A long time ago, Netscape put out a warning that Mozilla was their trademark and nobody should use it in their useragent strings. Microsoft blew them off, and that was that.
It's in there for compatiblity reasons (possibly with Netscape web servers?), so I suspect there's no case to be made.
Check the licence for UNIX -- Same deal. Note that we now have a few fully functional Unix clones, but nobody's ever gotten close with Windows.
You can say what you want about the old school "Open Standards" theory relative to "Open Source", but it's better than what you are getting from proprietary vendors.
Apparently. some very old HTTP servers were hardcoded to only serve content to browsers calling themselves "Mozilla". What? Why? I have no idea.
This also defeated some JavaScript detection scripts looking for Netscape 3.0 (It really should be Mozilla/3.0 compatible, as IE does not support the proprietary Netscape 4 object model).
Contrary to what you hear on Slashdot, Nobody in the real world knows or cares about Mozilla. Which is the way it should be for a development and testing browser.
Regular users not interested in coding and QA are directed to Netscape 6.1 for a supported commercial product.
Which is not to say that some people didn't fuck up. Perhaps Mozilla.org should consider just reporting themselves as Netscape 6.2 Beta (or whatever) to eliminate some of the QA hassle caused by browser detect stuff.
1) IBM owned 10 or 20% of Intel at the time
2) They started on a 68K machine, but the price point would have been way too high.
3) The PC was originally planned to have an Intel 8080, and used lots of stock parts which were already in common use in the microcomputer business. That equalled time-to-market.
4) Likewise, the 8086 was very compatible with existing applications (CP/M and clones, WordStar, VisiCalc, etc.)
So it was a lot more than luck on Intel's part -- they were positioned perfectly in the market for the PC revolution, and lots of people realized that before IBM did.
OK - I see your greater point. I guess my greater point is that people generally don't like computers and will tend to minimize the amount of mental effort they spend on the computer in order to achieve their task. It's a certain form of training cost -- the resistance to change cost.
That is -- if the only thing you give them is KDE, they'll use it, but it if Windows is available, why would they bother? It would be an interesting test in a student lab -- see how long the line for the Windows machines get before people plunk their ass down in front of Unix. (Back in my day they'd wait indefinately for the Macs over the forsaken PS/2s, even if they only wanted to telnet into their pine mail.)
The guy might be off by a few years in his dates, but his point stands. Apple was getting some real momentum in business environments, but then Windows 3 pretty much snuck in the backdoor on company supported DOS PCs.
It's not so much that DOS already had the advantage -- it's the lost opportunity cost. In 1990, seeing a XT or AT machine in production was not that uncommon -- there was virtually no reason to have a better machine with DOS software. But, either with Mac or Windows, that machine would need to be replaced to run in a GUI environment (and either could emulate a 8088 just fine).
Another huge factor was VisualBasic -- Microsoft somehow convinced Apple to not include database drivers in with HyperCard, and the rest is history. I know the place I worked at in the mid 90s purged a significant numbers of Macs as part of a "Client-Server Standards" project (although the users would often ignore their shiny new PC as much as possible and kept clunking along on their IIci or whatever).
Furthermore, Apple made the affirmative decision that they were going to be network incompatible with everyone else. Ask any old Novell admin about MAC.NLM and see him cringe...
When I was in college (left in 92), lots of idiot state school kids figured out how to use Pine without trouble (even the Mac users...)
However, that's because it was the ONLY way to get the sexy new thing -- e-mail!
Everyone nowdays has already been exposed to AOL, Outlook, Netscape, and Hotmail. It's not that they are incapable of learning Pine -- it's that they think it's a ridiclous waste of their time to do so. Furthermore, they can easily block out and ignore some snotty Unix guy with a superority complex telling them otherwise. That's why people give you puzzling looks when you are foaming at them.
Intel: Here's a cool 32-bit chip, somebody write some software.
Microsoft and IBM: We don't need to support 32-bit for the next 10 years, so you get a bunch of crappy compatibility hacks and spurious "out of memory" errors. The hacks will make it _more_ difficult to support 32-bits in the future. Enjoy!
Now, the exact same thing is going to happen all over again for 64-bit chips. And I'm supposed to be excited?
However, it seems that AMD will be able to win out on the desktop
OK -- where's the software support? Where's Windows/AMD64? Where's the need for 64-bit desktop chips?
I like AMD's strategy in theory, however it will be marketed like a box of Cheerios that says "NEW - Now With More Bits!!" and nothing really to back it up.
(I should note that Apple has a similar problem with the G5, except they will ship native OS support, and it's concievable that a 64-bit CPU will have an advantage for media applications, which is pretty much their only market. Will 64-bit Quake or 64-bit OpenGL drivers help that much?)
Hopefully, I'm not outthinking the Best Buy guy and shafting myself, but my rule on Service Plans is get one if and only the item is 1) Expensive and 2) Mechanical.
So, far so good, considering that I've had my LaserDisc unit and SVHS in 3 times each before they were finally fixed. That's $1200 in original purchase price, plus a $120 or so for the service plans.
(I Passed for the Sony TV and cheapy DVD and CD players. Never would think about buying a computer at Best Buy.)
Intel used to have a special "Pentium III owners only" website that hyped up Photoshop scores. (Remember the whole "it makes the Internet faster" ad campaign?)
I don't see how using publically available knowledge like SSE2 is cheating. It's only "at the expense of AMD" in that Intel made a deal with Adobe to make the mods and AMD didn't get any special optimization.
The only thing I'll toss out there is that the Oracle app server isn't known to be one of the best performing, and AFAIK isn't widely used.
But, that's sorta the point of J2EE -- lots of different implementations with different characteristics. The results are somewhat believable (Java is not Fast), but would be a hellava lot more credible if there was more than one J2EE server tested (for example BEA and IBM, which have a huge marketshare lead over the others). But, on "gotdotnet.com", it's probably more of a feelgood for the MS customers anyway.
You certainly have a point, but specing a bunch of raw parts is not the way to make it.
Assembly costs money in the real world, but so does *integration*. (Meaning if you have to hang around message boards to try to figure out why your SoundBlaster is incompatible with your VIA mobo, and then wait for and test drivers, that's a real cost, as is homebrewing cooling solutions. Those are real world examples.)
However, if this is a hobby and not a business proposition, then Apple's not your vendor. Neither is Dell or IBM*.
*and I have to say my Intellistation rocks:), but I'm glad I didn't pay the even-more-obnoxious-than-apple $4000 retail price for it. Chech alienware.com if you want to pay top dollar for some AMD stuff.
Second, to get above your level of discourse, let me explain: I have no real need to reveal my primary address to Slashdot, nor bother with the bureaucracy of encryption for spamtraps. If you know who I am, you can find my key, and if you don't know who I am, I'm not a secure channel anyway. Furthermore, anything I say here is implicitly public and not requiring any obfuscation, and if any further conversation would require that, it can be moved to such channels.
OEMs still outsell screwdriver shops by a large margin. Most screwdriver shops live and breath on the support (network installs, etc) - not the hardware. Microsoft gives them a pre-integrated "Small Business Server" - Linux gives them a bunch of tools that need to be pieced together.
You can believe in Linux supportability all you want, but until the OEMs can see something on the bottomline, MS will be in the position it's in now.
Very good point, but don't confuse Microsoft's loss for anyone else's gain.
ESR once said that Linux will have "won" when Microsoft's stock price hits a certain level -- and this is a guy who's a professional Linux advocate.
It's that sort of bizarre thinking that moshes the Windows Hater club in with the people who genuinely are trying to create something interesting. The truth is that goals of these two groups diverge significantly -- hackers hack because they their scratch itches and Linux Advocates advocate Linux because they envy/hate/want to replicate Microsoft.
The end is that eventually people will realize that the hackers will never create something that can displace "M$" (no matter how poorly they are doing financially) and the Microsoft Haters will hitch their hopes to something else (just as they were all over IBM OS/2 before jumping on board Linux).
1) Sell a box for $500 dollars including all the basic software that most people will need. Configure it, brand it, do whatever you like with it. Your costs are $400, you make a profit of $100.
2) Sell a computer for $650. $150 dollars of that goes to Microsoft. Your profit stays the same at $100. Microsofts profit is close to $150. You have to configure it how Microsoft tells you to.
Nice analysis, but you are missing the biggest factor that goes into the OEM bottom line-- support costs.
If it costs $100 in (1) to support a user, you've made no money, whereas with (2) you can get your support costs down to $50, and still come out ahead.
Microsoft will not be displaced from the Home/SoHo OEMs until someone can produce a cheaper and easier to support alternative. My assertation is that will NEVER be an OS created by and for Unix-heads -- they've got far too much baggage and disdain for the end user.
As much as I hate to do so, I have to disagree -- the Dam will hold until somebody can prove that the Total Cost (not just the licence cost) for Linux is cheaper than for Windows for the general market as a whole (not just your constrained x-terminal setup).
Actually Microsoft only had about 80% compatibility with WordPerfect, and their support for macro-encrusted 123 sheets was even worse.
When companies converted to Office, they generally hired a temp to spend a couple weeks going through all the documents on the fileserver to convert and reformat them. (Of course, this before widespread use of office docs in e-mail, so you didn't need to worry about new documents coming in all the time.)
The Office Document Problem is a prime example of Linux-types having only a skin deep understanding of the problem. Hypothetically, let's say it's solved (or I want to switch to Macs and use MS Office there) --
Then what? There's people using Visio and MS Project. There's people who RUN THE BUSINESS on crappy Access applications which would need to be rewritten. There's vertical software that we use that's only available on Windows (prime example being DB or CASE modeling tools for the developers). There's VB apps that people have hacked together over the years. There's still that wing of the company using Lotus Notes. There's the sales automation solution that you spent $10M for. The VP loves his business card scanner. Etc Etc Etc.
From what I've seen, it's incredably difficult to even move the userbase from Win98 to Win2000 and verify that everything was tested and working. Linux? -- unpossible.
In my book, Opera solves the problems of 1994. I prefer Mozilla even though I am one of those millions who downloaded and installed it (for testing purposes).
It would be kinda funny to read the mail that comes into that address. I bet it falls into these categories:
1) I'm a random concerned citizen who wishes to express my views about "The Freedom To Innovate". Any similarity to www.microsoft.com/billg is purely coincidental.
2) I'm from slashdot.org, and I'm karma whoring for Great Justice.
3) Mirco$fot wrecked my comupter!!
4) My stocks are really taking a beating -- please please please give me a break
One thing to note is that ATI doesn't make laptop drivers for the consumer -- they expect the OEM to customize the drivers for a particular model and then release them to the end user. It could be that ATI shipped updated drivers, but Half LIfe fixes are low on Dell's priority so they aren't handing them off to you. Or it could be ATI's normal situation of abandoning old chips quickly.
This leads to interesting situations where different models with the same chip have different resolutions and features available.
Adaptec spun off Roxio because they saw the writing on the wall with OS support for CD burning.
Microsoft would only licence Easy CD under one circumstance -- the price was cheaper than developing it inhouse. That means Roxio is moving from getting $$ from virtually every burner sold to getting pennies from MS. (See also the Scandisk/Defrag software and other bits MS has licenced on the cheap over the years.)
Roxio might have a future selling higher end "Platinum" software for DVD mastering, etc. But MS has basically ate their bread and butter. (Not that I care -- EasyCD sucks, and device support *should* be built into the OS.)
Cool. Although this gets into the point about the manual (how would I know this?)
Is there a place to start for people that want to work on documentation?
"Um. The whole browser UI is in Javascript/DOM. It's fairly solid."
I admit my experience was based on porting some DHTML stuff over from IE in the moz.8x timeframe. Got crashes even some NS3-type stuff, not to mention the DOM1 stuff I tried which seemed utterly broken. (yes everything was bugzilla'd) I'm sure it's better now, but I haven't had an opportunity to go back and try again. Soon, I hope.
Which, I would argue, is actually the 'correct' or ideal behavior!
It might have been ideal behavior, but it certainly wasn't "correct" with MacOS's crappy memory manager. (Program memory had to be *contiguous*, which meant having a 20MB chunk allocated and not doing anything would negatively affect other programs. Furthermore running into VM slowed everything down.)
With OS X's VM, the behavior is fine - the program swaps out and no troubles.
And Mac HCI guidelines have forever said that double-clicking the icon of a running program with no windows should open a new document window. If a browser doesn't do this, it's broken.
Slashdot Mirror
A long time ago, Netscape put out a warning that Mozilla was their trademark and nobody should use it in their useragent strings. Microsoft blew them off, and that was that.
It's in there for compatiblity reasons (possibly with Netscape web servers?), so I suspect there's no case to be made.
Check the license. Look, but don't touch.
Check the licence for UNIX -- Same deal. Note that we now have a few fully functional Unix clones, but nobody's ever gotten close with Windows.
You can say what you want about the old school "Open Standards" theory relative to "Open Source", but it's better than what you are getting from proprietary vendors.
Apparently. some very old HTTP servers were hardcoded to only serve content to browsers calling themselves "Mozilla". What? Why? I have no idea.
This also defeated some JavaScript detection scripts looking for Netscape 3.0 (It really should be Mozilla/3.0 compatible, as IE does not support the proprietary Netscape 4 object model).
Then it's probably just a detection fuckup.
Contrary to what you hear on Slashdot, Nobody in the real world knows or cares about Mozilla. Which is the way it should be for a development and testing browser.
Regular users not interested in coding and QA are directed to Netscape 6.1 for a supported commercial product.
Which is not to say that some people didn't fuck up. Perhaps Mozilla.org should consider just reporting themselves as Netscape 6.2 Beta (or whatever) to eliminate some of the QA hassle caused by browser detect stuff.
1) IBM owned 10 or 20% of Intel at the time
2) They started on a 68K machine, but the price point would have been way too high.
3) The PC was originally planned to have an Intel 8080, and used lots of stock parts which were already in common use in the microcomputer business. That equalled time-to-market.
4) Likewise, the 8086 was very compatible with existing applications (CP/M and clones, WordStar, VisiCalc, etc.)
So it was a lot more than luck on Intel's part -- they were positioned perfectly in the market for the PC revolution, and lots of people realized that before IBM did.
OK - I see your greater point. I guess my greater point is that people generally don't like computers and will tend to minimize the amount of mental effort they spend on the computer in order to achieve their task. It's a certain form of training cost -- the resistance to change cost.
That is -- if the only thing you give them is KDE, they'll use it, but it if Windows is available, why would they bother? It would be an interesting test in a student lab -- see how long the line for the Windows machines get before people plunk their ass down in front of Unix. (Back in my day they'd wait indefinately for the Macs over the forsaken PS/2s, even if they only wanted to telnet into their pine mail.)
The guy might be off by a few years in his dates, but his point stands. Apple was getting some real momentum in business environments, but then Windows 3 pretty much snuck in the backdoor on company supported DOS PCs.
It's not so much that DOS already had the advantage -- it's the lost opportunity cost. In 1990, seeing a XT or AT machine in production was not that uncommon -- there was virtually no reason to have a better machine with DOS software. But, either with Mac or Windows, that machine would need to be replaced to run in a GUI environment (and either could emulate a 8088 just fine).
Another huge factor was VisualBasic -- Microsoft somehow convinced Apple to not include database drivers in with HyperCard, and the rest is history. I know the place I worked at in the mid 90s purged a significant numbers of Macs as part of a "Client-Server Standards" project (although the users would often ignore their shiny new PC as much as possible and kept clunking along on their IIci or whatever).
Furthermore, Apple made the affirmative decision that they were going to be network incompatible with everyone else. Ask any old Novell admin about MAC.NLM and see him cringe...
When I was in college (left in 92), lots of idiot state school kids figured out how to use Pine without trouble (even the Mac users...)
However, that's because it was the ONLY way to get the sexy new thing -- e-mail!
Everyone nowdays has already been exposed to AOL, Outlook, Netscape, and Hotmail. It's not that they are incapable of learning Pine -- it's that they think it's a ridiclous waste of their time to do so. Furthermore, they can easily block out and ignore some snotty Unix guy with a superority complex telling them otherwise. That's why people give you puzzling looks when you are foaming at them.
What was the advantage of using Pine again?
Where's the need for 32-bit desktop chips?
That's exactly the problem I'm talking about:
Intel: Here's a cool 32-bit chip, somebody write some software.
Microsoft and IBM: We don't need to support 32-bit for the next 10 years, so you get a bunch of crappy compatibility hacks and spurious "out of memory" errors. The hacks will make it _more_ difficult to support 32-bits in the future. Enjoy!
Now, the exact same thing is going to happen all over again for 64-bit chips. And I'm supposed to be excited?
However, it seems that AMD will be able to win out on the desktop
OK -- where's the software support? Where's Windows/AMD64? Where's the need for 64-bit desktop chips?
I like AMD's strategy in theory, however it will be marketed like a box of Cheerios that says "NEW - Now With More Bits!!" and nothing really to back it up.
(I should note that Apple has a similar problem with the G5, except they will ship native OS support, and it's concievable that a 64-bit CPU will have an advantage for media applications, which is pretty much their only market. Will 64-bit Quake or 64-bit OpenGL drivers help that much?)
Hopefully, I'm not outthinking the Best Buy guy and shafting myself, but my rule on Service Plans is get one if and only the item is 1) Expensive and 2) Mechanical.
So, far so good, considering that I've had my LaserDisc unit and SVHS in 3 times each before they were finally fixed. That's $1200 in original purchase price, plus a $120 or so for the service plans.
(I Passed for the Sony TV and cheapy DVD and CD players. Never would think about buying a computer at Best Buy.)
Intel used to have a special "Pentium III owners only" website that hyped up Photoshop scores. (Remember the whole "it makes the Internet faster" ad campaign?)
I don't see how using publically available knowledge like SSE2 is cheating. It's only "at the expense of AMD" in that Intel made a deal with Adobe to make the mods and AMD didn't get any special optimization.
The only thing I'll toss out there is that the Oracle app server isn't known to be one of the best performing, and AFAIK isn't widely used.
But, that's sorta the point of J2EE -- lots of different implementations with different characteristics. The results are somewhat believable (Java is not Fast), but would be a hellava lot more credible if there was more than one J2EE server tested (for example BEA and IBM, which have a huge marketshare lead over the others). But, on "gotdotnet.com", it's probably more of a feelgood for the MS customers anyway.
You certainly have a point, but specing a bunch of raw parts is not the way to make it.
:), but I'm glad I didn't pay the even-more-obnoxious-than-apple $4000 retail price for it. Chech alienware.com if you want to pay top dollar for some AMD stuff.
Assembly costs money in the real world, but so does *integration*. (Meaning if you have to hang around message boards to try to figure out why your SoundBlaster is incompatible with your VIA mobo, and then wait for and test drivers, that's a real cost, as is homebrewing cooling solutions. Those are real world examples.)
However, if this is a hobby and not a business proposition, then Apple's not your vendor. Neither is Dell or IBM*.
*and I have to say my Intellistation rocks
First of all -- Fuck you.
Second, to get above your level of discourse, let me explain: I have no real need to reveal my primary address to Slashdot, nor bother with the bureaucracy of encryption for spamtraps. If you know who I am, you can find my key, and if you don't know who I am, I'm not a secure channel anyway. Furthermore, anything I say here is implicitly public and not requiring any obfuscation, and if any further conversation would require that, it can be moved to such channels.
OEMs still outsell screwdriver shops by a large margin. Most screwdriver shops live and breath on the support (network installs, etc) - not the hardware. Microsoft gives them a pre-integrated "Small Business Server" - Linux gives them a bunch of tools that need to be pieced together.
You can believe in Linux supportability all you want, but until the OEMs can see something on the bottomline, MS will be in the position it's in now.
Very good point, but don't confuse Microsoft's loss for anyone else's gain.
ESR once said that Linux will have "won" when Microsoft's stock price hits a certain level -- and this is a guy who's a professional Linux advocate.
It's that sort of bizarre thinking that moshes the Windows Hater club in with the people who genuinely are trying to create something interesting. The truth is that goals of these two groups diverge significantly -- hackers hack because they their scratch itches and Linux Advocates advocate Linux because they envy/hate/want to replicate Microsoft.
The end is that eventually people will realize that the hackers will never create something that can displace "M$" (no matter how poorly they are doing financially) and the Microsoft Haters will hitch their hopes to something else (just as they were all over IBM OS/2 before jumping on board Linux).
1) Sell a box for $500 dollars including all the basic software that most people will need. Configure it, brand it, do whatever you like with it. Your costs are $400, you make a profit of $100.
2) Sell a computer for $650. $150 dollars of that goes to Microsoft. Your profit stays the same at $100. Microsofts profit is close to $150. You have to configure it how Microsoft tells you to.
Nice analysis, but you are missing the biggest factor that goes into the OEM bottom line-- support costs.
If it costs $100 in (1) to support a user, you've made no money, whereas with (2) you can get your support costs down to $50, and still come out ahead.
Microsoft will not be displaced from the Home/SoHo OEMs until someone can produce a cheaper and easier to support alternative. My assertation is that will NEVER be an OS created by and for Unix-heads -- they've got far too much baggage and disdain for the end user.
As much as I hate to do so, I have to disagree -- the Dam will hold until somebody can prove that the Total Cost (not just the licence cost) for Linux is cheaper than for Windows for the general market as a whole (not just your constrained x-terminal setup).
Actually Microsoft only had about 80% compatibility with WordPerfect, and their support for macro-encrusted 123 sheets was even worse.
When companies converted to Office, they generally hired a temp to spend a couple weeks going through all the documents on the fileserver to convert and reformat them. (Of course, this before widespread use of office docs in e-mail, so you didn't need to worry about new documents coming in all the time.)
The Office Document Problem is a prime example of Linux-types having only a skin deep understanding of the problem. Hypothetically, let's say it's solved (or I want to switch to Macs and use MS Office there) --
Then what? There's people using Visio and MS Project. There's people who RUN THE BUSINESS on crappy Access applications which would need to be rewritten. There's vertical software that we use that's only available on Windows (prime example being DB or CASE modeling tools for the developers). There's VB apps that people have hacked together over the years. There's still that wing of the company using Lotus Notes. There's the sales automation solution that you spent $10M for. The VP loves his business card scanner. Etc Etc Etc.
From what I've seen, it's incredably difficult to even move the userbase from Win98 to Win2000 and verify that everything was tested and working. Linux? -- unpossible.
In my book, Opera solves the problems of 1994. I prefer Mozilla even though I am one of those millions who downloaded and installed it (for testing purposes).
It would be kinda funny to read the mail that comes into that address. I bet it falls into these categories:
1) I'm a random concerned citizen who wishes to express my views about "The Freedom To Innovate". Any similarity to www.microsoft.com/billg is purely coincidental.
2) I'm from slashdot.org, and I'm karma whoring for Great Justice.
3) Mirco$fot wrecked my comupter!!
4) My stocks are really taking a beating -- please please please give me a break
One thing to note is that ATI doesn't make laptop drivers for the consumer -- they expect the OEM to customize the drivers for a particular model and then release them to the end user. It could be that ATI shipped updated drivers, but Half LIfe fixes are low on Dell's priority so they aren't handing them off to you. Or it could be ATI's normal situation of abandoning old chips quickly.
This leads to interesting situations where different models with the same chip have different resolutions and features available.
Adaptec spun off Roxio because they saw the writing on the wall with OS support for CD burning.
Microsoft would only licence Easy CD under one circumstance -- the price was cheaper than developing it inhouse. That means Roxio is moving from getting $$ from virtually every burner sold to getting pennies from MS. (See also the Scandisk/Defrag software and other bits MS has licenced on the cheap over the years.)
Roxio might have a future selling higher end "Platinum" software for DVD mastering, etc. But MS has basically ate their bread and butter. (Not that I care -- EasyCD sucks, and device support *should* be built into the OS.)
> This would be the getComputedStyle() function
.8x timeframe. Got crashes even some NS3-type stuff, not to mention the DOM1 stuff I tried which seemed utterly broken. (yes everything was bugzilla'd) I'm sure it's better now, but I haven't had an opportunity to go back and try again. Soon, I hope.
Cool. Although this gets into the point about the manual (how would I know this?)
Is there a place to start for people that want to work on documentation?
"Um. The whole browser UI is in Javascript/DOM. It's fairly solid."
I admit my experience was based on porting some DHTML stuff over from IE in the moz
Which, I would argue, is actually the 'correct' or ideal behavior!
It might have been ideal behavior, but it certainly wasn't "correct" with MacOS's crappy memory manager. (Program memory had to be *contiguous*, which meant having a 20MB chunk allocated and not doing anything would negatively affect other programs. Furthermore running into VM slowed everything down.)
With OS X's VM, the behavior is fine - the program swaps out and no troubles.
And Mac HCI guidelines have forever said that double-clicking the icon of a running program with no windows should open a new document window. If a browser doesn't do this, it's broken.