There's a difference between a large war chest and a monopoly. A monopoly, carefully (if illegally) maintained, never runs out, and your shareholders never worry about declining income. In fact with an OS monopoly your income grows with the PC market without you having to do much work.
A monopoly at the bottom of the software stack is particularly useful because not only does it provide essential income, it also gives you leverage against the upper layers of the software stack --- i.e. all the other software markets you want to conquer.
> According to Rick Chapman, the answer is > simpler: > Microsoft was the only company on the list that > never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this > was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb > luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the > dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really?
Microsoft's past is littered with failures: Microsoft Bob, early versions of Windows, early versions of PocketPC, all versions of Smartphone so far, the original MSN "Blackbird", LAN Manager, UltimateTV, Windows At Work, Windows DNA, and huge internal projects like Pyramid and Cairo that never even saw the light of day --- these are just some of the examples.
None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.
It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is that the monopolist gets a lot more lives.
Ditto for Intel. What other company could have survived the IA64 debacle? Yet Intel has, on the back of its x86 near-monopoly.
Not just a Flash kiiller ... PDF and HTML too
on
Longhorn's Flash Killer?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
XAML is Microsoft's new do-it-all markup language that includes vector graphics and animation a la SVG (they even call the graphics subset "WVG"). You can read all about it in the Longhorn alpha developer docs. I suspect Sparkle is just the authoring toolset for the graphics.
What's interesting is that XAML also includes markup for user interface elements (similar in intent to XUL), and general documents (similar to HTML). It also has a feature set called "fixed format" documents which seems clearly designed to supplant PDF.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Microsoft ultimately plans to bury the W3C and make Web formats their proprietary property. They may as well just call it Bluebird 2006.
> It's not the job of television to educate > children on how to eat. At the risk of sounding > like a broken record, this is something the > parents are responsible for.
This kind of logic sounds great until you actually are a parent. Then you realize that while it is indeed your responsibility to instill healthy eating habits into your child, the influence of television makes your job very much harder, and being a parent is already very hard work. There is a cost for unrestrained sex, violence and fast food in the media, borne by stressed-out parents. For the sake of compassion or prudence, you might want to consider the cost.
Only being installed on 2% of machines (or whatever the number is) is a genuine advantage. It's not a technical advantage, but it is nonetheless very real. Don't knock it.
Put it another way --- software diversity is a good thing.
Re:Slow cumbersome process
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> If you'd like a demonstration of the difference > between the run-time execution of.NET vs Java, > pick your favorite VM and run Forte, then run > Visual Studio.NET (it's written in C#)
That is a lie. VS.NET is not written in C#.
> There is a lot of FUD being disseminated about > "Microsof is going to sue Ximian, et al. for > Mono" blah,blah,blah. That's not going to > happen.
Your omniscience is impressive.
Microsoft has gotten EMCA's stamp on C#, the CLR, and the basic Framework, but they still control them with an iron grip. When.NET's behaviour differs from the ECMA spec, who's right, ECMA or Microsoft? Who gets to decide how things will evolve --- ECMA, or Microsoft? And of course.NET is much more than what ECMA has blessed. I doubt we'll see ADO, ASP.NET, System.Windows.Forms or a bazillion other APIs that you need to write actually useful applications in ECMA anytime soon.
Even if you're willing to go beyond ECMA and port the Microsoft proprietary APIs to other platforms, the fact is that System.Windows.Forms is absolutely NOT a cross-platform GUI toolkit. The Mono guys are implementing it by sucking in WINE! There is simply no Microsoft-blessed cross platform GUI toolkit for.NET.
There are a couple of other relevant legal issues.
FirebirdSQL were not the first to use "Firebird" for software, not even for open-source software. There was Firebird BBS (firebird.org.tw), and others can be found via Google.
Also, trademarks have to be defended. Until now, FirebirdSQL have not attempted to defend their purported trademark against other software products using the same name.
Phoenix BIOS has a web browser which naturally would be referred to as the Phoenix Browser. FirebirdSQL does not have its own Web browser. That's the difference.
> AOL staff didn't have the imagination to think up > a name of their own
Just for fun, try to come up with a name that's memorable and that no-one's ever used before for any software product. Perhaps it's harder than you think.
It's not on by default because there are serious, obvious bugs that need to be fixed before smooth scrolling is ready for prime time.
It's also not on by default because a lot of people hate smooth scrolling.
First I'll fix the bugs (I already have a patch for the main bugs). Then there will be a discussion about whether it's worth turning this on by default. My current feeling is that we should turn it on by default only on platforms which have a platform setting for this (only Windows, AFAIK) and we should honor that platform setting.
1) Have users pay for a certain amount of bandwidth and when that's exceeded, they lose service temporarily. E.g., if I'm paying for 1GB per day but I go over that, for any reason, I'll lose service for part of the day --- but that's better than being socked with a huge unexpected bill. This works for incoming and outgoing traffic. It protects the ISP and the customer.
2) A nice technical feature would be to be able to push packet filters from the customer to the ISP without human intervention. After all, if the ISP's router is going to forward a packet P to next-hop X, then it may as well obey filtering instructions from X for packet P, since if it doesn't X can just drop P. This can be extended many hops into the network. This only protects against incoming traffic.
If they didn't check, they shouldn't make statements like that.
Having made such statements, they should be held accountable.
You can't just go into a court and make up your testimony and then, when you get caught, say "oops, I didn't check".
However, Sun is the copyright holder for OpenOffice, and I suspect that Sun is a BSA member. Therefore technically it's true that the BSA is authorized to act on behalf of the OpenOffice copyright holders. Unfortunately then, they escape a perjury charge this time.
I wonder if the statement "The BSA represents that the information in this notification is accurate" carries any legal weight, though. They should be slapped for that.
We've been working on compilers for 40 years. Intel and HP and others have been working on Itanium-ish compilers for 10 years. The "compilers with optimizations tailored to it" are already out, and they're just not good enough.
I'll elaborate. Itanium is statically scheduled, so a "good" compiler has to know in advance the order in which instructions will complete. This is impossible when you're doing random memory accesses some of which will hit in cache but you don't know which ones.
Every other modern CPU can do out-of-order execution so a "good" compiler doesn't have to know exactly the order in which instructions will complete.
That is why there are "good" compilers for most architectures, but not for Itanium.
Just because DSL is "available" to a place doesn't mean it will actually work once you ask for it. Both times I've tried to get DSL service, it was "available" and then mysteriously didn't work when I actually ordered the service. (Until I called in an air strike from the NYPUC, but that's another story.)
Given that Mozilla runs on Mac, Windows, and X (not to mention BeOS and OS/2), there was no acceptable single set of libraries, toolkit, and component model available to use. Certainly not back in 1998-1999 and not today either.
We're trying hard to get the look and feel correct on each platform. We now get the native look by rendering using the native themes on Mac, Windows and GTK. We'll do KDE themes if and when the Qt port gets up to speed.
"don't bother"... "can't be bothered"... "quite content"... please, don't jump to conclusions.
If you or anyone else proposes some credible freedesktop.org-style standards, we'll take a look. If you need a contact, just email me at roc+moz@cs.cmu.edu (member of Mozilla drivers).
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There's a difference between a large war chest and a monopoly. A monopoly, carefully (if illegally) maintained, never runs out, and your shareholders never worry about declining income. In fact with an OS monopoly your income grows with the PC market without you having to do much work.
A monopoly at the bottom of the software stack is particularly useful because not only does it provide essential income, it also gives you leverage against the upper layers of the software stack --- i.e. all the other software markets you want to conquer.
True, it's not over, but Intel has survived so far and at the moment they could still afford to cancel the project if they had to.
> According to Rick Chapman, the answer is
> simpler:
> Microsoft was the only company on the list that
> never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this
> was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb
> luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the
> dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really?
Microsoft's past is littered with failures: Microsoft Bob, early versions of Windows, early versions of PocketPC, all versions of Smartphone so far, the original MSN "Blackbird", LAN Manager, UltimateTV, Windows At Work, Windows DNA, and huge internal projects like Pyramid and Cairo that never even saw the light of day --- these are just some of the examples.
None of these mistakes were fatal simply because Microsoft could always fall back on the revenues of their OS monopoly, and later Office monopoly.
It gets my goat when people point to companies like Netscape and say "they deserved to be crushed by Microsoft, because they made mistakes". Everybody makes mistakes. The difference is that the monopolist gets a lot more lives.
Ditto for Intel. What other company could have survived the IA64 debacle? Yet Intel has, on the back of its x86 near-monopoly.
XAML is Microsoft's new do-it-all markup language that includes vector graphics and animation a la SVG (they even call the graphics subset "WVG"). You can read all about it in the Longhorn alpha developer docs. I suspect Sparkle is just the authoring toolset for the graphics.
What's interesting is that XAML also includes markup for user interface elements (similar in intent to XUL), and general documents (similar to HTML). It also has a feature set called "fixed format" documents which seems clearly designed to supplant PDF.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Microsoft ultimately plans to bury the W3C and make Web formats their proprietary property. They may as well just call it Bluebird 2006.
> It's not the job of television to educate
> children on how to eat. At the risk of sounding
> like a broken record, this is something the
> parents are responsible for.
This kind of logic sounds great until you actually are a parent. Then you realize that while it is indeed your responsibility to instill healthy eating habits into your child, the influence of television makes your job very much harder, and being a parent is already very hard work. There is a cost for unrestrained sex, violence and fast food in the media, borne by stressed-out parents. For the sake of compassion or prudence, you might want to consider the cost.
Only being installed on 2% of machines (or whatever the number is) is a genuine advantage. It's not a technical advantage, but it is nonetheless very real. Don't knock it.
Put it another way --- software diversity is a good thing.
> If you'd like a demonstration of the difference .NET vs Java, .NET (it's written in C#)
.NET's behaviour differs from the ECMA spec, who's right, ECMA or Microsoft? Who gets to decide how things will evolve --- ECMA, or Microsoft? And of course .NET is much more than what ECMA has blessed. I doubt we'll see ADO, ASP.NET, System.Windows.Forms or a bazillion other APIs that you need to write actually useful applications in ECMA anytime soon.
.NET.
> between the run-time execution of
> pick your favorite VM and run Forte, then run
> Visual Studio
That is a lie. VS.NET is not written in C#.
> There is a lot of FUD being disseminated about
> "Microsof is going to sue Ximian, et al. for
> Mono" blah,blah,blah. That's not going to
> happen.
Your omniscience is impressive.
Microsoft has gotten EMCA's stamp on C#, the CLR, and the basic Framework, but they still control them with an iron grip. When
Even if you're willing to go beyond ECMA and port the Microsoft proprietary APIs to other platforms, the fact is that System.Windows.Forms is absolutely NOT a cross-platform GUI toolkit. The Mono guys are implementing it by sucking in WINE! There is simply no Microsoft-blessed cross platform GUI toolkit for
You mean like Computer Science?
There are a couple of other relevant legal issues.
FirebirdSQL were not the first to use "Firebird" for software, not even for open-source software. There was Firebird BBS (firebird.org.tw), and others can be found via Google.
Also, trademarks have to be defended. Until now, FirebirdSQL have not attempted to defend their purported trademark against other software products using the same name.
We (Mozilla) have offered that.
Phoenix BIOS has a web browser which naturally would be referred to as the Phoenix Browser. FirebirdSQL does not have its own Web browser. That's the difference.
> AOL staff didn't have the imagination to think up
> a name of their own
Just for fun, try to come up with a name that's memorable and that no-one's ever used before for any software product. Perhaps it's harder than you think.
> Somewhere between $39.95 and $149.95.
So you think Nokia is going to buy a copy of Red Hat to ship with every cell phone?
The per-unit royalties for Linux are $0.
It's not on by default because there are serious, obvious bugs that need to be fixed before smooth scrolling is ready for prime time.
It's also not on by default because a lot of people hate smooth scrolling.
First I'll fix the bugs (I already have a patch for the main bugs). Then there will be a discussion about whether it's worth turning this on by default. My current feeling is that we should turn it on by default only on platforms which have a platform setting for this (only Windows, AFAIK) and we should honor that platform setting.
I have a patch to fix this and a number of other smoothscroll bugs, but it didn't make 1.4a.
It won't stop it, but it could slow it down a lot.
And for the spam that you did get, at least you get some money in return. That's not bad.
Mozilla does support XSLT.
We have XBL to let us seperate concerns. Check it out.
1) Have users pay for a certain amount of bandwidth and when that's exceeded, they lose service temporarily. E.g., if I'm paying for 1GB per day but I go over that, for any reason, I'll lose service for part of the day --- but that's better than being socked with a huge unexpected bill. This works for incoming and outgoing traffic. It protects the ISP and the customer.
2) A nice technical feature would be to be able to push packet filters from the customer to the ISP without human intervention. After all, if the ISP's router is going to forward a packet P to next-hop X, then it may as well obey filtering instructions from X for packet P, since if it doesn't X can just drop P. This can be extended many hops into the network. This only protects against incoming traffic.
True, but OpenOffice contributors must assign copyright to Sun.
If they didn't check, they shouldn't make statements like that.
Having made such statements, they should be held accountable.
You can't just go into a court and make up your testimony and then, when you get caught, say "oops, I didn't check".
However, Sun is the copyright holder for OpenOffice, and I suspect that Sun is a BSA member. Therefore technically it's true that the BSA is authorized to act on behalf of the OpenOffice copyright holders. Unfortunately then, they escape a perjury charge this time.
I wonder if the statement "The BSA represents that the information in this notification is accurate" carries any legal weight, though. They should be slapped for that.
We've been working on compilers for 40 years. Intel and HP and others have been working on Itanium-ish compilers for 10 years. The "compilers with optimizations tailored to it" are already out, and they're just not good enough.
I'll elaborate. Itanium is statically scheduled, so a "good" compiler has to know in advance the order in which instructions will complete. This is impossible when you're doing random memory accesses some of which will hit in cache but you don't know which ones.
Every other modern CPU can do out-of-order execution so a "good" compiler doesn't have to know exactly the order in which instructions will complete.
That is why there are "good" compilers for most architectures, but not for Itanium.
Just because DSL is "available" to a place doesn't mean it will actually work once you ask for it. Both times I've tried to get DSL service, it was "available" and then mysteriously didn't work when I actually ordered the service. (Until I called in an air strike from the NYPUC, but that's another story.)
I always wonder why viruses and worms don't flash the BIOS with garbage.
Given that Mozilla runs on Mac, Windows, and X (not to mention BeOS and OS/2), there was no acceptable single set of libraries, toolkit, and component model available to use. Certainly not back in 1998-1999 and not today either.
... "can't be bothered" ... "quite content" ... please, don't jump to conclusions.
We're trying hard to get the look and feel correct on each platform. We now get the native look by rendering using the native themes on Mac, Windows and GTK. We'll do KDE themes if and when the Qt port gets up to speed.
"don't bother"
If you or anyone else proposes some credible freedesktop.org-style standards, we'll take a look. If you need a contact, just email me at roc+moz@cs.cmu.edu (member of Mozilla drivers).