[OT] Nuclear powered surface ships
on
Sonic Torpedo Defense
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The last of the non-carrier surface ships to have a reactor was a destroyer or cruiser (whichever is larger) and either has been or is being decomisioned.
I was about to post that there were only two nuclear powered non-carrier surface ships in the Navy (the two my father helped build), but my favorite source indicates there were nine nuclear-powered guided missile cruisers (CGN's), the last of which were decommissioned in 1998.
IIRC, the US built one proof-of-concept nuclear-powered merchant ship (the Savannah) in the 60's, and the Soviet Union built at least one nuclear-powered ice-breaker.
Slashdot: a convenient dumping ground for the trivia that clutters our minds...
P.S. I have to add that pausing to contemplate environmentally safe warfare is laughable; this is a classic case of wanting to treat the symptom instead of the disease.
I really can never see myself watching any video on anything less that a 32" screen
I agree, which is why I think an Airport Express Video (HD) is far more likely than a video iPod. A video version of Airport Express actually makes more sense then the audio version (because there's a display available for a local UI), as opposed to the iPod, where video detracts from the usefulness of the device.
While movies and music videos are obvious content for an AE/Video, it would also be useful for iPhoto slideshows, iMovies, etc.
Forget about a video iPod. iTunes has at least one other outlet.
I don't want to watch video on my iPod. When I'm using my iPod, I need to watch where I'm going.
OTOH, I spend at least half of my music-listenting-time on music streamed from my desktop to my stereo via Airport Express. If I could subscribe to TV series and/or movies via iTunes and play them the same way on my (HD)TV, it would blow away my DVRs and DVD rentals. I wouldn't even care (much) if I was prevented from saving them permanently.
I'm not sure 802.11g is up to the bandwidth challenge, or that an HD-capable device on the scale of Airport Express is possible today, but that's what I'm waiting for...
Microsoft "targeted" Mac OS before. Sometime in the mid-90's you could use Microsoft's development tools to build cross-platform (Win/MacOS) applications. In theory.
The reality was that the barrier to entry was very high (IIRC, you needed a specially-configured version of NT to host the tools), and you could use only a subset of the Windows APIs (sound familiar?). AFAIK, Microsoft didn't even use them to build anything significant; my recollection is that the then-current version of Office was not built with them.
So what was the point? To the extent that anybody thought about doing cross-platform development, they could be answered with the line that "if we use Microsoft's tools, we'll be able to cross-develop if and when we want to." One more reason to consider using not getting locked into Microsoft's tooling was apparently answered.
Also, the "subset" qualification meant that you could make a choice: be cross-platform, or exploit every platform feature to build the best possible application. As soon as you were sucked into the latter alternative, you were locked out of the other platform(s). (This is the approach Microsoft took with their flavor of Java.)
Finally, the non-Windows implementations of these cross-platform application were marginal at best in terms of platform guidelines on the Mac. So, if you were to go ahead and deliver on the cross-platform tools, you were guaranteed a luke-warm reception at best from the Mac community, which in turn would probably make you think twice about developing for the platform again.
That attempt to go "cross-platform" by Microsoft was so choked with booby traps that it never got off the ground. I expect the same result here, even allowing for adaptations to lessons learned.
I agree with the conclusion (1-2-3 was a victim of mismanagement as much as anything else), but I'd like to embellish on the details.
1-2-3 v3.0 was, appropriately, a rewrite in C of the previous versions, written in 808x assembler. Regrettably, although it was started in 1986 or so, the effort ignored the fact that there were a) GUI OS's available or on the horizon; and b) greater-than-16-bit address spaces available or on the horizon. 1-2-3 v3.0 was a strict re-implementation of the character-based earlier versions, tied to a 16-bit address space, relying on a horrendous kludge called "extended memory" which mapped a limited number of pages of memory beyond 640K into the app's address space.
When 1-2-3 3.0 was finally released, the best way Lotus could find to add "graphical" capabilities to the product was to acquire a third-party developer that had found a way to reverse-engineer things like text formatting and graphing onto the product by bolting it onto the side.
When Lotus turned its attention to real (and semi-real) GUI environments with >16-bit address spaces (Mac and Windows 3.x, respectively), the "modern" 3.0 code base was hopelessly inadequate to the task, and the implementations suffered accordingly.
There's more (file formats, cross-platform strategies), but, yeah, Lotus did at least as much to kill 1-2-3's dominance as Microsoft did, even given my assertion that Microsoft spoofed Lotus into directing significant effort toward OS/2 (which it did) even as Microsoft was (as I believe) turning its own efforts toward Windows.
Last time I checked, it wasn't possible to embed "voice-over-IP" in M$ documents either..
Exactly; or voice, either (as differentiated from audio, mentioned separately).
This (the Microsoft statement) is classic FUD: claim that "you won't be able to take advantage of without our stuff!" Even otherwise intelligent people hear that stuff and say, "well, we don't see a need for it now, but it's the future, and we don't want to paint ourselves into a corner."
For the first time in a very long time, Massachusetts public officials have made me proud to live here.
Unfortunately, the best way to make documents widely accessible is to use MS Word.
Yes and no.
It's the "best" way because, as you point out, it happens to "just work" for a majority users.
It's a horrible way to distribute documents for a whole bunch of reasons:
The documents are modifiable by the reader, which means anyone can content and re-distribute it. (Yes, there are ways to prevent or inhibit this, but we're talking about the casual-use case.)
In most cases, the reader sees the clutter of red and green markup where Microsoft disapproves of the spelling (usually of correctly spelled proper names) or grammar of the author.
Across different OS's, versions of the OS, versions of Word, and installed font sets, Word often re-formats the document in subtle ways that have non-subtle effects, mangling a document that looks fine on the author's machine, or on similarly configured machines in the author's workgroup. (This effect is even more pronounced when a non-savvy user uses "incorrect", but depressingly common, formatting techniques, like using space characters to position text.)
For all of its very real problems, PDF avoids these pitfalls.
What is really needed is an intuitive way for users of applications to differentiate between documents-for-authoring and document-for-distribution-and-consumption. (In the old days, these were the disk-file and printed product, respectively.) Apple takes a small step in the right direction with its ubiquitous print-to-PDF, but that still requires extra steps and user management of separate representations of the same document. Better application and system support is needed; this is an opportunity for someone (OOo?) to step forward and innovate and differentiate, rather than chase Microsoft's shadow.
>> It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
You're right, it's a shitty way to write an OS. Unfortunately, if MS "breaks" some program because the ISV used undocumented APIs or reserved fields who do you think gets blamed? If that program has enough users (like anything Adobe makes) then MS has to make a check to restore the broken behavior for the bad app.
Believe me, I understand the pressure on OS vendors to maintain compatibility. In the 70's, I was involved in the port of a turnkey CAD system to a new platform, and we had to bend over backwards to preserve every nuance that customer-written "plug-ins" had come to depend on over several years.
The difference, in my mind, is that we architected, over a period of several months, a solution that maintained the environment that customer-written code had come to depend on, down to the expectation that certain values would appear in certain locations in the address space; we called it "crock-for-crock compatibility." (I take no personal credit for the effort, BTW; I just followed instructions.)
By contrast, it seems to me that Microsoft tends to address these problems by exception: write the code, test, and when it breaks, patch it over with code that addresses the symptom. I know that's probably unfairly simplistic, but that's the impression I got from the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article.
I agree. I was at Lotus for quite a while starting in 1983. In the early days (1-2-3 v1 and v2, and MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x), Lotus and Microsoft were quite friendly, and we had NDA access to a lot of stuff from Microsoft, including MD-DOS releases. [I also saw early releases of Windows 1.x documentation and remember thinking how pathetic it was next to Inside Macintosh -- but that's a whole other story...]
Anyway... In the spirit of this "friendly" cooperation, I remember attending technical presentations from Microsoft about OS/2 Presentation Manager and how important it was for us to architect our applications in anticipation of OS/2 so we'd be ready when it hit the street; and feeling like we'd been had when Microsoft switched their emphasis from OS/2 to Windows 3.x, and had their applications all ready to go while Lotus was invested heavily in an OS/2 suite.
From that point forward, 1-2-3 was on the ropes vs. Excel and it seemed like every OS move by Microsoft with Windows kept us off-balance; there was also the issue that the Excel developers seemed way better informed about developing for Windows 3.x than the rest of us. There was wide speculation that Microsoft was publishing and encouraging the use of APIs that their application developers did not use. It was (and is) easily believable that there was a philosophy of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
On another, contrary, note, I also remember (later) a page 1 Wall Street Journal article about the development of Windows NT under Dave Cutler. IIRC, one of the points made in the article was that NT had a huge team of developers (50?) adding code to NT that was conditional on the application being run; i.e., "if the current application is PhotoShop, perform this operation this way" for compatibility. It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
I highly recommend reading Jerry's book, cited in TFA. Even if you take Jerry's claims with a liberal dose of salt, there are all sorts of signs of anti-competitive behavior, from arm-twisting potential partners of Go to possible violation of NDAs in the development of Microsoft's FUD^H^H^H PenWindows "alternative".
Personally, I always wondered why the government didn't use the Go story in its antitrust case; it's a tidily packaged narrative that hits many of the low points in the patterns of Microsoft's behavior. OTOH, they had so much material to work with...
As a struggling startup, Go didn't stand a chance in any possible legal action at the time, and AT&T didn't have the will (even if it did have the means) after Go was forced into selling out. Suing now may look opportunistic, but Jerry did only recently reacquire what's left of the company, and if he can demonstrate that illegal behavior by Microsoft contributed to the delay in his ability to pursue legal action, maybe he'll get his day in court.
Disclaimer: I had occasion to work with Jerry for a while before he started Go, although that doesn't really predispose me to take his side.
It's not so much about manufacturing as branding and channels, as it is for the iPod. Apple would dilute its own message by selling and supporting hardware running Windows. HP wouldn't, and they have a customer base they can already sell to.
In the end, it's practically free money for Apple, with the only downside that they are "enabling" users to remain on Windows. OTOH, most of the users probably wouldn't have switched directly to Mac anyway, and now they'd be on a platform where they could switch to OS X (or try it) without a separate hardware investment.
The hard part is figuring out what HP would get out of it, but that question applies to the iPod deal as well, and HP seems content with that.
Another clue comes from HP, where a rumor is going around that HP selling iPods could turn into HP becoming an Apple hardware partner for personal computers, too.
Steve knows the Windows market isn't going away. (Remember "it's not necessary for Microsoft to lose for Apple to win", or something of that nature?) If Apple can deliver kick-ass Macs, and then also pick up a chunk of the Windows box market without diluting its brand by selling through HP, isn't that a net win?
The One Thing Apple can't do is make it too easy to install OS X on a Dell. (A narrow crack like XPostFacto might not be so bad...)
Back in college in the 70's, I worked as a "consultant" in the computer center, assisting users with whatever questions they might have. A freshman taking the entry-level programming course, which used FORTRAN on punched cards(!), came to ask why his program wouldn't compile.
I opened his listing (printed on non-recycled 11x14 paper), and was surprised to find the listing double-spaced. I tried to figure out how he did it (assuming it was an obscure parameter on the job control card), and eventually realized that he had inserted a blank comment between every line of code (ignore and forgive the periods; I had trouble indenting):
C . INT I C . REAL X C . I = 0 C . X = 0.0
Understand that this meant that, while at the keypunch, he took the time to type a single "C", then feed a new card (taking a couple of seconds), before entering another line of code. (Not to mention the waste of expensive card stock.)
When I asked why he took the time to generate all those blank cards, he answered, sincerely, (wait for it...):
"The professor said the program would be easier to debug if we had a lot of comments."
First, disclaimers: I'm a Mac fanboy since 1983 (not a typo), worked extensively and deeply with PC-DOS, hate Windows with a passion, and currently use Linux at work. Although I tend to disagree with the article's position, I think it's unimportant.
First, Windows is probably too entrenched to go away, simply because of all the investment in applications that depend on it. IMHO, OS X is better in nearly all respects, and Linux is better in many, but there are many people -- even competent ones;-) -- who use Windows to get their job done and believe it's what works best for them.
But the persistence of OS X and the aggressive improvement of Linux have all but succeeded in preventing the Microsoft monoculture from taking root; well, not from taking root, but from being the weed that kills off everything else. Take the small example of the browser space; there are fewer and fewer sites (that matter) that have backed off dependence on IE and embraced Firefox, Safari, et. al., by embracing more non-proprietary standards. The world is getting used to working in a heterogeneous environment, and that makes it a safer place to nurture the alternatives.
Linux (and OS X) could grow robustly for years and not push Windows into the minority, but, frankly, I don't care! I am way less marginalized as a non-Windows user than I was, say, five years ago, and I think it's past the point where Microsoft has the ability to change that.
Having said all that, it's not clear to me that Microsoft doesn't have the potential to contribute to its own unravelling and expedite even greater changes. Also, I look forward with some curiosity to Tom Yager's promised opinion on why he thinks OS X & Java have better potential to beat Windows (not that I'm arguing).
how come mp3 players with fm radio are so hard to find?
Market research? Maybe the manufacturers find that they don't (didn't) sell as well as those without FM.
When I went shopping for an MP3 player several years ago, an FM tuner was on my short list of required features. (A memory card compatible with my camera was another.) As I recall, even then, the newer models becoming available at the time were dropping the FM tuner.
I ended up with a Creative Nomad II, and although I do try to use the tuner often, I find it unusable in most places, especially indoors. I will be getting an iPod soon, and I won't miss the FM tuner.
I'm sympathetic with the desire for the tuner, and I'm sure lots of people have had more success than I, but maybe the numbers don't support it. There's almost certainly enough of a market to warrant somebody offering it, but the numbers may be too small for Apple to care. (Isn't that ironic?)
The original Mac deserves some mention; IIRC, it was smaller and lighter than the Compaq luggable (I had one of each in 1984), and the carrying handle. The luggable does get points for packing up into a single unit.
The eMate (which I still have) was essentially a Newton laptop; flash memory, instant on, keyboard and handwriting interfaces, word processor, simple web browser, etc. Lots of great design ideas in that little puppy. (It was also the design precursor to the original two-tone iBook, which is not viewed as a good thing in all quarters...)
There's a whole lot of over-reacting going on here. The Times article starts with:
Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies... fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.
My own first reaction was that this is a much larger First Amendment issue than the Apple lawsuits, and many posters are expressing fear of a growing "American Taliban" and such.
But, on closer examination, the suppression is self-imposed. That first paragraph is the last mention of the word "protest" in the article; I found no mention of organized protests or a movement to suppress the films. The only specific comments anyone cites are those solicited in a survey after a test screening, and the comments are not of the foaming-at-the-mouth, book-burning variety. In fact, they're a darn sight tamer than most comments about anything here on/.
Quoting the article again:
"It's going to be hard for our filmmakers to continue to make unfettered documentaries when they know going in that 10 percent of the market" will reject them.
Others who follow the issue say many institutions are not able to resist such pressure.
Pressure? So now a small minority opting not to pay to see a documentary, however silly we may consider their reasons, constitutes a threat to free expression? The alarmism in that correlation is, IMHO, more inflammatory and manipulative than the "pressure" cited in the article.
Look, I abhor the movement to elevate "creationism" to the level of science in school curricula, and I know that the organized movement to do so is in the minds of those expressing their fears in the article. I'll be the one of the first to fight the movement before my local school committee if it comes to that, which I doubt.
But I don't see anything to react to here, other than to be a little more proactive about voting with my feet and wallet to offset the silliness of others.
How did you and your wife ever figure out to to turn the computer off? LOL.
Sadly, it's not a joke. Back in day a PC user (with an advanced CS degree) with a new Mac complained to me that the power button on her Mac IIfx (IIRC) was way in the back of the CPU, and, oh, by the way, why did Mac complain on startup that it was not properly shut down?
This was around the time that it was possible (and not unheard of) to exit Windows 3.x to the C:> prompt and turn off the box before the OS finished deferred writes to the hard drive.
But I as the blogger don't have any responsibility to protect your NDA.
You don't have a contractual agreement not to disclose. But...
If you stipulate that the intellectual property involved is really property (a big "if" on/.), then misappropriating that property by breaking the non-disclosure is a form of theft. Which makes taking possession of the information and using it akin to receipt of stolen property.
IANAL, so I don't claim that this analogy holds water, legally. Nor do I think ThinkSecret et. al. should be held criminally or civilly liable. (And, as you have pointed out, Apple action's are actually intended to expose the original violators.)
My point is that ThinkSecret (apparently) knowingly benefitted from somebody else's extra-legal disclosure, without the imprimatur of exposing illegal or otherwise bad activity of a public or quasi-public official, and they therefore don't hold the same moral high ground as, say, Woodward and Bernstein.
Apple doesn't have cause to expect their marketing plan should remain private.
Well, there's where we disagree. I believe it does.
The public has a legitimate interest in the content of Apple's marketing plan because they buy Apple products and they invest in Apple stock...
So am I entitled to read my carpenter's financial records because I buy his services? Selling a product does not obligate a business to disclose whatever information a customer might be interested in.
Similarly, a publicly traded company is not obligated to open all of its internal information to shareholders. In fact, as a shareholder, I'm more interested in a company protecting its assets than satisfying my idle curiosity.
Slashdot Mirror
I was about to post that there were only two nuclear powered non-carrier surface ships in the Navy (the two my father helped build), but my favorite source indicates there were nine nuclear-powered guided missile cruisers (CGN's), the last of which were decommissioned in 1998.
IIRC, the US built one proof-of-concept nuclear-powered merchant ship (the Savannah) in the 60's, and the Soviet Union built at least one nuclear-powered ice-breaker.
Slashdot: a convenient dumping ground for the trivia that clutters our minds...
P.S. I have to add that pausing to contemplate environmentally safe warfare is laughable; this is a classic case of wanting to treat the symptom instead of the disease.
I agree, which is why I think an Airport Express Video (HD) is far more likely than a video iPod. A video version of Airport Express actually makes more sense then the audio version (because there's a display available for a local UI), as opposed to the iPod, where video detracts from the usefulness of the device.
While movies and music videos are obvious content for an AE/Video, it would also be useful for iPhoto slideshows, iMovies, etc.
I don't want to watch video on my iPod. When I'm using my iPod, I need to watch where I'm going.
OTOH, I spend at least half of my music-listenting-time on music streamed from my desktop to my stereo via Airport Express. If I could subscribe to TV series and/or movies via iTunes and play them the same way on my (HD)TV, it would blow away my DVRs and DVD rentals. I wouldn't even care (much) if I was prevented from saving them permanently.
I'm not sure 802.11g is up to the bandwidth challenge, or that an HD-capable device on the scale of Airport Express is possible today, but that's what I'm waiting for...
Microsoft "targeted" Mac OS before. Sometime in the mid-90's you could use Microsoft's development tools to build cross-platform (Win/MacOS) applications. In theory.
The reality was that the barrier to entry was very high (IIRC, you needed a specially-configured version of NT to host the tools), and you could use only a subset of the Windows APIs (sound familiar?). AFAIK, Microsoft didn't even use them to build anything significant; my recollection is that the then-current version of Office was not built with them.
So what was the point? To the extent that anybody thought about doing cross-platform development, they could be answered with the line that "if we use Microsoft's tools, we'll be able to cross-develop if and when we want to." One more reason to consider using not getting locked into Microsoft's tooling was apparently answered.
Also, the "subset" qualification meant that you could make a choice: be cross-platform, or exploit every platform feature to build the best possible application. As soon as you were sucked into the latter alternative, you were locked out of the other platform(s). (This is the approach Microsoft took with their flavor of Java.)
Finally, the non-Windows implementations of these cross-platform application were marginal at best in terms of platform guidelines on the Mac. So, if you were to go ahead and deliver on the cross-platform tools, you were guaranteed a luke-warm reception at best from the Mac community, which in turn would probably make you think twice about developing for the platform again.
That attempt to go "cross-platform" by Microsoft was so choked with booby traps that it never got off the ground. I expect the same result here, even allowing for adaptations to lessons learned.
1-2-3 v3.0 was, appropriately, a rewrite in C of the previous versions, written in 808x assembler. Regrettably, although it was started in 1986 or so, the effort ignored the fact that there were a) GUI OS's available or on the horizon; and b) greater-than-16-bit address spaces available or on the horizon. 1-2-3 v3.0 was a strict re-implementation of the character-based earlier versions, tied to a 16-bit address space, relying on a horrendous kludge called "extended memory" which mapped a limited number of pages of memory beyond 640K into the app's address space.
When 1-2-3 3.0 was finally released, the best way Lotus could find to add "graphical" capabilities to the product was to acquire a third-party developer that had found a way to reverse-engineer things like text formatting and graphing onto the product by bolting it onto the side.
When Lotus turned its attention to real (and semi-real) GUI environments with >16-bit address spaces (Mac and Windows 3.x, respectively), the "modern" 3.0 code base was hopelessly inadequate to the task, and the implementations suffered accordingly.
There's more (file formats, cross-platform strategies), but, yeah, Lotus did at least as much to kill 1-2-3's dominance as Microsoft did, even given my assertion that Microsoft spoofed Lotus into directing significant effort toward OS/2 (which it did) even as Microsoft was (as I believe) turning its own efforts toward Windows.
Exactly; or voice, either (as differentiated from audio, mentioned separately).
This (the Microsoft statement) is classic FUD: claim that "you won't be able to take advantage of without our stuff!" Even otherwise intelligent people hear that stuff and say, "well, we don't see a need for it now, but it's the future, and we don't want to paint ourselves into a corner."
For the first time in a very long time, Massachusetts public officials have made me proud to live here.
Yes and no.
It's the "best" way because, as you point out, it happens to "just work" for a majority users.
It's a horrible way to distribute documents for a whole bunch of reasons:
- The documents are modifiable by the reader, which means anyone can content and re-distribute it. (Yes, there are ways to prevent or inhibit this, but we're talking about the casual-use case.)
- In most cases, the reader sees the clutter of red and green markup where Microsoft disapproves of the spelling (usually of correctly spelled proper names) or grammar of the author.
- Across different OS's, versions of the OS, versions of Word, and installed font sets, Word often re-formats the document in subtle ways that have non-subtle effects, mangling a document that looks fine on the author's machine, or on similarly configured machines in the author's workgroup. (This effect is even more pronounced when a non-savvy user uses "incorrect", but depressingly common, formatting techniques, like using space characters to position text.)
For all of its very real problems, PDF avoids these pitfalls.What is really needed is an intuitive way for users of applications to differentiate between documents-for-authoring and document-for-distribution-and-consumption. (In the old days, these were the disk-file and printed product, respectively.) Apple takes a small step in the right direction with its ubiquitous print-to-PDF, but that still requires extra steps and user management of separate representations of the same document. Better application and system support is needed; this is an opportunity for someone (OOo?) to step forward and innovate and differentiate, rather than chase Microsoft's shadow.
You're right, it's a shitty way to write an OS. Unfortunately, if MS "breaks" some program because the ISV used undocumented APIs or reserved fields who do you think gets blamed? If that program has enough users (like anything Adobe makes) then MS has to make a check to restore the broken behavior for the bad app.
Believe me, I understand the pressure on OS vendors to maintain compatibility. In the 70's, I was involved in the port of a turnkey CAD system to a new platform, and we had to bend over backwards to preserve every nuance that customer-written "plug-ins" had come to depend on over several years.
The difference, in my mind, is that we architected, over a period of several months, a solution that maintained the environment that customer-written code had come to depend on, down to the expectation that certain values would appear in certain locations in the address space; we called it "crock-for-crock compatibility." (I take no personal credit for the effort, BTW; I just followed instructions.)
By contrast, it seems to me that Microsoft tends to address these problems by exception: write the code, test, and when it breaks, patch it over with code that addresses the symptom. I know that's probably unfairly simplistic, but that's the impression I got from the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article.
I agree. I was at Lotus for quite a while starting in 1983. In the early days (1-2-3 v1 and v2, and MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x), Lotus and Microsoft were quite friendly, and we had NDA access to a lot of stuff from Microsoft, including MD-DOS releases. [I also saw early releases of Windows 1.x documentation and remember thinking how pathetic it was next to Inside Macintosh -- but that's a whole other story...]
Anyway... In the spirit of this "friendly" cooperation, I remember attending technical presentations from Microsoft about OS/2 Presentation Manager and how important it was for us to architect our applications in anticipation of OS/2 so we'd be ready when it hit the street; and feeling like we'd been had when Microsoft switched their emphasis from OS/2 to Windows 3.x, and had their applications all ready to go while Lotus was invested heavily in an OS/2 suite.
From that point forward, 1-2-3 was on the ropes vs. Excel and it seemed like every OS move by Microsoft with Windows kept us off-balance; there was also the issue that the Excel developers seemed way better informed about developing for Windows 3.x than the rest of us. There was wide speculation that Microsoft was publishing and encouraging the use of APIs that their application developers did not use. It was (and is) easily believable that there was a philosophy of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
On another, contrary, note, I also remember (later) a page 1 Wall Street Journal article about the development of Windows NT under Dave Cutler. IIRC, one of the points made in the article was that NT had a huge team of developers (50?) adding code to NT that was conditional on the application being run; i.e., "if the current application is PhotoShop, perform this operation this way" for compatibility. It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
I'll watch from a distance, thank you.
...and I saw the (contraction-less, of course) repeat coming a mile away when Scotty met Data in Ten Forward on TNG.
Personally, I always wondered why the government didn't use the Go story in its antitrust case; it's a tidily packaged narrative that hits many of the low points in the patterns of Microsoft's behavior. OTOH, they had so much material to work with...
As a struggling startup, Go didn't stand a chance in any possible legal action at the time, and AT&T didn't have the will (even if it did have the means) after Go was forced into selling out. Suing now may look opportunistic, but Jerry did only recently reacquire what's left of the company, and if he can demonstrate that illegal behavior by Microsoft contributed to the delay in his ability to pursue legal action, maybe he'll get his day in court.
Disclaimer: I had occasion to work with Jerry for a while before he started Go, although that doesn't really predispose me to take his side.
In the end, it's practically free money for Apple, with the only downside that they are "enabling" users to remain on Windows. OTOH, most of the users probably wouldn't have switched directly to Mac anyway, and now they'd be on a platform where they could switch to OS X (or try it) without a separate hardware investment.
The hard part is figuring out what HP would get out of it, but that question applies to the iPod deal as well, and HP seems content with that.
Another clue comes from HP, where a rumor is going around that HP selling iPods could turn into HP becoming an Apple hardware partner for personal computers, too.
Steve knows the Windows market isn't going away. (Remember "it's not necessary for Microsoft to lose for Apple to win", or something of that nature?) If Apple can deliver kick-ass Macs, and then also pick up a chunk of the Windows box market without diluting its brand by selling through HP, isn't that a net win?
The One Thing Apple can't do is make it too easy to install OS X on a Dell. (A narrow crack like XPostFacto might not be so bad...)
Huh? I'm running Tiger & iLife on a 4+ year old PowerBook. As I type.
And, FWIW, I run Panther & iTunes on a 9+ year old 7500 (with upgraded G3 CPU). (Keynote is a bit of a dog on that hardware...)
...make it seem like he reads mostly old Tom Swift books these days.
Which is it to be? Do they want it publicised or not?
No, let me guess; only favourable publicity.
The logical conclusion of this is that a screenshot of Longhorn is considered inherently unfavo[u]rable...
On second thought, yeah, OK, that makes sense.
I opened his listing (printed on non-recycled 11x14 paper), and was surprised to find the listing double-spaced. I tried to figure out how he did it (assuming it was an obscure parameter on the job control card), and eventually realized that he had inserted a blank comment between every line of code (ignore and forgive the periods; I had trouble indenting):
Understand that this meant that, while at the keypunch, he took the time to type a single "C", then feed a new card (taking a couple of seconds), before entering another line of code. (Not to mention the waste of expensive card stock.)
When I asked why he took the time to generate all those blank cards, he answered, sincerely, (wait for it...):
"The professor said the program would be easier to debug if we had a lot of comments."
First, Windows is probably too entrenched to go away, simply because of all the investment in applications that depend on it. IMHO, OS X is better in nearly all respects, and Linux is better in many, but there are many people -- even competent ones ;-) -- who use Windows to get their job done and believe it's what works best for them.
But the persistence of OS X and the aggressive improvement of Linux have all but succeeded in preventing the Microsoft monoculture from taking root; well, not from taking root, but from being the weed that kills off everything else. Take the small example of the browser space; there are fewer and fewer sites (that matter) that have backed off dependence on IE and embraced Firefox, Safari, et. al., by embracing more non-proprietary standards. The world is getting used to working in a heterogeneous environment, and that makes it a safer place to nurture the alternatives.
Linux (and OS X) could grow robustly for years and not push Windows into the minority, but, frankly, I don't care! I am way less marginalized as a non-Windows user than I was, say, five years ago, and I think it's past the point where Microsoft has the ability to change that.
Having said all that, it's not clear to me that Microsoft doesn't have the potential to contribute to its own unravelling and expedite even greater changes. Also, I look forward with some curiosity to Tom Yager's promised opinion on why he thinks OS X & Java have better potential to beat Windows (not that I'm arguing).
Market research? Maybe the manufacturers find that they don't (didn't) sell as well as those without FM.
When I went shopping for an MP3 player several years ago, an FM tuner was on my short list of required features. (A memory card compatible with my camera was another.) As I recall, even then, the newer models becoming available at the time were dropping the FM tuner.
I ended up with a Creative Nomad II, and although I do try to use the tuner often, I find it unusable in most places, especially indoors. I will be getting an iPod soon, and I won't miss the FM tuner.
I'm sympathetic with the desire for the tuner, and I'm sure lots of people have had more success than I, but maybe the numbers don't support it. There's almost certainly enough of a market to warrant somebody offering it, but the numbers may be too small for Apple to care. (Isn't that ironic?)
The eMate (which I still have) was essentially a Newton laptop; flash memory, instant on, keyboard and handwriting interfaces, word processor, simple web browser, etc. Lots of great design ideas in that little puppy. (It was also the design precursor to the original two-tone iBook, which is not viewed as a good thing in all quarters...)
Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies ... fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.
My own first reaction was that this is a much larger First Amendment issue than the Apple lawsuits, and many posters are expressing fear of a growing "American Taliban" and such.
But, on closer examination, the suppression is self-imposed. That first paragraph is the last mention of the word "protest" in the article; I found no mention of organized protests or a movement to suppress the films. The only specific comments anyone cites are those solicited in a survey after a test screening, and the comments are not of the foaming-at-the-mouth, book-burning variety. In fact, they're a darn sight tamer than most comments about anything here on /.
Quoting the article again:
"It's going to be hard for our filmmakers to continue to make unfettered documentaries when they know going in that 10 percent of the market" will reject them.
Others who follow the issue say many institutions are not able to resist such pressure.
Pressure? So now a small minority opting not to pay to see a documentary, however silly we may consider their reasons, constitutes a threat to free expression? The alarmism in that correlation is, IMHO, more inflammatory and manipulative than the "pressure" cited in the article.
Look, I abhor the movement to elevate "creationism" to the level of science in school curricula, and I know that the organized movement to do so is in the minds of those expressing their fears in the article. I'll be the one of the first to fight the movement before my local school committee if it comes to that, which I doubt.
But I don't see anything to react to here, other than to be a little more proactive about voting with my feet and wallet to offset the silliness of others.
Sadly, it's not a joke. Back in day a PC user (with an advanced CS degree) with a new Mac complained to me that the power button on her Mac IIfx (IIRC) was way in the back of the CPU, and, oh, by the way, why did Mac complain on startup that it was not properly shut down?
This was around the time that it was possible (and not unheard of) to exit Windows 3.x to the C:> prompt and turn off the box before the OS finished deferred writes to the hard drive.
You don't have a contractual agreement not to disclose. But...
If you stipulate that the intellectual property involved is really property (a big "if" on /.), then misappropriating that property by breaking the non-disclosure is a form of theft. Which makes taking possession of the information and using it akin to receipt of stolen property.
IANAL, so I don't claim that this analogy holds water, legally. Nor do I think ThinkSecret et. al. should be held criminally or civilly liable. (And, as you have pointed out, Apple action's are actually intended to expose the original violators.)
My point is that ThinkSecret (apparently) knowingly benefitted from somebody else's extra-legal disclosure, without the imprimatur of exposing illegal or otherwise bad activity of a public or quasi-public official, and they therefore don't hold the same moral high ground as, say, Woodward and Bernstein.
Well, there's where we disagree. I believe it does.
The public has a legitimate interest in the content of Apple's marketing plan because they buy Apple products and they invest in Apple stock...
So am I entitled to read my carpenter's financial records because I buy his services? Selling a product does not obligate a business to disclose whatever information a customer might be interested in.
Similarly, a publicly traded company is not obligated to open all of its internal information to shareholders. In fact, as a shareholder, I'm more interested in a company protecting its assets than satisfying my idle curiosity.