So clearly traits that tend toward suicide aren't going a terribly good thing to pass along.
Suicide is about social problems.
No, suicide is typically about psychological problems. Most people's minds don't fall apart dealing with social problems. Those whose do have "undesirable traits" that natural selection can "select" on.
All else being equal, if person A decides to top themselves and person B does not, then clearly person B is the better bet for prolonging the species.
Which is entirely my point. If they haven't got sufficient mental toughness to deal with life, then from an evolutionary perspective they're a failure.
Ie: Natural selection in action - elimination of undesirable traits.
There are a lot of living people with the social skills that make them capable of continuing the species, but I'd rather they be escorted out of the gene pool before the water becomes suddenly warm.
None of which is relevant in an evolutionary context. Natural selection chooses traits which are favourable to the survival and expansion of the species - goals a tendency towards suicide most certainly does not further.
(This is not a judgement on whether someone who kills themselves deserved to die.)
I'd have to say that the notion of "every life is sacred" is a very recent development, rather than something "archaic".
How on Earth is suicide not natural selection ? All else being equal, a person who suicides is clearly not the better candidate for prolonging the species.
Which is relevant if all you're interested in is how that individual application application works on its own.
Personally, I find HCI and application integration to be *vastly* more interesting technology than drawing a box with some widgets - no matter how fancy they might be - around the output of an application, something that was mastered 20+ years ago.
Now, if you're concerned with 'eye candy' and how the 'desktop' looks, the situation differs.
No, I'm interested in the technology of user interface, of which "eye candy" is an integral part.
Why it bothers you so much that Microsoft will, in some ways, have the best technology for the next few years is a mystery to me.
By that measure, since pretty much every networked and/or multiuser OS in existence has an equivalent to 'net send', who could you trust ?
IIRC it was C2, and that certification _requires_ the system not to be networked.
Why not ?
Specific, technical details with references, please - not just rhetoric.
Because almost all the time, you *want* a process to be using 100% of the CPU.
I mean, if we let a process only take up to let's say 99% of the CPU, we'd still have a system reactive enough to get to the task manager and eventually put and end to the process that would otherwise make anything else so slow that you'd have to reboot. It's not even about priority, just about preventing a process from using 100%, and depriving it from a non-significant processing time, but that would be significiant for the other tasks.
That's exactly what priorities are for.
It is so trivially easy to remove or disable access to this sort of software, that it boggles the mind anyone would even consider trying to make an issue out of it.
Most "rich people whose names I know" are movie/music/sports stars, royalty and their children. Not many of them "worked very hard".
I'm sure you think this is somehow relevant to the discussion, but I really don't see how...
So you continually install more and better apps, and add them to your GUI by editing ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc . Or ~/.twm if you really are only interested in the tech.
Er, no. That's what you do if you're an old-skool [wannabe] unix hacker, in which case you're probably not interested in "tech" newer than tcsh and pipes.
Which does not invalidate the "fact" that MacOS was laughably behind for the 5 - 7 years prior to that. Nor does it make either of those things relevant.
At any given time, someone has the better tech. For the last few years, it's been Apple (although IMHO they dramatically underestimated how well their hardware platform would be able to utilise it, lessening its impressiveness). For the next few, it'll be Microsoft. When the tech is all you're really interested in, who's making it is irrelevant.
That's because all those hotfixes save backups of the files they replace, so they can be uninstalled.
Because a PC will be cheaper.
After all Aero Glass is mostly based on developments seen quite a while ago in OS X.
Everything I've seen suggests that Vista's display system is technologically better (resolution indepependent, for example).
Actually, it would be more like the difference between 10.1 and the upcoming 10.5.
Either you're lying, or leaving out some rather important details.
*Very* few "viruses" fit this profile. Most are binaries deliberately (if ignorantly) executed by the end user. No OS can protect against that.
Virus scanners aren't "repairs" they're extra defenses.
It's like buying a window, having the window arrive with a big crack in it, the manufacturer charging extra to fix the crack, and then finally saying that, for an annual fee, they will help prevent other cracks (not a guarantee).
Actually it's more like buying a window, then hiring a large man to stand in front of it making sure no-one throws any stones through it and fix it for you if they do.
Windows (from 3.0 onwards) didn't so much use DOS as a "foundation" as it knocked the whole building down (sans maybe the water and electricity connections) and erected a new one in its place.
Starting from Windows 3.0, DOS was not much more than a boot loader - Windows replaced nearly _all_ OS level functionality (processor scheduling, hardware access, memory management, etc).
There is no way in Hell any of the BSDs are a viable alternative to Windows for the majority of Windows users.
OS X: definitely.
Linux: probably good enough, depending on distro.
*BSD: no way.
The BSDs are OSes for *unix hackers*, not ignorant end users.
"FreeBSD is for people who love unix. Linux is for people who hate Windows."
Every Linux distribution the typical end user is ever likely to see comes with the same set of basic tools providing all the functionality any virus or other piece of malware could ever need.
Windows Vista is supposed to fix the issue with users always running around as an admin evven though they almost never need it.
This issue is extremely overplayed. Certainly, running as a non-Admin works _now_ as a decent defense because most malware is written to assume the user is Administrator. However, there's very little - if anything - it really needs Administrator privileges to do. Expect to see a fresh round of malware in the next 12 - 18 months that doesn't make the Administrator assumption and that running as a regular user provides no defense for.