I stopped reading there, becasue yo ahve no idea what a monopoly is.
I do, and I don't think Microsoft is/was a monopoly because there's always been at *least* one drop-in replacement for all their products at all times in the last twenty years.
I agree as soon as Apple is declared by the courts to have a monopoly on desktop operating systems [...]
Ah, but that's the thing - Microsoft _weren't_ found a monopoly of "desktop operating systems", they were found a monopoly of "desktop operating systems for x86 processors" - Apple/MacOS weren't even considered to be a competitor. So, with that market definition in mind, how many alternative desktop operating systems for PPC processors can you think of ?
It's just that no-one *cares* about Apple because even though they're at least as bad as Microsoft, their "badness" only affects a tiny number of people.
That's some of the point. Why shouldn't any rendering engine be able to be plugged in when an application wants to render HTML?
Maybe because none of them have that capability ?[0] More importantly, none of them had that functionality back in 1996 when Microsoft started componentising IE.
[0] Although I do seem to remember stumbling across an ActiveX control once where someone had wrapped Gecko into an IE-compatible container.
This is a null argument. Media Player's not critical.
That is entirely a matter of opinion (ie: in some people's opinion's, a CLI shell isn't important - would you argue it's less of a "critical feature" than a media player ? How about a TCP/IP stack ? How about packet filtering ?)
IE's a little better of an analogy about needing a given component, but why would you embed into the OS heart such a component as MS has done.
Why don't you ask the KDE, GNOME and OS X developers why they've all done exactly the same thing ? At least you might be more inclined to listen to what they have to say...
But you need IE for this stuff, the way MS has done it. Therein lies the rub.
You "need" khtml in KDE and WebCore/WebKit in OS X as well - how is that any different ?
What we really need is Microsoft to allow removal of any and all programs that are not basic for an operating system.
Who gets to decide ? I'd be pretty willing to bet money most consumers consider a web browser and a media player "basic" functionality (far more than would consider, say, a text editor and a CLI shell to be "basic" functionality).
Correct engineering of software programs and their development, it seems, are almost lost.
Where's the poor engineering in a reusable software module ?
Yeah. The current situation is that consumers are forced to pay for Windows Media Player to get Windows. And when Windows is a monopoly, that is illegal.
This is about as accurate (and intelligent) as saying consumers are "forced to pay" for a passenger seat when they buy a car...
The downside is tha they are going with a inferior (as in technical) platform.
Not really. Macs have a few minor technical niceties over x86, but in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty unimportant (and completely unnoticable and irrelevant to 99% of people).
Jobs may say that it's better, but what he failed to realize was that the Power PC can do more then a Intel chip could per clock cycle.
No, he hasn't. Doing more per clock cycle is irrelevant when the clock speed gap more than makes up for it. Not to mention, in the case of the Pentium M ot Athlons, PPCs aren't doing "more per clock cycle" _anyway_.
Case in point, when I got my powerbook, my desktop, a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz was JUST as fast at doing my every day stuff as a lowly 1 GHz G4.
Sounds like your PC was either broken or very poorly configured. A G4 averages about 50% greater general performance at a given clock speed than a P4.
The Clock speed myth STILL lives.
The only clock speed myth that ever existed was the one Apple invented and perpetuated by deceptively marketing a handful of carefully chosen photoshop benchmarks as general performance metrics.
Also, I think that Apple still has not given IBM the chance to perform.
I'm sure Apple still has rather fresh memories of the PowerPC performance debacles that have played out over the last decade and simply don't want to continue the experience. Intel have an excellent track record of consistent performance improvement over time - if anyone can deliver, it's them.
Now there's no justification of Apple charging higher prices.
Of course there is - the same justification there's always been: It's a Mac.
Macs aren't expensive because they use PPC chips, they're expensive because that's the price Apple sells them at. 99% of a Mac's internals are the same parts that get put into millions of PC clones every day.
If the Macintel's are brought out and are MORE then the equivalent non Mac platform, then it will hardly seem worth paying for the privledge of Mac OS X.
People have been paying for the privilege of running MacOS for decades - what makes you think they'll suddenly stop now ? It's not like Macs have had any hardware advantages for the last 10 - 15 years (with a handful of brief exceptions).
I would then but the Dell and run Kubuntu.
Then, clearly, you're not interested in Macs because they're Macs (but, I'm guessing, because they're not Windows).
The time zone of the client should be set in the user's locale information - or does Outlook not support the Outlook client being in a different TZ to the Exchange server?
I assume so - I never saw any obvious weirdness dealing with Exchange clients spread across four timezones connecting to an Exchange server in my previous job.
According to Extended Universe, yes. Luke even has a Sith girlfriend, Mara Jade. But that seems to contradict Yoda's "Only two there are, a master and an apprentice"--at no point were Vader or Palpatine able to train more apprentices if they followed that rule.
I really don't understand the interpretation of Yoda's statement that leads to "there are only ever two Sith in the Galaxy". The immediate and most obvious conclusion to draw from Yoda's statement, IMHO, is that you never find more than two of them in the same place at the same time.
Ie: there's lots of pairs of Sith galavanting around the Galaxy, just never more than two together at once.
While the rest of our hardware is well ahead of the PC curve, the CPU does not.
How do you figure that ? If anything, Apple are consistently *behind* the curve in every way - bus speeds, video hardware, expansion capabilities (with the possible exception of firewire, depending on your perspective), processor speeds, etc. It's a struggle to think of any aspect of any Mac's specifications that wasn't present a year or more earlier on the PC plaform.
Apple hardware hasn't even been *on the curve* relative to PCs for over a decade, let alone ahead of it.
I STILL think that this move is stupid and with in 2 weeks, likely less, of release of the first Intel based Mac not only will the OS run on another Intel based box (a Dell or a IBM/Lenovo or whatever) AND Not ONLY will Windows run and run well on it, but so will any x86 Linux.
While I can see it being a minor problem if running OS X on non-Apple x86 machines is easy (although I don't for a second believe that it actually will be a trivial operation), I'm struggling to see any downside whatsoever to Windows and/or Linux being usable on x86 Macs...
You CPU has to handle all the additonal calculations and transactions and that slows things down. A real RAID controller offloads all that, so the CPU feels no additonal load. Good ones even do things the CPU normally has to do for single disks, reducing the load further. Desktop boards with low-end RAID chips are common in the PC world, and workstation/server boards with high-end RAID chips are quite common as well, have been for a while now.
I wish this meme would die. Software RAID has no meaningful CPU overhead on any remotely modern system.
There are good reasons to get hardware RAID. "Reducing CPU overhead" is not one of them.
I'm guessing since Open Firmware is an open standard (and is available for x86) it would be trivial for a third party manufacturer to build a motherboard based on Open Firmware that could run OS X.
However, given that running OS X on such a machine would be illegal, the market for such a product probably wouldn't be viable. That's why you don't see manufacturer's making "OS X compatible" PPC clones.
Guess they have something else up their sleeves. Probably some kind of proprietary DRM chip that the OS requires to run.
OS X only needs to be marginally difficult to run on clone hardware - even not being able to install straight from the installer CD because of a lack of drivers or even just a simple "serial number check" from the installer - to make economic sense. Someone prepared to buy (or build) a clone PC, compile their own version of the Darwin layer with appropriate hardware drivers and/or hardware tests removed and then merge it with an illegal, unsupported copy of OS X do not represent a lost sale to Apple. If anything, they represent the possibility of future sales.
I play plenty of games in XP. My beef isn't with the viability of XP to play games, it's with the insinuation that Windows backwards compatibility is some golden example of great corporate strategy. It's not.
But you're not looking for Windows backwards compatibility, you're looking for *DOS* backwards compatibility. Complaining Windows XP won't run your old DOS games with 100% compatibility makes about as much sense as complaining that Linux won't run them with 100% compatibility. DOS and Windows XP are two *completely* different operating systems.
Microsoft's backwards (and forwards, for that matter) compatibility might not be perfect, but it _is_ comparitively excellent - and their commitment to it is a major reason why their products have remained popular.
Just look at all the kludges, workarounds, and add-ons that have been made to get around the design limitations of that first hardware, many of which are still with us today. LIMS/EMS. Bank switching. Extended mode switching. Too few DMA channels. Too few hardware IRQs. An insane memory map. The list goes on.
Then take comfort in the fact that a miniscule number of people care about those things and only a tiny proportion of them actually have to worry about them.
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You can delete as much of the bundled "stuff" on Windows as you can on OS X.
Ah, nice. I didn't realise Apple had finally developed something like this.
You mean like, say, music ? Or software ? Or anything else defined by "intellectual property" laws ?
This is not normal. You should get it fixed.
I would imagine the lack of something equivalent to Group Policy is also a bit of a damper as well.
I do, and I don't think Microsoft is/was a monopoly because there's always been at *least* one drop-in replacement for all their products at all times in the last twenty years.
Ah, but that's the thing - Microsoft _weren't_ found a monopoly of "desktop operating systems", they were found a monopoly of "desktop operating systems for x86 processors" - Apple/MacOS weren't even considered to be a competitor. So, with that market definition in mind, how many alternative desktop operating systems for PPC processors can you think of ?
It's just that no-one *cares* about Apple because even though they're at least as bad as Microsoft, their "badness" only affects a tiny number of people.
In what way is it easier ?
Maybe because none of them have that capability ?[0] More importantly, none of them had that functionality back in 1996 when Microsoft started componentising IE.
[0] Although I do seem to remember stumbling across an ActiveX control once where someone had wrapped Gecko into an IE-compatible container.
That is entirely a matter of opinion (ie: in some people's opinion's, a CLI shell isn't important - would you argue it's less of a "critical feature" than a media player ? How about a TCP/IP stack ? How about packet filtering ?)
IE's a little better of an analogy about needing a given component, but why would you embed into the OS heart such a component as MS has done.
Why don't you ask the KDE, GNOME and OS X developers why they've all done exactly the same thing ? At least you might be more inclined to listen to what they have to say...
But you need IE for this stuff, the way MS has done it. Therein lies the rub.
You "need" khtml in KDE and WebCore/WebKit in OS X as well - how is that any different ?
No:
* It almost certainly uses functionality other browsers lack.
* Which other browsers expose just their rendering engine as an embeddable module ?
* What's the "standard" for interfacing to an embeddable browser object that they're supposed to write for ?
* How can they reasonably design a critical OS feature based on the assumption and end user *might* have installed a suitably compatible browser ?
Who gets to decide ? I'd be pretty willing to bet money most consumers consider a web browser and a media player "basic" functionality (far more than would consider, say, a text editor and a CLI shell to be "basic" functionality).
Correct engineering of software programs and their development, it seems, are almost lost.
Where's the poor engineering in a reusable software module ?
This is about as accurate (and intelligent) as saying consumers are "forced to pay" for a passenger seat when they buy a car...
Not really. Macs have a few minor technical niceties over x86, but in the grand scheme of things, they're pretty unimportant (and completely unnoticable and irrelevant to 99% of people).
Jobs may say that it's better, but what he failed to realize was that the Power PC can do more then a Intel chip could per clock cycle.
No, he hasn't. Doing more per clock cycle is irrelevant when the clock speed gap more than makes up for it. Not to mention, in the case of the Pentium M ot Athlons, PPCs aren't doing "more per clock cycle" _anyway_.
Case in point, when I got my powerbook, my desktop, a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz was JUST as fast at doing my every day stuff as a lowly 1 GHz G4.
Sounds like your PC was either broken or very poorly configured. A G4 averages about 50% greater general performance at a given clock speed than a P4.
The Clock speed myth STILL lives.
The only clock speed myth that ever existed was the one Apple invented and perpetuated by deceptively marketing a handful of carefully chosen photoshop benchmarks as general performance metrics.
Also, I think that Apple still has not given IBM the chance to perform.
I'm sure Apple still has rather fresh memories of the PowerPC performance debacles that have played out over the last decade and simply don't want to continue the experience. Intel have an excellent track record of consistent performance improvement over time - if anyone can deliver, it's them.
Now there's no justification of Apple charging higher prices.
Of course there is - the same justification there's always been: It's a Mac.
Macs aren't expensive because they use PPC chips, they're expensive because that's the price Apple sells them at. 99% of a Mac's internals are the same parts that get put into millions of PC clones every day.
If the Macintel's are brought out and are MORE then the equivalent non Mac platform, then it will hardly seem worth paying for the privledge of Mac OS X.
People have been paying for the privilege of running MacOS for decades - what makes you think they'll suddenly stop now ? It's not like Macs have had any hardware advantages for the last 10 - 15 years (with a handful of brief exceptions).
I would then but the Dell and run Kubuntu.
Then, clearly, you're not interested in Macs because they're Macs (but, I'm guessing, because they're not Windows).
At no stage has Microsoft ever "bailed out" Apple.
I assume so - I never saw any obvious weirdness dealing with Exchange clients spread across four timezones connecting to an Exchange server in my previous job.
I really don't understand the interpretation of Yoda's statement that leads to "there are only ever two Sith in the Galaxy". The immediate and most obvious conclusion to draw from Yoda's statement, IMHO, is that you never find more than two of them in the same place at the same time.
Ie: there's lots of pairs of Sith galavanting around the Galaxy, just never more than two together at once.
Funny you say that, I would have picked OS/2 users as the second worst of the lot (that you list). Amiga users, of course, being #1.
How do you figure that ? If anything, Apple are consistently *behind* the curve in every way - bus speeds, video hardware, expansion capabilities (with the possible exception of firewire, depending on your perspective), processor speeds, etc. It's a struggle to think of any aspect of any Mac's specifications that wasn't present a year or more earlier on the PC plaform.
Apple hardware hasn't even been *on the curve* relative to PCs for over a decade, let alone ahead of it.
While I can see it being a minor problem if running OS X on non-Apple x86 machines is easy (although I don't for a second believe that it actually will be a trivial operation), I'm struggling to see any downside whatsoever to Windows and/or Linux being usable on x86 Macs...
I wish this meme would die. Software RAID has no meaningful CPU overhead on any remotely modern system.
There are good reasons to get hardware RAID. "Reducing CPU overhead" is not one of them.
Lack of consumer demand. There's no _technical_ reason you couldn't daisy-chain together a keyboard and mouse off a single PS/2 port.
However, given that running OS X on such a machine would be illegal, the market for such a product probably wouldn't be viable. That's why you don't see manufacturer's making "OS X compatible" PPC clones.
Guess they have something else up their sleeves. Probably some kind of proprietary DRM chip that the OS requires to run.
OS X only needs to be marginally difficult to run on clone hardware - even not being able to install straight from the installer CD because of a lack of drivers or even just a simple "serial number check" from the installer - to make economic sense. Someone prepared to buy (or build) a clone PC, compile their own version of the Darwin layer with appropriate hardware drivers and/or hardware tests removed and then merge it with an illegal, unsupported copy of OS X do not represent a lost sale to Apple. If anything, they represent the possibility of future sales.
But you're not looking for Windows backwards compatibility, you're looking for *DOS* backwards compatibility. Complaining Windows XP won't run your old DOS games with 100% compatibility makes about as much sense as complaining that Linux won't run them with 100% compatibility. DOS and Windows XP are two *completely* different operating systems.
Microsoft's backwards (and forwards, for that matter) compatibility might not be perfect, but it _is_ comparitively excellent - and their commitment to it is a major reason why their products have remained popular.
Then take comfort in the fact that a miniscule number of people care about those things and only a tiny proportion of them actually have to worry about them.