Hey, it used to be worse -- Windows NT 4.0 Server shipped with "Foreground applicaitons get priority" turned on. So if someone turned on the OpenGL screensavers, the server applications would grind to a halt.
As for the indexing service... it would be a useful consumer feature, IF it came with a user interface. (Recently they finally produced a MSN-branded UI as a download nobody will find.) But it basically proves Mossberg's point: MS tends to be five years ahead of Apple under-the-hood, but two years behind in terms of user interface features.
Nope. Everyone knew that Sony was installing some sort of DRM crap. The issue was that they didn't know it had a kernel-mode "rootkit"-like driver that hid processes and files.
If you think that Mac users have any clue about what happens after they type the sudo password, you're kidding yourself. Anything being installed could be SUID root, which would completely defeat the permission system. And of course, installing drivers is not impossible with OSX either.
Mainly for political reasons, deflecting regulatory pressure, etc.
My local power company was under a lot of heat from the state for not maintaining power lines, outages, etc. They responed with an advertising campaign about how nice and devoted their customer service and line employees are.
Who said they would have to use a sticker? They could always screenprint it right on the case (as they did for years with "PowerPC").
Anyway, I'll bet that Apple's joining the Intel logo program. When was the last time you saw a TV commercial for a Mac? You'll see them for Macintels (ba-boom-ba-boom).
You said: Rambus was part of the JEDEC committie that drafted the DDR syncronous specification and they "suggested" several bits of technology that they had previously patented but they never disclosed the patent to the committee
Rambus said (and apparently has proven in court) that JEDEC knew about Rambus' patents, but intentionally colluded to exclude them from the patent pool. Furthermore, they fixed prices to ensure that RDRAM was more expensive and in short supply.
It was a suprise to me too... the Rambus myth fed to us by sites like Tom's Hardware looks like it turned out to be completely wrong. At the time Rambus was a big win on speed (about 20% faster in overalll benchmarks), but a loser on price. It appears that was only due to illegal market manipulation.
If I'm following it correctly, all these lawsuits are spinning out of the same action, and Rambus is winning them. I think you're just reading one side (the JEDEC side) of the story.
Actually, I was looking at machines I would buy, so of course I was. n-Series was consistently cheaper. Like I said, the only exceptions are the loss-leaders with 128MB RAM and that kind of crap. (US site)
> the FOSS alternatives that Dell provides (which results in less Microsoft software usage) should result in lower support costs for them
Get real. The support costs are cheaper because Dell doesn't have to do any OS support at all. The "FOSS" option is RedHat, which charges an annual fee just for patch support.
> If I'm not buying Windows then why the heck am I still paying for it?
If DRM had anything do with SACD failing, then iTunes would have failed right along with it.
PC users will willingly buy-in for ~50GB of backup storage. I know I will. That will get the market off the groundfloor.
Even if the studios fail to get consumers to care about HD, or having an entire season of TV on one single disk, the installedbase of crappy $50 Walmart DVD players will all fail at some point and will be replaced with HD players.
Actually, all of the lawsuits are going in Rambus' favor and against JEDEC members. Only that was after Intel dropped RDRAM and the PC screwdriver crowd stopped paying attention.
Disagree: Hollywood wants to phase out the insecure DVD standard as quickly as they can get away with it.
Right now the studios are in the catbird seat with both BR and HDDVD trying to best each other with more and more DRM. But in either case they will end up with something significantly better for them than DVD.
Everytime I've run through this exercise and built a 'reasonable' machine, the FreeDOS model comes out about $50 cheaper than XP Home. The exceptions tend to be only the loss-leader specials where the Win version gets a free monitor or something.
Besides, the money that Dell saves shipping a bare box is not so much the OS license, but support costs.
My mistake. You are indeed so smart that you are exempt from any sort of basic fact-checking. In fact, I have no doubt you have a specially printed license to talk out of your ass. In that case, all of your patented special FUD is totally allowable, and you should be allowed to smear it all over the internet without nary a flame licking your dainty bottom.
Either that or you are just another slashbot idiot getting well-deserved insults.
Well the real excuse is more along the lines of "Nobody needs to know these incantations but trained Unix sysadmins, who like to keep things as obscure as possible in order to protect their salaries."
XP x64 is not in beta and Dell does sell bare metal (see my other post). You are either an idiot or a liar and post nothing but worthless low-grade FUD.
Just like a good chunk of this discussion thread, your entire premise is just more idiotic FUD that could easily be dispelled by clicking around dell.com for a minute. They do offer Windows x64 and even Linux x86 on a ton of different machines, and it's the default on the higher-end models.
It's not like Dell is my favorite vendor or anything, but you mention their name and it seems like every ignoramus crawls out from under their bridge to start spreading lies.
> Well PhotoShop is a derivation (to prevent lawsuits) of PrintShop
Huh? A Photo Shop is quite literally a shop where one gets their photos processed. Entirely different thing than a Print Shop (and yeah I remember the old PrintShop program).
If that's the case, why did Microsoft fight so hard in the first one?
Nutscrape wasn't "just a browser" like Firefox or Opera -- they were offering a full-scale client-server suite that threatened MS's core application development and server markets, and they had the stated goal of "reducing Windows to a bunch of buggy device drivers". Microsoft wanted to eliminate the brand-value of Netscape before people started building things on top of their infrastructure.
Ultimately MS didn't totally succeed however, because Java vendors like IBM and BEA were able to establish strong footholds in the applicaiton server markets even with Netscape eliminated.
IBM was nice enough to ship us a bunch of ThinkPads with OS/2 installed... which was totally useless to us because OS/2 had no networking support OOB. ("Please contact your IBM Representative for LAN Support Pack Option #235G")
The funny part was the 20 step instruction sheet on how to boot DOS/Windows. Real intuitive GUI there, IBM.
When we complained to our IBM guy, he said the OS/2 customers were even more angry because their users were figuring out how to boot into Windows.
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Hey, it used to be worse -- Windows NT 4.0 Server shipped with "Foreground applicaitons get priority" turned on. So if someone turned on the OpenGL screensavers, the server applications would grind to a halt.
... it would be a useful consumer feature, IF it came with a user interface. (Recently they finally produced a MSN-branded UI as a download nobody will find.) But it basically proves Mossberg's point: MS tends to be five years ahead of Apple under-the-hood, but two years behind in terms of user interface features.
As for the indexing service
one must wonder how they could have lost the number 1 position to AMD when it comes to 64 bit processors.
Intel outsells AMD five to one in 64-bit chips.
Actually what's wrong with it is very simple: It's the fucking font from Star Trek: The Next Generation!
Nope. Everyone knew that Sony was installing some sort of DRM crap. The issue was that they didn't know it had a kernel-mode "rootkit"-like driver that hid processes and files.
If you think that Mac users have any clue about what happens after they type the sudo password, you're kidding yourself. Anything being installed could be SUID root, which would completely defeat the permission system. And of course, installing drivers is not impossible with OSX either.
Mainly for political reasons, deflecting regulatory pressure, etc.
My local power company was under a lot of heat from the state for not maintaining power lines, outages, etc. They responed with an advertising campaign about how nice and devoted their customer service and line employees are.
Who said they would have to use a sticker? They could always screenprint it right on the case (as they did for years with "PowerPC").
Anyway, I'll bet that Apple's joining the Intel logo program. When was the last time you saw a TV commercial for a Mac? You'll see them for Macintels (ba-boom-ba-boom).
You said: Rambus was part of the JEDEC committie that drafted the DDR syncronous specification and they "suggested" several bits of technology that they had previously patented but they never disclosed the patent to the committee
... the Rambus myth fed to us by sites like Tom's Hardware looks like it turned out to be completely wrong. At the time Rambus was a big win on speed (about 20% faster in overalll benchmarks), but a loser on price. It appears that was only due to illegal market manipulation.
Rambus said (and apparently has proven in court) that JEDEC knew about Rambus' patents, but intentionally colluded to exclude them from the patent pool. Furthermore, they fixed prices to ensure that RDRAM was more expensive and in short supply.
It was a suprise to me too
If I'm following it correctly, all these lawsuits are spinning out of the same action, and Rambus is winning them. I think you're just reading one side (the JEDEC side) of the story.
> Hint; don't create a 'reasonable' machine
Actually, I was looking at machines I would buy, so of course I was. n-Series was consistently cheaper. Like I said, the only exceptions are the loss-leaders with 128MB RAM and that kind of crap. (US site)
> the FOSS alternatives that Dell provides (which results in less Microsoft software usage) should result in lower support costs for them
Get real. The support costs are cheaper because Dell doesn't have to do any OS support at all. The "FOSS" option is RedHat, which charges an annual fee just for patch support.
> If I'm not buying Windows then why the heck am I still paying for it?
You aren't.
Actually I read an interview with Ken Thompson where he said it was. But wahteva.
It gets coverage on The Inq: Samsung screwed Rambus using price fixing, so look through their archives.
> the next fad in startups, get some IP in a standard, wait a few years and profit
Or, form a cartel, and steal ideas from startups. Frankly, as long as I don't have to buy super expensive RAM, I don't give a damn.
If DRM had anything do with SACD failing, then iTunes would have failed right along with it.
PC users will willingly buy-in for ~50GB of backup storage. I know I will. That will get the market off the groundfloor.
Even if the studios fail to get consumers to care about HD, or having an entire season of TV on one single disk, the installedbase of crappy $50 Walmart DVD players will all fail at some point and will be replaced with HD players.
Actually, all of the lawsuits are going in Rambus' favor and against JEDEC members. Only that was after Intel dropped RDRAM and the PC screwdriver crowd stopped paying attention.
Disagree: Hollywood wants to phase out the insecure DVD standard as quickly as they can get away with it.
Right now the studios are in the catbird seat with both BR and HDDVD trying to best each other with more and more DRM. But in either case they will end up with something significantly better for them than DVD.
Examples Please?
Everytime I've run through this exercise and built a 'reasonable' machine, the FreeDOS model comes out about $50 cheaper than XP Home. The exceptions tend to be only the loss-leader specials where the Win version gets a free monitor or something.
Besides, the money that Dell saves shipping a bare box is not so much the OS license, but support costs.
I have no idea what point you are attempting to make.
My mistake. You are indeed so smart that you are exempt from any sort of basic fact-checking. In fact, I have no doubt you have a specially printed license to talk out of your ass. In that case, all of your patented special FUD is totally allowable, and you should be allowed to smear it all over the internet without nary a flame licking your dainty bottom.
Either that or you are just another slashbot idiot getting well-deserved insults.
Well the real excuse is more along the lines of "Nobody needs to know these incantations but trained Unix sysadmins, who like to keep things as obscure as possible in order to protect their salaries."
XP x64 is not in beta and Dell does sell bare metal (see my other post). You are either an idiot or a liar and post nothing but worthless low-grade FUD.
Just like a good chunk of this discussion thread, your entire premise is just more idiotic FUD that could easily be dispelled by clicking around dell.com for a minute. They do offer Windows x64 and even Linux x86 on a ton of different machines, and it's the default on the higher-end models.
It's not like Dell is my favorite vendor or anything, but you mention their name and it seems like every ignoramus crawls out from under their bridge to start spreading lies.
> Well PhotoShop is a derivation (to prevent lawsuits) of PrintShop
Huh? A Photo Shop is quite literally a shop where one gets their photos processed. Entirely different thing than a Print Shop (and yeah I remember the old PrintShop program).
If that's the case, why did Microsoft fight so hard in the first one?
Nutscrape wasn't "just a browser" like Firefox or Opera -- they were offering a full-scale client-server suite that threatened MS's core application development and server markets, and they had the stated goal of "reducing Windows to a bunch of buggy device drivers". Microsoft wanted to eliminate the brand-value of Netscape before people started building things on top of their infrastructure.
Ultimately MS didn't totally succeed however, because Java vendors like IBM and BEA were able to establish strong footholds in the applicaiton server markets even with Netscape eliminated.
What's your obsession over the "default browser"? Do you type your URLs into the Start+Run box or something?
You click any browser icon, you click "Yes", and it's now your default browser. Is that really worth fretting over?
Acutally it's because they were using teletypes with crappy keyboards and very slow connections.
IBM was nice enough to ship us a bunch of ThinkPads with OS/2 installed ... which was totally useless to us because OS/2 had no networking support OOB. ("Please contact your IBM Representative for LAN Support Pack Option #235G")
The funny part was the 20 step instruction sheet on how to boot DOS/Windows. Real intuitive GUI there, IBM.
When we complained to our IBM guy, he said the OS/2 customers were even more angry because their users were figuring out how to boot into Windows.