Because those are the people paying the most in taxes to start with. If you look at the numbers, the vast majority of taxes are paid by the vast minority of the people.
This is only because the vast minority of the people have the vast majority of the wealth.
check out the dell m101z, for 500 bucks you have an 11,6 screen, a decent size hdd (which you can replace with an ssd if you want) and an AMD dual core CULV CPU
It's also 3x the volume and (at least) 50% heavier.
Granted, the cpu probably is slightly lower then the intel CULV in this new apple, but there is no way the apple is twice as good in terms of specs
Depends on which specs you're measuring. If size and weight are important (and if you're entertaining buying either of these machines then they must be) then the MBA probably is nearly twice as good.
I think a big part of it (from the public's perspective, anyway) is a misconception about open source.
The idea that "the public" understands (let alone cares) what "Open Source" actually means is laughable in and of itself.
Even for people who do know, outright bullshit like this:
By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests.
And FUD like this:
Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems.
If oil continues an upward trend, and we don't find a suitable substitute, air travel will become far more expensive in the future. The air line industries are already having difficulty, so maybe they will subsidize by selling some aircraft off for recycling.
Some airlines are having difficulty, others are making money quite nicely.
The financial crisis put a big damper on business travel - particularly in Business and First class - which is most airline's bread and butter. This trend has started to reverse itself over the last 6 months, however.
Speaking of which, why do they need to keep the wings? It's not like someone can live in that part, and it massively increases the probability of a pilot misidentifying it from above.
Judging by the pictures they'll be used for aesthic and/or shading purposes.
Err, the quote was that Windows and Office were bloated(which directly translates to bad performance on older hardware) [...]
It's a particularly laughable statement when the comparison is OSX, which had atrociously poor performance even on the fastest hardware available, for several *years* after its initial release.
If you rip out enough components out of an OS, something surely will break. In this case you are ripping out both system libraries (WebKit) and applications (Safari). In the case of MS, the IE application itself could not be removed not just the system libraries. That was the point of the anti-trust case. MS didn't have to tie IE so much into the OS, but it did.
IE the app could most certainly be removed. Just delete iexplore.exe.
That doesn't matter. The OP's point was that MS did nothing to Netscape. The court record says otherwise.
OP said:
[...] MS never tried to block anyone from installing Netscape (or any other browser) in Windows [...]
Which is perfectly true.
*My* point is that all Microsoft's hardball paying did diddly squat until they had a product that people were actually prepared to use (IE3), and not a whole lot more than that until they had a product people preferred (IE4+).
Again, that's not the point. Could Navigator been better? Yes. Would more resources helped this? Probably. But we'll never know as Netscape had to make due with fewer financial resources because of MS.
No they didn't. There is little evidence to suggest that more resources would have resulted in a better Navigator 4.x line. The problem wasn't lack of manpower or money, it was poor management and worse coding. By the time "fewer financial resources" became an issue, the writing was already well and truly on the wall.
Most other desktop OS's today do not require a browser. OS X has Safari but it can be removed. Linux, BSD, etc does not need Mozilla, Opera, or whatever.
If you rip Safari+Webkit out of OS X, it will break things (iTunes, for example). Similarly with khtml and KDE, and GNOME + whatever it's browser component is. That's what happens when you reuse code components within a complex system, which is generally considered good software engineering.
Ironically, every major platform now has the same sort of "browser integration" as Windows introduced with Win98.
Further, note that nothing Microsoft did against Netscape mattered a whit until their browser was as good (IE3), and was relatively unimportant until it was better (IE4). The biggest burst of growth in IE usage came during the period when that version (IE4) was *not* "bundled" with Windows.
Finally, this is even before betting into the disaster that was Navigator 4.x. Microsoft certainly put the final nails into Netscape's coffin, but that was only after Netscape had dug the hole, organised the funeral, gotten into the coffin and passed them the hammer.
I guess you do not know the history of Microsoft against Digital Research. Microsoft purposely crippled Windows so it would not run on DR-DOS at one time.
No, they didn't.
Microsoft also exerted an extraordinary amount of power to displace Netscape from the desktop [...]
The main "power" they exerted was building a better browser while Netscape kept building shittier one.
I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines. The greatest revolution in the web was reintroducing the command line in the form of the search bar.
Equating a CLI interface to search bars is disingenuous, at best. The similarities basically begin and end at "you type stuff out".
People don't like commandlines because they require a large amount of pre-existing, contextual knowledge to be useful, because they generally offer little - if any - feedback and because mistakes are often destructive.
EAX and similar hardware-accelerated sound processing.
You mean the functionality provided by "Creative ALchemy" ?
It was working in XP, yet with Vista Microsoft not only removed any relevant APIs, but also refused to certify any drivers which did have support for that.
They reimplemented the whole audio stack. Kinda hard to "recertify" a driver that was built for something that no longer exists.
What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not?
Generally speaking: transportability, reliability and longevity. Potentially performance, as well, depending on how you're connecting those "backup drives".
Yes, but unlike Microsoft, most of them don't seriously enforce it anymore. You put them into some kind "test mode" by typing a four digit code on the remote and it will never bother you again.
We're not talking about hardware DVD players, we're talking about DVD playing software. Every licensed software DVD player I've ever seen - on multiple platforms - has required the DVD region of the drive be set before they'll play.
No, I am complaining about the right people. MS could have stood up for their customers.
How ? Do you seriously think they would have been allowed to sell a system specifically designed to circumvent DRM restrictions put in place by the copyright holder, even if it had made the slightest business sense to do so ?
To have working DRM, you need to remove system capabilities. hat's why the sound card driver model has been crippled in Vista/7, removing all paths that could be used to avoid DRM.
DRM is only active when DRM-encumbered media is being played. There's no need to remove "functionality" at all to support DRM-encumbered media (unless your idea of "system capabilities" is circumventing DRM - in which case, again, you need to complain to the copyright holder).
And that makes mplayer so superior:p
The point is it has nothing to do with "Windows 7 DRM". MacOS Classic, on a PPC iBook, has the same requirement to choose a DVD region.
1. Crippling sound cards.
How ?
2. Burning lots of processing power for HDCP.
HDCP is done in the hardware between the video card and the display device. It's got nothing to do with your CPU.
3. Monitors proportions: 4:3 -> 16:10 -> 16:9. Low screens are useless for anything but watching cinema-format movies.
Has nothing to do with DRM. Not to mention my 27" 1920x1200 LCD works great for displaying multiple document pages at 100%, or numerous terminal windows. The two 22" widescreen LCDs rotated to portrait beside it are *excellent* for displaying long documents as well.
You do suffer from these even if you don't do anything DRM-encumbered.
You do not. DRM is not active if you're not using DRM-encumbered media. It does nothing.
Btw, I don't understand why Samba4 won't do what AD does. Once you have profiles, don't you have what you need?
No. That doesn't give you anything more than the old Domain model did fifteen years ago.
Or is Group Policy more than that? And if so, could you possibly give a 2-paragraph description so someone could be inspired to write the missing pieces?
If no-one's been "inspired" yet to implement GPOs in Samba4 (or a UNIX equivalent for UNIX servers), nothing I write is going to change their mind. They've been around for a decade and the benefits are both compelling and clear.
Is it stuff like checking a checkbox that says "Can't modify own wallpaper"?
That's a very basic example, but yes. Group Policies are a centralised configuration management tool. Everything from controller wallpapers through power management settings to restricting what software can be run.
I guess something like that would have the frontend look something like a webpage with option/checkboxes, and the backend (for that particular option) would be config dot-files set to read-only, user-root.
There would need to be numerous implementation backends, to handle the different UIs and applications. Likely this is one of the reason's no-one has done it yet.
DRM is irrelevant unless you have DRM-encumbered media.
I tried it once on a computer that came with it, the moment it could not play a dvd without setting a region code on the drive I knew it was not for me.
Every single licensed software DVD player on the planet requires a DVD region code to be set on the drive. This is hardly something unique to Windows 7, or even Windows.
These folks seemed to think my computer belongs to the MPAA.
Again, the DRM does nothing unless the owner of the copyright has DRM-encumbered their media. You're complaining about the wrong people.
Ever look at the Server/sysadmin ratio for windows shops vs $n.x shops?
A discrepancy that in no small measure is the result of the Windows sysadmins commonly getting involved in end-user support (either directly or indirectly), a relatively rare scenario for the typical *nix admin (outside of "shut up and reboot").
I guess Linux is close to solving one of the major pieces of the puzzle (directory services) that has it beat by Windows.
It's not. The reason everyone wants AD is not AD itself, but the stuff that comes along with it. In particular, the centralised configuration offered by Group Policies, for which Linux (and UNIX in general) has no equivalent[0].
[0]By default. You can of course DIY your own centralised config infrastructure using something like puppet or cfengine, or even just simple scripts, but that's basically defeating the purpose.
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Because those are the people paying the most in taxes to start with. If you look at the numbers, the vast majority of taxes are paid by the vast minority of the people.
This is only because the vast minority of the people have the vast majority of the wealth.
check out the dell m101z, for 500 bucks you have an 11,6 screen, a decent size hdd (which you can replace with an ssd if you want) and an AMD dual core CULV CPU
It's also 3x the volume and (at least) 50% heavier.
Granted, the cpu probably is slightly lower then the intel CULV in this new apple, but there is no way the apple is twice as good in terms of specs
Depends on which specs you're measuring. If size and weight are important (and if you're entertaining buying either of these machines then they must be) then the MBA probably is nearly twice as good.
Another thing: 768p screen? Really? Mine has 1024p and it's a few years old.
Who makes an 11" ultraportable with a 1080p screen ?
Heck, I'm not even sure I'd want such a thing. 1366x768 on 11" will be squinty enough as it is.
I think a big part of it (from the public's perspective, anyway) is a misconception about open source.
The idea that "the public" understands (let alone cares) what "Open Source" actually means is laughable in and of itself.
Even for people who do know, outright bullshit like this:
By the inherent nature of closed software, when systems are (optionally!) certified by registrars, there is no proof that they will behave the same on election day as in tests.
And FUD like this:
Plus they are vulnerable to software bugs and are often based on unstable, closed-source operating systems.
Just makes people touting OSS look like zealots.
If oil continues an upward trend, and we don't find a suitable substitute, air travel will become far more expensive in the future. The air line industries are already having difficulty, so maybe they will subsidize by selling some aircraft off for recycling.
Some airlines are having difficulty, others are making money quite nicely.
The financial crisis put a big damper on business travel - particularly in Business and First class - which is most airline's bread and butter. This trend has started to reverse itself over the last 6 months, however.
Speaking of which, why do they need to keep the wings? It's not like someone can live in that part, and it massively increases the probability of a pilot misidentifying it from above.
Judging by the pictures they'll be used for aesthic and/or shading purposes.
Err, the quote was that Windows and Office were bloated(which directly translates to bad performance on older hardware) [...]
It's a particularly laughable statement when the comparison is OSX, which had atrociously poor performance even on the fastest hardware available, for several *years* after its initial release.
If you rip out enough components out of an OS, something surely will break. In this case you are ripping out both system libraries (WebKit) and applications (Safari). In the case of MS, the IE application itself could not be removed not just the system libraries. That was the point of the anti-trust case. MS didn't have to tie IE so much into the OS, but it did.
IE the app could most certainly be removed. Just delete iexplore.exe.
That doesn't matter. The OP's point was that MS did nothing to Netscape. The court record says otherwise.
OP said:
[...] MS never tried to block anyone from installing Netscape (or any other browser) in Windows [...]
Which is perfectly true.
*My* point is that all Microsoft's hardball paying did diddly squat until they had a product that people were actually prepared to use (IE3), and not a whole lot more than that until they had a product people preferred (IE4+).
Again, that's not the point. Could Navigator been better? Yes. Would more resources helped this? Probably. But we'll never know as Netscape had to make due with fewer financial resources because of MS.
No they didn't. There is little evidence to suggest that more resources would have resulted in a better Navigator 4.x line. The problem wasn't lack of manpower or money, it was poor management and worse coding. By the time "fewer financial resources" became an issue, the writing was already well and truly on the wall.
MS is a convicted monopolist, reading the reason as to why that is reason enough to know which is more evil than the other.
I don't see anything Microsoft did that Apple hasn't also done.
The new bogeyman: fragmented FRAGMENTED FRAGMENTED!!!
It's not new and it's not a bogeyman. For example, platform fragmentation is the single biggest reason UNIX doesn't rule the world today.
Most other desktop OS's today do not require a browser. OS X has Safari but it can be removed. Linux, BSD, etc does not need Mozilla, Opera, or whatever.
If you rip Safari+Webkit out of OS X, it will break things (iTunes, for example). Similarly with khtml and KDE, and GNOME + whatever it's browser component is. That's what happens when you reuse code components within a complex system, which is generally considered good software engineering.
Ironically, every major platform now has the same sort of "browser integration" as Windows introduced with Win98.
Further, note that nothing Microsoft did against Netscape mattered a whit until their browser was as good (IE3), and was relatively unimportant until it was better (IE4). The biggest burst of growth in IE usage came during the period when that version (IE4) was *not* "bundled" with Windows.
Finally, this is even before betting into the disaster that was Navigator 4.x. Microsoft certainly put the final nails into Netscape's coffin, but that was only after Netscape had dug the hole, organised the funeral, gotten into the coffin and passed them the hammer.
I guess you do not know the history of Microsoft against Digital Research. Microsoft purposely crippled Windows so it would not run on DR-DOS at one time.
No, they didn't.
Microsoft also exerted an extraordinary amount of power to displace Netscape from the desktop [...]
The main "power" they exerted was building a better browser while Netscape kept building shittier one.
MacOS has been able to read FAT and NTFS for over a decade.
NTFS read-only support was first introduced with OS X 10.3, in 2003.
The rest of your post is similarly alarmist bullshit.
I never quite got why so many people are allergic to command lines. The greatest revolution in the web was reintroducing the command line in the form of the search bar.
Equating a CLI interface to search bars is disingenuous, at best. The similarities basically begin and end at "you type stuff out".
People don't like commandlines because they require a large amount of pre-existing, contextual knowledge to be useful, because they generally offer little - if any - feedback and because mistakes are often destructive.
EAX and similar hardware-accelerated sound processing.
You mean the functionality provided by "Creative ALchemy" ?
It was working in XP, yet with Vista Microsoft not only removed any relevant APIs, but also refused to certify any drivers which did have support for that.
They reimplemented the whole audio stack. Kinda hard to "recertify" a driver that was built for something that no longer exists.
If Microsoft wanted to make it easy to skirt region restrictions, they could, and they could get away with it. They choose to make it hard.
No, they choose not to make it easy. They do exactly what everyone else does.
What, exactly, does tape provide you in terms of archival veracity and longevity that current drives do not?
Generally speaking: transportability, reliability and longevity. Potentially performance, as well, depending on how you're connecting those "backup drives".
Yes, but unlike Microsoft, most of them don't seriously enforce it anymore. You put them into some kind "test mode" by typing a four digit code on the remote and it will never bother you again.
We're not talking about hardware DVD players, we're talking about DVD playing software. Every licensed software DVD player I've ever seen - on multiple platforms - has required the DVD region of the drive be set before they'll play.
No, I am complaining about the right people. MS could have stood up for their customers.
How ? Do you seriously think they would have been allowed to sell a system specifically designed to circumvent DRM restrictions put in place by the copyright holder, even if it had made the slightest business sense to do so ?
That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said.
To have working DRM, you need to remove system capabilities. hat's why the sound card driver model has been crippled in Vista/7, removing all paths that could be used to avoid DRM.
DRM is only active when DRM-encumbered media is being played. There's no need to remove "functionality" at all to support DRM-encumbered media (unless your idea of "system capabilities" is circumventing DRM - in which case, again, you need to complain to the copyright holder).
And that makes mplayer so superior :p
The point is it has nothing to do with "Windows 7 DRM". MacOS Classic, on a PPC iBook, has the same requirement to choose a DVD region.
1. Crippling sound cards.
How ?
2. Burning lots of processing power for HDCP.
HDCP is done in the hardware between the video card and the display device. It's got nothing to do with your CPU.
3. Monitors proportions: 4:3 -> 16:10 -> 16:9. Low screens are useless for anything but watching cinema-format movies.
Has nothing to do with DRM. Not to mention my 27" 1920x1200 LCD works great for displaying multiple document pages at 100%, or numerous terminal windows. The two 22" widescreen LCDs rotated to portrait beside it are *excellent* for displaying long documents as well.
You do suffer from these even if you don't do anything DRM-encumbered.
You do not. DRM is not active if you're not using DRM-encumbered media. It does nothing.
Btw, I don't understand why Samba4 won't do what AD does. Once you have profiles, don't you have what you need?
No. That doesn't give you anything more than the old Domain model did fifteen years ago.
Or is Group Policy more than that? And if so, could you possibly give a 2-paragraph description so someone could be inspired to write the missing pieces?
If no-one's been "inspired" yet to implement GPOs in Samba4 (or a UNIX equivalent for UNIX servers), nothing I write is going to change their mind. They've been around for a decade and the benefits are both compelling and clear.
Is it stuff like checking a checkbox that says "Can't modify own wallpaper"?
That's a very basic example, but yes. Group Policies are a centralised configuration management tool. Everything from controller wallpapers through power management settings to restricting what software can be run.
I guess something like that would have the frontend look something like a webpage with option/checkboxes, and the backend (for that particular option) would be config dot-files set to read-only, user-root.
There would need to be numerous implementation backends, to handle the different UIs and applications. Likely this is one of the reason's no-one has done it yet.
And chock full of DRM.
DRM is irrelevant unless you have DRM-encumbered media.
I tried it once on a computer that came with it, the moment it could not play a dvd without setting a region code on the drive I knew it was not for me.
Every single licensed software DVD player on the planet requires a DVD region code to be set on the drive. This is hardly something unique to Windows 7, or even Windows.
These folks seemed to think my computer belongs to the MPAA.
Again, the DRM does nothing unless the owner of the copyright has DRM-encumbered their media. You're complaining about the wrong people.
Ever look at the Server/sysadmin ratio for windows shops vs $n.x shops?
A discrepancy that in no small measure is the result of the Windows sysadmins commonly getting involved in end-user support (either directly or indirectly), a relatively rare scenario for the typical *nix admin (outside of "shut up and reboot").
I guess Linux is close to solving one of the major pieces of the puzzle (directory services) that has it beat by Windows.
It's not. The reason everyone wants AD is not AD itself, but the stuff that comes along with it. In particular, the centralised configuration offered by Group Policies, for which Linux (and UNIX in general) has no equivalent[0].
[0]By default. You can of course DIY your own centralised config infrastructure using something like puppet or cfengine, or even just simple scripts, but that's basically defeating the purpose.