If you look at Adobe's financials, their PDF and "enterprise intelligent document" products are a larger piece of the pie than their traditional creative products like Photoshop (excluding macromedia of course -- http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/ 10Q_Q1FY05.pdf page 18.)
This is a pretty much Windows-only business where the customers are government and large corporations. Not exactly Apple's cup-of-tea, and probably would be a huge distraction to Apple. It would make some sense for Microsoft though.
Furthermore, even the creative products are well enough established on Windows that it's doubtful that Apple could afford to make them Mac-only. That would put Apple in the position of being a major Windows ISV.
It is not a huge leap to take Flash and see developers using it to crank out low-end RAD/inhouse apps much like people did with VisualBasic in the olden days. Of the compeititon out there, Flash is the one with a real userbase that could pose a threat.
The issue with.NET/XAML/Avalon is that it's targetted at Java and has much higher sophistication level. So there is also a risk that MS loses the low-end entry-level developers. Plus Flash is portable, small, and fast.
So, to put it simply, Microsoft had no reason to buy Macromedia.
Paranoia and eliminating or neutering compeitition are reasons. Your post made the point that Macromedia really does go toe-to-toe with MS for web development.
Fortunately for Microsoft, Macromedia never made a full-fledged developer tools push and Adobe is even less likely to do so.
Dvorak was a huge Mac fan who became disheartened with how incompetantly Apple was being run in the 1990s. I think he was trying to speak for the silent majority of Apple users, many of whom did abandon the platform in that time period. Unfortunately, like today, the Mac magazines were sold to the fanboy market that rejected any form of dissent. Now that Apple has revitalized itself, the Mac Dvorak-haters should acknowledge that he was largely correct in his analyses.
Just as a historical point, Apple took an astoundingly long time to respond to Win95. In late 1995, the only way to get your Mac on the Internet was to warez a copy of MacTCP (academic only software), and then use this really crappy FreePPP thing. Apple finally got around to shipping OpenTransport, but it was just horrifically buggy in the beginning.
Win95 was the most hyped thing in computer industry history, and Apple's management was so screwed up at the time they just ignored it (other than the snarky Win95=Mac84 bumper stickers).
Yes they did, in big letters right on the homepage. However, on further digging it turned out that most of it was stub-implementations, or read-only, or just broken.
I wouldn't let my experience with v6 affect an evaluation of v8* -- just pointing out that the perception in the Opera community that the sites are broken can differ greatly from reality.
* only half-true. I don't spend time coding/testing for Opera, and until someone asks me to, I probably won't.
I tested a webapp against Opera 6. While the Opera site advertised great standards-compliance, the fact was that their Javascript DOM was totally broken to the point where it was impossible to do any sort of DHTML.
The Opera people have always been saying "Opera is standards complaint, it must be your site" since the beginning of time. I expect v8 is superior in this regard, but after years of lying about the matter, it's hard to believe this claim on it's face.
Having Nazis is 1000x more interesting than Generic Star Trek Butthead Alien of the Week. (Which unfortunately Storm Front had also.)
Why Nazis? Because Star Trek is SUPPOSED to be pulp action-oriented science fiction. Having a totally silly time-travel episode was a very fitting end to that overbearing and incoherant "temporal cold war" plot arc. Get back to the roots.
Withholding the Win32 programming interface from competitors as long as possible prior to the launch of Windows 95
One could write Win32 programs for Windows NT for 2 years before Win95 shipped, and many third parties did. And their programs ran on Win95 with only minor tweaking.
Office 95 was a very small refresh of the previously released Office 4.2 for NT. I think it contained a net total of 2 new features. Furthermore, WordPerfect had a 32 bit product on the market within a few months. In conclusion, it seems like you made this one up.
Your argument is basically "Linux distros are safe because all of your applicaitons come from a single vendor you can trust".
Which is accurate, but doesn't mean that Unix permissions address the Windows/Mac reality where software comes from different vendors an not all those vendors have the same trust level. The canonical example is installing some random freeware like Kazaa and then finding that the installation program has installed a nasty browser plugin.
An ideal "Personal Computer"-oriented security system wouldn't have this problem. Unfortunately all modern PC OSes (including Linux) come with a security model which was designed back in the Managed Multiuser Minicomputer days of the 1970s.
Furthermore, COM/ActiveX is a core Windows OS technology which makes it a lot more "standard" than Mozilla plugins or XPI (aka Mozilla's clone of ActiveX).
Fonts have a whole bunch of bizarre rules covering the intellectual property involved with them,
Bizarre rules, but not as bizarre as "The Font maker has copyright rights over your book because you used their font". Whis is basically the 'bizarre' GPL argument here. If Adobe or Bitstream claimed this, they would be laughed at by the publishing industry.
I think the main issue is that the Free Software faction has convinced themselves that "Derived Works" is much more extensive than it actually is, and that leads to all sorts of ridiclous conclusions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that for high-end motherboards, you can't just pricewatch random power supply and RAM. You need to be very careful to select components that are fully compatibile, and this stuff comes at a premimum.
If the poster is serious about building this box, I would recommend he ask over at Ars Technica or some other board where people have detailed knowledge of these highend motherboards.
My datapoint is that a couple years ago I looked into building a dual Xeon, and ended up finding a complete system on Dell Outlet for only a couple hundred dollars more than the parts cost.
At least we have someone admitting to prejudicial moderation. Unfortunately, it's a blatent violation of the moderation guidelines to mod someone down because they scored some points against your favorite platform.
The issue with your position is that slashdot has always been a site dedicated to cross-platform comparison and compeitition. Nobody agrees on anything here (except that we all hate Windows ME). So you are always going to see the Apple Fanboys arguing with the Anti-Apple Fanboys arguing with the pragmatists. It's the nature of the place.
Furthermore it's the Apple advocates that tend to provoke (or "troll") reactions here by making blanket statements, mindlessly repeating Apple marketing propganda, and spreading really poor FUD. Sadly that's the stuff that gets moderated up on apple.slashdot.org, while the responses tend to become "overrated."
I would suggest that if you only want unified agreement that Macs are the best, that you get off Slashdot and go to a MacNN.com or some other Mac zealot place..
It's akin to a black person discussing being Asian
Unfortunately for this silly "P.C." argument, anyone with $500 can become a computing negro (ie, a Mac user) and offer legitimate opinions about the strenghts and weaknesses of the thing. In general, I think it's the Mac fanboys here that lack experience with and knowledge of Windows XP and Linux and not visa-versa.
These EE boxes are only so expensive so that Intel can rape the early adopter hotrod crowd.
When mainstream Dual-Core P4s hit, they won't be that much more expensive than regular P4s. As a longtime smp user, I certainly think it will be worth the extra $50-$100 to get one of these systems.
BitMovers' Linux repository is an ASP -- And I suppose this complicates the legal situation somewhat because McVoy was really offering a service agreement rather than a software licence.
It's one thing to reverse engineer YOUR Microsoft SMB server that you legally licenced, it's quite another to use BitMovers' servers outside of what was agreed to (or even access them at all without an agreement).
[Note that I have no idea what Tridge did or did not do.]
I agree 100% -- Apple's implementation of these technologies will assuredly be far superior for the end user. Microsoft treated this stuff as nothing more than faceless developer components.
But the fact is that those signs appeared at the Apple developer conference, and were aimed at developers. So pointing out technology is relevant to this discussion. It's one thing to tell end users that Tiger is ahead of Windows in UI functionality (true), quite another to get up and do what Jobs did and tell developers that unsandboxed javascript apps and content indexing puts Tiger ahead of Windows (false).
(BTW, HTAs/unsandboxed javascript/ActiveDesktop was the most retarded thing Microsoft ever did security-wise, and a primary source of virus/spyware infection. I hope to god that Apple really was aware that MS did it first so they don't make the same mistakes.)
----------
As for desk accessories, the cool part about Dashboard is the translucent launcher, not the calculator the rest of the old hat applets. Much like the Apple Menu, I could see using this thing as my primary UI to launch Safari and Word and ignoring the DAs.
Apple made a lot of noise about their 64-bit "personal computer" hardware, including falsely claiming that the G5 was the first. Sad that claim turned out to be 99.999% marketing hot air.
I'm biting my tongue to not bring up the 640K quote, but the fact is that the mainstream PC market is going 64-bit in 2006 with or without Apple.
Well, Index Server worked well enough, but it was packaged as a developer component rather than an end user feature to sell a retail OS. Although the fact that you would compared either Index Server or Spotlight to 'locate' just shows you don't really know of what you speak.
Under System 6 and earlier, the term "Desk Accessory" described a particular hack for a non-multitasking OS. With System 7, DAs were just small applications. I guess you could say that Dashboard is a snazzy replacement for the Apple Menu UI under the old OS, but it's not like Apple invented calculator and clock applets.
XHTML/Javascript bindings to local objects is a straight copy of MS's "HTA" and ActiveX technology. MS even had a Calculator HTA as an example, but it was rather ugly and not all sexy, rounded and orange.
all UI code benefits from *not* being 64bit, but if you want 64bit pointers, you have to spawn a separate process for them.
Your analysis convienently ignores that 99.999% of Mac applications do not spawn a seperate process for the UI. Plus, it's most likely not reasonable to do so because the apps were designed as *Mac* apps and not "the unix way".
I think most users who need more than 4GB of application data could live with a sightly slower UI, so this all seems more like an justification than a reason. Wouldn't suprise me a bit if 10.5 had 64-bit UI code.
Spotlight (clone of MS Index Server, 1998) Dashboard (clone of MS ActiveDesktop, 1997)
Maybe they ment "Introducing NT4.0 Option Pack" instead:)
Of course, the Apple versions have a much prettier and very likely more user-friendly implementation.
The big "We'll always be one step ahead" from Apple is a central part of their "Preaching to the Converted" marketing, but that doesn't mean it's always true. But it's very important that Mac users believe it to be true, or they may be tempted by the latest $350 Dell.
ever hear of Wine? As soon as Wine gets DCOM working correctly and Installshield working right, it won't matter to Joe User if the OS is Linux or Windows, just so long as he can install TurboTax and Doom3.
Yes, Wine is completely essential to Linux ever becoming a replacement for Windows. But I see no serious effort to really integrate Wine into Linux distributions and get it working as transparently as possible. You need to buy some third party package, install it, and then hope it supports whatever program you want to run.
The problem with Wine (besides being "almost there" forever as the AC said) is that they are still fighting with specific namebrand shrinkwrapped warez like "TurboTax and Doom3".
What about the tens of millions anonymous windows applications used in the corporate world? All those wierd internal/vertical applications are the cornerstone of what keeps users on Windows. Until one can just double-click and go with 99% of all Windows programs, corporate Linux conversion is going to be a very expensive exercise in pain.
If you look at for example the server market, or the governments sector, linux is already beating up windows.
And did you look? According to IDC, Windows has a larger server marketshare than Linux, and that trend will continue with Windows dominating 60% of the market by 2008.
Even if the numbers are arguable, the idea that Linux "beats up" the server market is nothing more than a little fib the Linux advocates tell themselves to feel better. MS is doing quite well on servers.
Linux has done very very well in traditional Unix segments (webhosting, Oracle, financial systems). But I haven't seen any serious penetration of Linux into file&print, groupware, and internal app servers, and don't expect MS is too worried about their core server markets.
A number of people were convicted and jailed for illegally manipulating the CA power market. Not to mention that one of the main compaines involves was involved in massive accounting and securities fraud. None of that makes up for the billions lost by taxpayers and businesses.
It take a very particular sort of freemarket hardliner to look at a situation where crooks were blatently breaking the rules, and come to the conclusion that less regulation was needed.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at Adobe's financials, their PDF and "enterprise intelligent document" products are a larger piece of the pie than their traditional creative products like Photoshop (excluding macromedia of course -- http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/ 10Q_Q1FY05.pdf page 18.)
This is a pretty much Windows-only business where the customers are government and large corporations. Not exactly Apple's cup-of-tea, and probably would be a huge distraction to Apple. It would make some sense for Microsoft though.
Furthermore, even the creative products are well enough established on Windows that it's doubtful that Apple could afford to make them Mac-only. That would put Apple in the position of being a major Windows ISV.
It is not a huge leap to take Flash and see developers using it to crank out low-end RAD/inhouse apps much like people did with VisualBasic in the olden days. Of the compeititon out there, Flash is the one with a real userbase that could pose a threat.
.NET/XAML/Avalon is that it's targetted at Java and has much higher sophistication level. So there is also a risk that MS loses the low-end entry-level developers. Plus Flash is portable, small, and fast.
The issue with
So, to put it simply, Microsoft had no reason to buy Macromedia.
Paranoia and eliminating or neutering compeitition are reasons. Your post made the point that Macromedia really does go toe-to-toe with MS for web development.
Fortunately for Microsoft, Macromedia never made a full-fledged developer tools push and Adobe is even less likely to do so.
Dvorak was a huge Mac fan who became disheartened with how incompetantly Apple was being run in the 1990s. I think he was trying to speak for the silent majority of Apple users, many of whom did abandon the platform in that time period. Unfortunately, like today, the Mac magazines were sold to the fanboy market that rejected any form of dissent. Now that Apple has revitalized itself, the Mac Dvorak-haters should acknowledge that he was largely correct in his analyses.
Just as a historical point, Apple took an astoundingly long time to respond to Win95. In late 1995, the only way to get your Mac on the Internet was to warez a copy of MacTCP (academic only software), and then use this really crappy FreePPP thing. Apple finally got around to shipping OpenTransport, but it was just horrifically buggy in the beginning.
Win95 was the most hyped thing in computer industry history, and Apple's management was so screwed up at the time they just ignored it (other than the snarky Win95=Mac84 bumper stickers).
Yes they did, in big letters right on the homepage. However, on further digging it turned out that most of it was stub-implementations, or read-only, or just broken.
I wouldn't let my experience with v6 affect an evaluation of v8* -- just pointing out that the perception in the Opera community that the sites are broken can differ greatly from reality.
* only half-true. I don't spend time coding/testing for Opera, and until someone asks me to, I probably won't.
I tested a webapp against Opera 6. While the Opera site advertised great standards-compliance, the fact was that their Javascript DOM was totally broken to the point where it was impossible to do any sort of DHTML.
The Opera people have always been saying "Opera is standards complaint, it must be your site" since the beginning of time. I expect v8 is superior in this regard, but after years of lying about the matter, it's hard to believe this claim on it's face.
Having Nazis is 1000x more interesting than Generic Star Trek Butthead Alien of the Week. (Which unfortunately Storm Front had also.)
Why Nazis? Because Star Trek is SUPPOSED to be pulp action-oriented science fiction. Having a totally silly time-travel episode was a very fitting end to that overbearing and incoherant "temporal cold war" plot arc. Get back to the roots.
Withholding the Win32 programming interface from competitors as long as possible prior to the launch of Windows 95
One could write Win32 programs for Windows NT for 2 years before Win95 shipped, and many third parties did. And their programs ran on Win95 with only minor tweaking.
Office 95 was a very small refresh of the previously released Office 4.2 for NT. I think it contained a net total of 2 new features. Furthermore, WordPerfect had a 32 bit product on the market within a few months. In conclusion, it seems like you made this one up.
Your argument is basically "Linux distros are safe because all of your applicaitons come from a single vendor you can trust".
Which is accurate, but doesn't mean that Unix permissions address the Windows/Mac reality where software comes from different vendors an not all those vendors have the same trust level. The canonical example is installing some random freeware like Kazaa and then finding that the installation program has installed a nasty browser plugin.
An ideal "Personal Computer"-oriented security system wouldn't have this problem. Unfortunately all modern PC OSes (including Linux) come with a security model which was designed back in the Managed Multiuser Minicomputer days of the 1970s.
> something that isn't a standard, will never be a standard and would be completely undesirable as a standard
I don't really want to get into this argument, but ActiveX is actually a documented standard.
Furthermore, COM/ActiveX is a core Windows OS technology which makes it a lot more "standard" than Mozilla plugins or XPI (aka Mozilla's clone of ActiveX).
Fonts have a whole bunch of bizarre rules covering the intellectual property involved with them,
Bizarre rules, but not as bizarre as "The Font maker has copyright rights over your book because you used their font". Whis is basically the 'bizarre' GPL argument here. If Adobe or Bitstream claimed this, they would be laughed at by the publishing industry.
I think the main issue is that the Free Software faction has convinced themselves that "Derived Works" is much more extensive than it actually is, and that leads to all sorts of ridiclous conclusions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that for high-end motherboards, you can't just pricewatch random power supply and RAM. You need to be very careful to select components that are fully compatibile, and this stuff comes at a premimum.
If the poster is serious about building this box, I would recommend he ask over at Ars Technica or some other board where people have detailed knowledge of these highend motherboards.
My datapoint is that a couple years ago I looked into building a dual Xeon, and ended up finding a complete system on Dell Outlet for only a couple hundred dollars more than the parts cost.
At least we have someone admitting to prejudicial moderation. Unfortunately, it's a blatent violation of the moderation guidelines to mod someone down because they scored some points against your favorite platform.
The issue with your position is that slashdot has always been a site dedicated to cross-platform comparison and compeitition. Nobody agrees on anything here (except that we all hate Windows ME). So you are always going to see the Apple Fanboys arguing with the Anti-Apple Fanboys arguing with the pragmatists. It's the nature of the place.
Furthermore it's the Apple advocates that tend to provoke (or "troll") reactions here by making blanket statements, mindlessly repeating Apple marketing propganda, and spreading really poor FUD. Sadly that's the stuff that gets moderated up on apple.slashdot.org, while the responses tend to become "overrated."
I would suggest that if you only want unified agreement that Macs are the best, that you get off Slashdot and go to a MacNN.com or some other Mac zealot place..
It's akin to a black person discussing being Asian
Unfortunately for this silly "P.C." argument, anyone with $500 can become a computing negro (ie, a Mac user) and offer legitimate opinions about the strenghts and weaknesses of the thing. In general, I think it's the Mac fanboys here that lack experience with and knowledge of Windows XP and Linux and not visa-versa.
So it's worth buying an insanely expensive CPU...
These EE boxes are only so expensive so that Intel can rape the early adopter hotrod crowd.
When mainstream Dual-Core P4s hit, they won't be that much more expensive than regular P4s. As a longtime smp user, I certainly think it will be worth the extra $50-$100 to get one of these systems.
BitMovers' Linux repository is an ASP -- And I suppose this complicates the legal situation somewhat because McVoy was really offering a service agreement rather than a software licence.
It's one thing to reverse engineer YOUR Microsoft SMB server that you legally licenced, it's quite another to use BitMovers' servers outside of what was agreed to (or even access them at all without an agreement).
[Note that I have no idea what Tridge did or did not do.]
I agree 100% -- Apple's implementation of these technologies will assuredly be far superior for the end user. Microsoft treated this stuff as nothing more than faceless developer components.
But the fact is that those signs appeared at the Apple developer conference, and were aimed at developers. So pointing out technology is relevant to this discussion. It's one thing to tell end users that Tiger is ahead of Windows in UI functionality (true), quite another to get up and do what Jobs did and tell developers that unsandboxed javascript apps and content indexing puts Tiger ahead of Windows (false).
(BTW, HTAs/unsandboxed javascript/ActiveDesktop was the most retarded thing Microsoft ever did security-wise, and a primary source of virus/spyware infection. I hope to god that Apple really was aware that MS did it first so they don't make the same mistakes.)
----------
As for desk accessories, the cool part about Dashboard is the translucent launcher, not the calculator the rest of the old hat applets. Much like the Apple Menu, I could see using this thing as my primary UI to launch Safari and Word and ignoring the DAs.
Apple made a lot of noise about their 64-bit "personal computer" hardware, including falsely claiming that the G5 was the first. Sad that claim turned out to be 99.999% marketing hot air.
I'm biting my tongue to not bring up the 640K quote, but the fact is that the mainstream PC market is going 64-bit in 2006 with or without Apple.
Well, Index Server worked well enough, but it was packaged as a developer component rather than an end user feature to sell a retail OS. Although the fact that you would compared either Index Server or Spotlight to 'locate' just shows you don't really know of what you speak.
Under System 6 and earlier, the term "Desk Accessory" described a particular hack for a non-multitasking OS. With System 7, DAs were just small applications. I guess you could say that Dashboard is a snazzy replacement for the Apple Menu UI under the old OS, but it's not like Apple invented calculator and clock applets.
XHTML/Javascript bindings to local objects is a straight copy of MS's "HTA" and ActiveX technology. MS even had a Calculator HTA as an example, but it was rather ugly and not all sexy, rounded and orange.
all UI code benefits from *not* being 64bit, but if you want 64bit pointers, you have to spawn a separate process for them.
Your analysis convienently ignores that 99.999% of Mac applications do not spawn a seperate process for the UI. Plus, it's most likely not reasonable to do so because the apps were designed as *Mac* apps and not "the unix way".
I think most users who need more than 4GB of application data could live with a sightly slower UI, so this all seems more like an justification than a reason. Wouldn't suprise me a bit if 10.5 had 64-bit UI code.
And what did Apple introduce?
:)
Spotlight (clone of MS Index Server, 1998)
Dashboard (clone of MS ActiveDesktop, 1997)
Maybe they ment "Introducing NT4.0 Option Pack" instead
Of course, the Apple versions have a much prettier and very likely more user-friendly implementation.
The big "We'll always be one step ahead" from Apple is a central part of their "Preaching to the Converted" marketing, but that doesn't mean it's always true. But it's very important that Mac users believe it to be true, or they may be tempted by the latest $350 Dell.
No modern motherboards put (S)ATA on PCI -- they are directly connected to the northbridge. In most cases the sound and network bypasses PCI too.
However, even though these devices aren't limited by the PCI bus, they still emulate PCI devices for the OS. That's why they show up with lspci.
ever hear of Wine? As soon as Wine gets DCOM working correctly and Installshield working right, it won't matter to Joe User if the OS is Linux or Windows, just so long as he can install TurboTax and Doom3.
Yes, Wine is completely essential to Linux ever becoming a replacement for Windows. But I see no serious effort to really integrate Wine into Linux distributions and get it working as transparently as possible. You need to buy some third party package, install it, and then hope it supports whatever program you want to run.
The problem with Wine (besides being "almost there" forever as the AC said) is that they are still fighting with specific namebrand shrinkwrapped warez like "TurboTax and Doom3".
What about the tens of millions anonymous windows applications used in the corporate world? All those wierd internal/vertical applications are the cornerstone of what keeps users on Windows. Until one can just double-click and go with 99% of all Windows programs, corporate Linux conversion is going to be a very expensive exercise in pain.
If you look at for example the server market, or the governments sector, linux is already beating up windows.
And did you look? According to IDC, Windows has a larger server marketshare than Linux, and that trend will continue with Windows dominating 60% of the market by 2008.
Even if the numbers are arguable, the idea that Linux "beats up" the server market is nothing more than a little fib the Linux advocates tell themselves to feel better. MS is doing quite well on servers.
Linux has done very very well in traditional Unix segments (webhosting, Oracle, financial systems). But I haven't seen any serious penetration of Linux into file&print, groupware, and internal app servers, and don't expect MS is too worried about their core server markets.
A number of people were convicted and jailed for illegally manipulating the CA power market. Not to mention that one of the main compaines involves was involved in massive accounting and securities fraud. None of that makes up for the billions lost by taxpayers and businesses.
It take a very particular sort of freemarket hardliner to look at a situation where crooks were blatently breaking the rules, and come to the conclusion that less regulation was needed.