Good, you Macites can make links. Now the question is, can you read those links and come to a reasonable conclusion on why MS might have a larger group of programmers?
OS is monolithic, growing in size and complexity at a geometric pace and is nearly impossible to adapt to changing demands.
I guess I see "Unable to Multitask" and "Media Center is late" as two fundementally different kinds of issues for an OS vendor. I don't believe that there is any evidence that the base Windows OS is unable to support what people want in terms of modern features. Just get realistic about what features you're going to deliver (ie don't promise WinFS).
I think Gates and Ballmer would've been lynched.
Like Steve Jobs has been lynched for "service packs" like 10.3 and 10.4? Some people (higher-end consumer users) love that approach. I think MS could seperate out the business/consumer upgrade paths and do a more reasonable job of making everyone happy.
I agree that businesses don't really want shorter cycles. But MS is large enough that they ought to be able to manage seperate business and consumer cycles. They did in the 90s with NT and annual feature refreshes for Win9x (95A, 95B, 95C, 98, 98SE, ME).
It's bad because you're basically paying for a point upgrade and "features" like Dashboard or rejigging Finder (again) which Apple tack on to make the upgrade look more compelling. It also means that apps constantly expect and only run on the last few releases and you're forced onto an upgrade treadmill
Agreed, but the perception is that OSX is "beating" Windows because of this approach, which is reasonable from the consumer (Apple user) perpective. And, Windows devs including MS are usually better about targeting downlevel versions than Mac vendors, so I think the upgrade treadmill would be less of a problem.
As announced, Copland wasn't anything near totally backward-compatible. Hell, System 7.6 wasn't totally backward-compatible with 7.53. I think you're exaggerating your point. Copland failed because the architecture was shite. Vista is late because they bit off more than they could chew.
Actually, from an enduser perspective, I wasn't that impressed with Win2K as it was a pretty incremental upgrade from NT 4.0. You got DirectX and USB and that's about it. And XP was incremental on 2000, mostly user-friendlness. The last real significant change to Windows was IE4/Active Desktop, nearly 10 years ago. So, Vista is a fairly large BFD.
Apple had a pretty massive ego before Copland cratered, too. MS has just been through the biggest development project failure ever in the private sector MS has two choices: cut a deal with SJ, or try to turn Solaris into a viable desktop system.
Copland was a technology failure -- the old MacOS just couldn't be "modernized" without breaking applications / using too much memory / etc. There was just no way to add SMP and memory protection to the thing.
Vista is a management failure. Rather than shorter release cycles with incremental improvments, MS put it on themselves to do it all in one big release. Nobody was asking them to do this -- it was just arrogance on their part. People want better security and search functionality in Windows, they don't want it rewritten in C# and they don't want shoot-the-moon features like WinFS. They don't even necessarily want transparent windows.
If there was an XP2004 and an XP2006 released, you wouldn't see the bitching. XP's biggest problem at this point is just that it's old and clunky.
So, different problems, different solutions. Apple had critical technical problems and had to buy a new OS to fix it. Microsoft has a project management problem.. Buying Solaris or OS X is only going to make the management problems worse, not better. They really just need to clean house of whomever is setting these development targets, and it looks like they've already started with the Chief Architect.
You know, I remember testing "Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2", and the desktop could barely draw itself, there were loads of icons missing, you couldn't run MS Office, the admin tools would bluescreen the box, and it took about 30 seconds to open the start menu. And I was thinking "They spent 4 years building THIS?" And that turned out to be Windows 2000, widely considered to be the least crap version of Windows ever.
There's the real possiblity that Vista might turn out to be a unusable crap heap, but its way to early to make that call. I'm kinda suprised that they had a public beta with 6 months (plus 3 more once it gets pushed again) to go.
4. There are thousands upon thousands of files, where you don't know what they do,
Eh, pretty much every OS has this issue nowdays, although some like MacOSX have a nicer organization scheme. It's been a long time since I could open my System Folder and tell you exactly what every file was there for,
I love these pointless debates. The average Windows/Mac customer couldn't tell the difference between Cocoa running on the NT kernel and Win32 running on the Apple XNU kernel. The implementation of the underlying OS has very little to do with the desirability of either product. And in reality, Apple is a lot more likely to dump Mach than MS is to dump NT.
Although one has to wonder what is going on when Microsoft's programmer team for Windows is in the several-thousands and Apple's development team for OS X is around 300.
Server software, tablets, media center, 64-bit support... Apple customers often forget there's more to computing than iMacs.
I'm more interested in what the actual software out there can do
Actually, me too -- I'd love to get a testing copy of a screen reader. I'm just reacting to the assertation which gets floated here that "works in Lynx" is somehow legally requried.
Well, I'm glad that someone finally provided a reference to this claim that Javascript is somehow prohibited by the ADA. But you have completely misreprsented what the regulations state -- there is NOT a prohibition on javascript navigation:
When pages utilize scripting languages to display content, or to create interface elements, the information provided by the script shall be identified with functional text that can be read by assistive technology.
So, basically your script navigation has to provide text labels or alt tags, which they nearly always do.
Yep, that's true, mostly due to middle management mandating Active Directory, from what I've heard (I talk to a lot of Mac shops with Windows servers).
Well, AD is a robust solution that's been around a long time, Novell's had a poor record with Mac support, and Apple's OpenDirectory is pretty new, so AD isn't really a terrible choice.
I don't claim to be an expert in this, but I know our Mac SAs weren't confident enough in OSX's SMB support to stop using W2K3's AFP. Just personally, I've seen problems with wireless disconnects and of course the dotfile issue.
If the target market is "people who can't afford Microsoft Office", then perhaps a cheesy in-your-face ad is the most appropriate.
When you see those ugly, poorly designed ads for used cars, home financing, rodent removal, and so on, the cheeze is purely intentional because the target market tends to avoid marketing that looks like its too classy for them. Just because the ad is ugly doesn't mean it will be ineffective.
I've heard that it's basically impossible to get a traffic conviction for "style points" (passing on the right, tailgating, left-lane-blocking, etc) in the US -- unlike Germany -- which is why the cops tend to focus only on (A) Speeding and (B) Expired Registration (because this often leads to other arrests).
As I understand it, the "web service" clause might apply to HTTP servers streaming HTML data over the network, which is a dent in the traditional "output is not covered" part of the GPL aka Freedom Zero.
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From an enduser perspective, yes -- those things were invisible. From a MCSE perspective, obviously not.
Good, you Macites can make links. Now the question is, can you read those links and come to a reasonable conclusion on why MS might have a larger group of programmers?
OS is monolithic, growing in size and complexity at a geometric pace and is nearly impossible to adapt to changing demands.
I guess I see "Unable to Multitask" and "Media Center is late" as two fundementally different kinds of issues for an OS vendor. I don't believe that there is any evidence that the base Windows OS is unable to support what people want in terms of modern features. Just get realistic about what features you're going to deliver (ie don't promise WinFS).
I think Gates and Ballmer would've been lynched.
Like Steve Jobs has been lynched for "service packs" like 10.3 and 10.4? Some people (higher-end consumer users) love that approach. I think MS could seperate out the business/consumer upgrade paths and do a more reasonable job of making everyone happy.
I agree that businesses don't really want shorter cycles. But MS is large enough that they ought to be able to manage seperate business and consumer cycles. They did in the 90s with NT and annual feature refreshes for Win9x (95A, 95B, 95C, 98, 98SE, ME).
It's bad because you're basically paying for a point upgrade and "features" like Dashboard or rejigging Finder (again) which Apple tack on to make the upgrade look more compelling. It also means that apps constantly expect and only run on the last few releases and you're forced onto an upgrade treadmill
Agreed, but the perception is that OSX is "beating" Windows because of this approach, which is reasonable from the consumer (Apple user) perpective. And, Windows devs including MS are usually better about targeting downlevel versions than Mac vendors, so I think the upgrade treadmill would be less of a problem.
Anybody know where he is/what he is doing?
You're in luck -- there is a whole site devoted to the history of Flight Simulator.
http://fshistory.simflight.com/fsh/artwick.htm
As announced, Copland wasn't anything near totally backward-compatible. Hell, System 7.6 wasn't totally backward-compatible with 7.53. I think you're exaggerating your point. Copland failed because the architecture was shite. Vista is late because they bit off more than they could chew.
Hey, gotta pander here :P
Actually, from an enduser perspective, I wasn't that impressed with Win2K as it was a pretty incremental upgrade from NT 4.0. You got DirectX and USB and that's about it. And XP was incremental on 2000, mostly user-friendlness. The last real significant change to Windows was IE4/Active Desktop, nearly 10 years ago. So, Vista is a fairly large BFD.
Backward compatibility is a perfectly reasonable requirement, a successor OS would fail without it.
... they didn't need Steve Jobs to tell them about it.
Apple was using virtualization with A/UX
Apple had a pretty massive ego before Copland cratered, too.
.. Buying Solaris or OS X is only going to make the management problems worse, not better. They really just need to clean house of whomever is setting these development targets, and it looks like they've already started with the Chief Architect.
MS has just been through the biggest development project failure ever in the private sector
MS has two choices: cut a deal with SJ, or try to turn Solaris into a viable desktop system.
Copland was a technology failure -- the old MacOS just couldn't be "modernized" without breaking applications / using too much memory / etc. There was just no way to add SMP and memory protection to the thing.
Vista is a management failure. Rather than shorter release cycles with incremental improvments, MS put it on themselves to do it all in one big release. Nobody was asking them to do this -- it was just arrogance on their part. People want better security and search functionality in Windows, they don't want it rewritten in C# and they don't want shoot-the-moon features like WinFS. They don't even necessarily want transparent windows.
If there was an XP2004 and an XP2006 released, you wouldn't see the bitching. XP's biggest problem at this point is just that it's old and clunky.
So, different problems, different solutions. Apple had critical technical problems and had to buy a new OS to fix it. Microsoft has a project management problem
Good bye Citrix then, because that's exactly what their enhanced-RDC product does.
You know, I remember testing "Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2", and the desktop could barely draw itself, there were loads of icons missing, you couldn't run MS Office, the admin tools would bluescreen the box, and it took about 30 seconds to open the start menu. And I was thinking "They spent 4 years building THIS?" And that turned out to be Windows 2000, widely considered to be the least crap version of Windows ever.
There's the real possiblity that Vista might turn out to be a unusable crap heap, but its way to early to make that call. I'm kinda suprised that they had a public beta with 6 months (plus 3 more once it gets pushed again) to go.
4. There are thousands upon thousands of files, where you don't know what they do,
Eh, pretty much every OS has this issue nowdays, although some like MacOSX have a nicer organization scheme. It's been a long time since I could open my System Folder and tell you exactly what every file was there for,
They would probably call it Windows/2.
I love these pointless debates. The average Windows/Mac customer couldn't tell the difference between Cocoa running on the NT kernel and Win32 running on the Apple XNU kernel. The implementation of the underlying OS has very little to do with the desirability of either product. And in reality, Apple is a lot more likely to dump Mach than MS is to dump NT.
... Apple customers often forget there's more to computing than iMacs.
Although one has to wonder what is going on when Microsoft's programmer team for Windows is in the several-thousands and Apple's development team for OS X is around 300.
Server software, tablets, media center, 64-bit support
I'm more interested in what the actual software out there can do
Actually, me too -- I'd love to get a testing copy of a screen reader. I'm just reacting to the assertation which gets floated here that "works in Lynx" is somehow legally requried.
So, basically your script navigation has to provide text labels or alt tags, which they nearly always do.
Oops - premature submission.
Also there are "Audio" CD-ROMs which carry a royalty. However, there's no reason to use them unless you have a standalone stereo component CD copier.
The US does this on blank digital and analog audio tape, IIRC. Media designed for computer storage isn't covered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHRA
Yep, that's true, mostly due to middle management mandating Active Directory, from what I've heard (I talk to a lot of Mac shops with Windows servers).
Well, AD is a robust solution that's been around a long time, Novell's had a poor record with Mac support, and Apple's OpenDirectory is pretty new, so AD isn't really a terrible choice.
I don't claim to be an expert in this, but I know our Mac SAs weren't confident enough in OSX's SMB support to stop using W2K3's AFP. Just personally, I've seen problems with wireless disconnects and of course the dotfile issue.
Contrast with WinFS,
I wasn't really doing that, but if it makes you Apple guys feel better, go right ahead.
If the target market is "people who can't afford Microsoft Office", then perhaps a cheesy in-your-face ad is the most appropriate.
When you see those ugly, poorly designed ads for used cars, home financing, rodent removal, and so on, the cheeze is purely intentional because the target market tends to avoid marketing that looks like its too classy for them. Just because the ad is ugly doesn't mean it will be ineffective.
It is a rather dumb client problem -- shouldn't your mailer warn you if the signature doesn't match the From field?
(And if these mailers supported PGP, they would have the same problem, its not really a comparative point.)
I've heard that it's basically impossible to get a traffic conviction for "style points" (passing on the right, tailgating, left-lane-blocking, etc) in the US -- unlike Germany -- which is why the cops tend to focus only on (A) Speeding and (B) Expired Registration (because this often leads to other arrests).
Exit Numbers: Just another thing to blame on Reagan.
As I understand it, the "web service" clause might apply to HTTP servers streaming HTML data over the network, which is a dent in the traditional "output is not covered" part of the GPL aka Freedom Zero.