I have no argument against the tech, and I use it myself.
However, Apple priced it out of the general peripheral market, dooming it to the DV niche. Even for harddrives, most general users would be better off with USB2 for reasons of compatibility and cost, leaving Firewire to the low-end RAID niche.
I don't think so. I just checked Dell, and even the high-end Dimensions only have 1394 as an optional add-on. I've never seen a business PC with Firewire.
Unfortunately, the current situation is that Firewire is basically a non-feature unless one is doing DV editing. However, it's not too late -- if Intel could build it into their chipsets without paying a licence fee, FW would be immediately become nearly universal.
Unfortunately, Apple restricted the use of the "Firewire" brand name in the early days, so most PC implementations were forced to use the unsexy "IEEE1394" moniker.
However, the real reason USB2 was victorious is because it is free technology while Firewire still requires some sort of licensing fee. Hopefully now that Apple and Intel are in bed, they can come to some sort of agreement and 1394 will become a standard PC chipset feature.
I pull my laptop in and out of a docking station all the time, so I'll dispute your 99/100 figure. (Even though I suspect my dock is just a 'dumb' port extender, not all of them are.)
Microsoft learned the internals of the Mac OS( APIs etc ) and started on Microsoft Windows
That's true, MS licenced the MacOS API from Apple, and then turned around licenced the Windows API to IBM for use in OS/2 PM (Although IBM changed a bunch of stuff). They also licenced stuff to X/Open Motif for Unix use.
But you entirely missed my last sentance -- MS was hiring from Xerox and knew as much about GUI application software as anyone, including Apple.
I will certainly give credit to the NeXT tools, but these weren't really widely available until fairly recently. (And still aren't, as Apple killed the Win32 and Unix versions.)
RealBasic, on the other hand, is a straight clone of Microsoft Visual Basic (which itself certainly borrowed ideas from NeXT and SmallTalk.) Maybe your point is "Macs can do it too!", but there certainly was a long period when Windows could do it and Macs couldn't.
[And in 1995, I saw a few thousand Macs go right into the dumpster for exactly that reason -- no VB-like RAD tools.]
Unfortunately I posted already and can't mod, but I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head.
Someone else said that Microsoft is a marketing company. While trivially true, MS is really a Developer Tools Marketing Company -- With a couple exceptions, they've never really tried to sell anything to the end user. They provide pretty mediocre packaging and let the applications sell the platform.
Apple, on the other hand, is a consumer marketing company. Karma be damned, they aren't really technically innovative any more. What they excel at is the packaging and integration, and producing an end product that's superior Out-Of-Box for their target market of home and graphics users.
Which is great if you are in those markets, but if you aren't, then Apple tends to be a non-factor.
Apple systems had decent visual WYSIWIG word processing in the mid 80's already... MacWrite easily kicked their asses long before any of those even existed
MacWrite was really a demo program. The state of the art WYSIWIG word processor on those mid-80s Apple systems was Microsoft Word.
Was WinWord innovative? Only in that it was a clone of the innovative Mac Word program, which itself was a clone of Xerox WYSIWIG word processors. Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox PARC to lead up this work -- they certainly were ahead of the industry as a whole.
This is probably somewhat true, but IBM still is involved with Microsoft in the server space and no doubt does a ton of MS-related business in consulting/services.
(A story on NPR implied that IBM Services would use the $75M of licences to sell Longhorn deployments.)
It's probably more correct to say that OS X has a Unix rather than is a Unix. Most of the nice things that would cause you to purchase a Macintosh have absolutely nothing to do with Unix (an Open API specification).
If you are looking for sh and Apache and MS Office, Mac's the way to go. If you really want a Unix, probably look for a vendor that considers Unix their #1 priority.
The problem is Microsoft just calculates how much they expect to pay in fines etc. each year, and simply work it into their operating costs and into their pricing.
This is ridiclous. We're talking about things that happened more than 10 years ago -- Microsoft surely believed that they either (A) weren't doing anything wrong, or (B) would get away with it scott-free. I highly doubt there was any anti-trust cost-benefit analysis done. (Although IBM may have done one with their weak packaging of OS/2.)
No, the knife went in pre-1.0, when IBM decided to build a 80286-based OS for mainframe customers and pretended that it would be a replacement for DOS/Windows.
Still, regardless of the numerous problems with OS/2 and it's marketing, Microsoft's predatory OEM contracts were an undeniable fact, and IBM deserves their piece. (MS signed their first consent decree in 1994.)
True, it is expensive to run, but as pointed out below, Lucas only contributes a small % of the operating budget. Plus, the land was carved out and sold to Lucas, more or less.
I agree that Presidio National Park is a great thing, and has been planned as a matter of law since the 1970s.
But the fact is that, contrary to Base Closing and National Park policy, the Gingrich Congress refused to fund the necessary reconstruction and preservation. Regardless of how you define pork, what matters is how they define it. (Even though the park is much cheaper to operate than the military base was.)
Pelosi and Feinstein (who's home overlooks the park) cut a deal where the park would be funded by commercial development. Pelosi (who wins 90% of the vote) sold this comprimise to local constituents by spinning it as a defeat of the evil GOP. Politically, it was win-win-win: San Franciscans got most of their park, the political machine's development and booster buddies got a piece, and GOPers in middle America got a nice place to visit. What got screwed in the process was local property taxes and the public's right not to have their property given away to George Lucas.
Nope, when I picked this UID, Nutscrape 4 had 20% marketshare and was still required for most projects. Someday I'll get around to picking a new product to hate on.
But feel free to make an argument if you have one.
Yeah, and we've been hearing this since the yonder days of "Push Technology" (when RDF/RSS first appeared, BTW).
Which is not to say that RSS doesn't have some interesting applications, but realistically it's about 0.1% of something like a document management system.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no argument against the tech, and I use it myself.
However, Apple priced it out of the general peripheral market, dooming it to the DV niche. Even for harddrives, most general users would be better off with USB2 for reasons of compatibility and cost, leaving Firewire to the low-end RAID niche.
I don't think so. I just checked Dell, and even the high-end Dimensions only have 1394 as an optional add-on. I've never seen a business PC with Firewire.
Unfortunately, the current situation is that Firewire is basically a non-feature unless one is doing DV editing. However, it's not too late -- if Intel could build it into their chipsets without paying a licence fee, FW would be immediately become nearly universal.
From the sounds of it, the BluRay people are taking PC applications seriously. A 200GB disk would be very desirable as a consumer backup medium.
Unfortunately, Apple restricted the use of the "Firewire" brand name in the early days, so most PC implementations were forced to use the unsexy "IEEE1394" moniker.
However, the real reason USB2 was victorious is because it is free technology while Firewire still requires some sort of licensing fee. Hopefully now that Apple and Intel are in bed, they can come to some sort of agreement and 1394 will become a standard PC chipset feature.
> Back in the "classic" MacOS, you could print a file by dragging its icon into the printer icon
Not in the early days. The whole Mac "desktop printer" UI was actually borrowed from OS/2.
Well that's the key right there .... The G5 had decent FPU and Altivec of course, but the Integer ("mainstream") performance was never competitive.
I pull my laptop in and out of a docking station all the time, so I'll dispute your 99/100 figure. (Even though I suspect my dock is just a 'dumb' port extender, not all of them are.)
Nope, I used it. It was much more minimal than VB (think it was largely used in .edu) and lacked things like database drivers.
No, the interface lawsuits were largely thrown out because Apple and Microsoft had a contract licencing MacOS tech.
Microsoft learned the internals of the Mac OS( APIs etc ) and started on Microsoft Windows
That's true, MS licenced the MacOS API from Apple, and then turned around licenced the Windows API to IBM for use in OS/2 PM (Although IBM changed a bunch of stuff). They also licenced stuff to X/Open Motif for Unix use.
But you entirely missed my last sentance -- MS was hiring from Xerox and knew as much about GUI application software as anyone, including Apple.
I will certainly give credit to the NeXT tools, but these weren't really widely available until fairly recently. (And still aren't, as Apple killed the Win32 and Unix versions.)
RealBasic, on the other hand, is a straight clone of Microsoft Visual Basic (which itself certainly borrowed ideas from NeXT and SmallTalk.) Maybe your point is "Macs can do it too!", but there certainly was a long period when Windows could do it and Macs couldn't.
[And in 1995, I saw a few thousand Macs go right into the dumpster for exactly that reason -- no VB-like RAD tools.]
Unfortunately I posted already and can't mod, but I think you've hit the nail exactly on the head.
Someone else said that Microsoft is a marketing company. While trivially true, MS is really a Developer Tools Marketing Company -- With a couple exceptions, they've never really tried to sell anything to the end user. They provide pretty mediocre packaging and let the applications sell the platform.
Apple, on the other hand, is a consumer marketing company. Karma be damned, they aren't really technically innovative any more. What they excel at is the packaging and integration, and producing an end product that's superior Out-Of-Box for their target market of home and graphics users.
Which is great if you are in those markets, but if you aren't, then Apple tends to be a non-factor.
Apple systems had decent visual WYSIWIG word processing in the mid 80's already ... MacWrite easily kicked their asses long before any of those even existed
MacWrite was really a demo program. The state of the art WYSIWIG word processor on those mid-80s Apple systems was Microsoft Word.
Was WinWord innovative? Only in that it was a clone of the innovative Mac Word program, which itself was a clone of Xerox WYSIWIG word processors. Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox PARC to lead up this work -- they certainly were ahead of the industry as a whole.
BASIC is still with us as well. And?
Not really. BASIC is now Java with different keywords, while C is still pretty much C.
This is probably somewhat true, but IBM still is involved with Microsoft in the server space and no doubt does a ton of MS-related business in consulting/services.
(A story on NPR implied that IBM Services would use the $75M of licences to sell Longhorn deployments.)
Windows 2.0 and OS/2 1.0 were released within a month or two of each other. OS/2 PM came some years later.
It's probably more correct to say that OS X has a Unix rather than is a Unix. Most of the nice things that would cause you to purchase a Macintosh have absolutely nothing to do with Unix (an Open API specification).
If you are looking for sh and Apache and MS Office, Mac's the way to go. If you really want a Unix, probably look for a vendor that considers Unix their #1 priority.
Why would IBM do anything to enhance OS/2? They make good money selling expensive migrations.
The problem is Microsoft just calculates how much they expect to pay in fines etc. each year, and simply work it into their operating costs and into their pricing.
This is ridiclous. We're talking about things that happened more than 10 years ago -- Microsoft surely believed that they either (A) weren't doing anything wrong, or (B) would get away with it scott-free. I highly doubt there was any anti-trust cost-benefit analysis done. (Although IBM may have done one with their weak packaging of OS/2.)
No, the knife went in pre-1.0, when IBM decided to build a 80286-based OS for mainframe customers and pretended that it would be a replacement for DOS/Windows.
Still, regardless of the numerous problems with OS/2 and it's marketing, Microsoft's predatory OEM contracts were an undeniable fact, and IBM deserves their piece. (MS signed their first consent decree in 1994.)
and report it to the authorities if it didn't stop. That is a threat?
Yes, that is a threat. By definition.
English. Learn it, love it.
True, it is expensive to run, but as pointed out below, Lucas only contributes a small % of the operating budget. Plus, the land was carved out and sold to Lucas, more or less.
I agree that Presidio National Park is a great thing, and has been planned as a matter of law since the 1970s.
But the fact is that, contrary to Base Closing and National Park policy, the Gingrich Congress refused to fund the necessary reconstruction and preservation. Regardless of how you define pork, what matters is how they define it. (Even though the park is much cheaper to operate than the military base was.)
Pelosi and Feinstein (who's home overlooks the park) cut a deal where the park would be funded by commercial development. Pelosi (who wins 90% of the vote) sold this comprimise to local constituents by spinning it as a defeat of the evil GOP. Politically, it was win-win-win: San Franciscans got most of their park, the political machine's development and booster buddies got a piece, and GOPers in middle America got a nice place to visit. What got screwed in the process was local property taxes and the public's right not to have their property given away to George Lucas.
Nope, when I picked this UID, Nutscrape 4 had 20% marketshare and was still required for most projects. Someday I'll get around to picking a new product to hate on.
But feel free to make an argument if you have one.
Yeah, and we've been hearing this since the yonder days of "Push Technology" (when RDF/RSS first appeared, BTW).
Which is not to say that RSS doesn't have some interesting applications, but realistically it's about 0.1% of something like a document management system.