Flamebait -- The Netcraft data is related to the story on domain speculation.
Netcraft's methodology is to count by host name, not by sever. Therefore, a squatter who has 100 domain names pointed at a single "Buy This Domain" page counts a 100 times in the survey. Due to the popularity of Apache at ISPs and and other hosting environments, this grossly inflates the apparent popularity of Apache in the survey. As small time or 'unused' domains disappear, you should see the Apache continue to decline.
(After I typed all of that, I actually read the Netcraft report: The drop has had particularly evident impact this month at the popular registrar register.com, which has seen the number of registered but unused sites parked at futuresite.register.com drop by 300k, accounting for the drop in Apache numbers this month.)
Let me clarify - these were corporate machines (PC300 and ThinkPad) that shipped with the full version of OS/2 (with Win-OS2) and a seperate install of Windows 3.11 and IBM DOS.
The OS/2 customers (real, live MIS people, not Teamers) were unhappy with this (according to the IBM rep) because it meant there was many megabytes of duplicate Windows code and utilites that they had to delete. They might have like OS/2 but not the extra work, or the free opportunity for thier users to buck using their standard OS.
It was an interesting experiement, especially because OS/2 was the default boot, and you could only get to DOS with a commandline utility (and even finding the command prompt icon and the reboot command was non-obvious in OS/2's jumbled UI).
But ultimately, whatever the (arguable IMHO) merits of WinOS2, the dualboot config was big clusterfuck because the OS/2 install didn't include networking software and therefore was useless in a corporate setting.
Umm, wouldn't you say that the "broadcasters" (which more and more means "television networks" after the 96 telcom act) are big businesses with lots of money and big political payoffs? It's not like the telcoms are in an exclusive spot here (and a good portion of the existing PCS spectrum hasn't even been built out yet). The point is that $$$ + Regular Voters = Big Juice.
Chairman Powell might be "business friendly", but to which businesses? He's smart enough not to show his cards before the bets are all in. (Oh yeah, public policy... Turning off the analog system will be a huge pain in the ass for a very large portion of the population. I don't think the merits of this idea have been properly debated outside of the $5K TV club.)
As for # of channels. It's true that most people are happy with 20-30 'basic cable' level service. Now imagine you could get this with rabbit-ears, for free, at near DVD SD quality. It's possible with DTV, just as soon as we forget this pretty picture hi-def nonsense:)
Well, sure there's HD programming _now_ during the political beta test. The open issue is how long it will last, and ain't nobody 'informed' enough to tell you that.
But, my guess is Just Enough so that your local CBS affiliate can point at all 3 of you with a HD set and then replace HD CSI with another channel running CNN.
Post #2757651 sums it up best, but the fix looked to be in on the beginning. Which is personally fine with me, because I'd rather have more crap than better crap, and face it, CSI and one NCAA game is crap, and everything else you mentioned falls into the luxury category.
My question is are you some sort of TV astroturfer, or are you just feeling a little nervous about your "investment"?
Both pure Linux and dual-boot Linux/Windows machines from top-tier OEMs will start to appear in the marketplace...
Can anyone explain where the market demand for dual-boot OSes is?
I can see a small number of Slashdot MCSE-types that want to play around parttime in Linux but are too lazy to install it, but I can't see what good it will do in the real world. It would increase support costs and therefore the total price of the system, though.
The only argument is that it would be good for advocacy reasons, but, sorry, that does not cut it.
(As a datapoint, IBM shipped all of their corp machines dualboot OS/2 and Windows 3.1 for a while back in the day, and both the OS/2 and the Windows customers bitched to high heaven.)
On the other hand, we're already seeing pre-installed Linux for the corporate market, and that's only going to get bigger. You just need to be a big enough account that you have the right phone number over at Dell or whatever, but I'd bet that it will be come a mainstream OS choice shortly enough. But the last thing corporate MIS wants is their users choosing which OS to boot!
True, but there's still been a delay in getting the sets out while they diddled around defining a DRM spec for the firewire cables. That's something that people didn't anticipate even a few years ago.
Well, I would say that a very high quality picture is a good idea, but I agree that the economics are all wrong.
Cable and Satellite have demonstrated that people want more channels, and it will be tough arguing that 30 over-the-air channels is not in the public's and in the broadcasters' interest, despite the interest of those with $3000 TVs. And Americans in general will choose quantity over quality every time.
HD programming will be available, but my guess is that it will be sold as a luxury service, and even then subsidized in that it won't be priced proportionally to the bandwidth used.
Another thing - Analog TV will not go dark in 2006. The sets/converter boxes aren't being mass-marketed now and it's almost 2002. Your congressman will listen to the little old ladys on social security that worry about their TVs being turned off. I'd even be surprised if it goes dark by 2016.
My advice? Save your cash until the open question of whether HD will be mass-marketed is resolved. Unless you want to go all the way and build the cost-is-no-object dream system, and are willing to put up with scarce programming in the meanwhile.
BeOS was nice, but face it, there was no market for it as a general desktop OS, and as you point out, it was years away from being feature-comparable to Windows or MacOS.
The "focus shift" that killed Be was when they abandonded being a nitch "media OS" and thought they could take on Microsoft. Willful suicide or stupidity?
Ogg is a great format, I'm not sure how well it is for streaming but is sounds a hell of alot better at 128k than mp3 does.
Excuse me for being ignorant, but what's the "streaming" market like for > 56K?
I always thought that Real and WMA ruled this market (over MP3) because they at least sound like something for modem users. Either Real or Ogg would necessarily be broadband-only, no?
If [MS-DOS] was never pirated, it would never have become nearly as popular as it was.
What? MS-DOS was almost never pirated by users. 99.9% of PC users got it with their system and didn't think about it at all. MS-DOS wasn't even a retail product until v5. (Now it could be that cruddy low-level OEMs were using counterfit copies of DOS, but that has nothing to do with the end user.)
Besides your argument is faulty. If people weren't too cheap to buy a $50 copy of DOS, they would have gone out and legally purchased a $300 copy of OS/2? I think not. It's not like there was a 'free' Linux distribution as an alternative in those days.
You could make the real argument that MS Office spread partially due to MS turning a blindeye to piracy, but I don't think it holds up for DOS or Windows (a lossleader for Office in the early days).
In previous years, the percentages of computer users who actually were real computer users
"Real computer users"? Are you talking about people who overclock their AMD Durons and play 20 hours of counterstrike a day? Yeah, those guys are keepin it real.
I think what you are trying to say is that in the past, a greater % of PC users were business users that ran only business applications, and it's only recently that the PC has become a home entertainment device.
In my experience, it's totally believable that business piracy rates are much lower, primarily due to fear of being audited/ratted out.
As for home users, for the most part any software they might need is either free or less than $50. For most people it's easier to drop the change than dink around on P2P and IRC to save a couple b bucks.
Hey -- The Windows monopoly "won" back in 1993 or so. I think JL Gasse should have been smart enough to figure that out.
It's too bad about BeOS, but trying to market themselves as a general purpose desktop OS (the exact same market segment as Windows) was really fucking stupid. Whatever advantage Be had in that space was elimated by Moore's Law back in 1996 or so.
It they would have stuck to a veritcal nitch as a "media OS" (or started the embedded strategy sooner), they might have had a chance to survive.
As for Apple as being a general solution for "the masses" -- Apple itself won't let it happen. As demand for their systems goes up, Apple will choose higher profits over a larger marketshare, and raise it's prices. It's a great system, but the marketing is all high-profit elitism aimed at a specific 5-10% sector.
Are you talking about setting the DOCTYPE header? That seems to me like a perfectly good way to preserve backward compatibility. (Mozilla does the same thing.)
I have a suspicion that the quirky UI is partly a consequence of the cross-platform nature of the product
Correct. Notes actually predates Windows 3.0 and is from back when nobdody knew who would win: OS/2 PM or Macintosh. Consequentally, it's got some alien widgets.
Part of the problem too is that Lotus developers themselves would produce ugly apps with purple text on yellow backgrounds and terrible usability, and the user community copied them. Much of what the "UI Hall of Shame" is ragging on is not the core product but some misguided corporate developer's work. (Their counterargument is that the core product should prevent such stupidity.)
But, to be fair, I think the reason those Exchange servers only handle a fraction of the workload is that they are really being asked to do a lot more work behind the scenes
True that Exchange versus Sendmail is radically unfair. But if you want Apples To Apples, Exchange is significantly less scalable than Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise. Significantly Less users per server, less mail moved per hour, etc etc.
Now, I'm not saying that scalability concerns outweigh the pretty client. They probably don't.
But, Fact: Exchange is just not built for speed -- Look at the architecture diagram! There's about 2000 little boxes on there as old early 90s X.400 system was adapted for modern usage. It's an overly complex bloatpile that works only because MS has massive resources to make it work.
I never understood why the extra stuff (calendaring and file storage, mostly) was in the *mail client*
1) It solves a technological problem by allowing a mail-based workflow for meeting scheduling (which turns out to be a pretty complex process: invite-respond-reschedule-accept-etc).
2) It solves a lUser problem by putting everything in one place.
3) It solves a political problem by putting one sticker price on a broad range of functionality. Shared calendaring software has been around forever, but nobody bought or used it until it was tacked onto the mail client.
Man, I can't wait to find a ROM of the McDonald's game.
Yeah, I wonder if McDonald's has "the subject of speculation for many years by Atari collectors" and "one of the most sought-after Atari 2600 prototypes". The sad thing is that it probably is.
(Actually, I collect old 2600 games, and 90% of them are crap, which is sorta the fun part. McDonalds would have no doubt supass other Atari spam classics like Chase The Chuckwagon, Kool-Aid Man, and Tooth Protectors.)
My guess: the Windows Master Browser election is pretty fragile and you occasionally get Win95 boxes thinking they've "won" the election and fucking up everyone's network neighborhood. IPX basically gives the real MB 2 chances at winning.
There's a util in the reskit which lets you view the browser election process. Or just use policies and disable everyone's ability to participate in browser elections except the domain and wins boxes.
But since you didn't mention what the problems were specifically, that's all out of my ass.
It occurred to me, but I figured that any data feed would probably have to be a subscription service (since Taco has previously indicated that there will be more ads).
You remember the Mark Andreeson quote about "a loosely debugged collection of device drivers"? It's starting to sink in everywhere except Linux-land.
The fact is, from an IT perspective, the operating system is not the most important platform any more. It's only interesting as a $billions legacy business for Microsoft. Combine that with migration costs, and you can see why people are ho-humish about Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops -- Typo city -- I wan't accusing the parent of Flamebait, just questioning the original moderation.
Flamebait -- The Netcraft data is related to the story on domain speculation.
Netcraft's methodology is to count by host name, not by sever. Therefore, a squatter who has 100 domain names pointed at a single "Buy This Domain" page counts a 100 times in the survey. Due to the popularity of Apache at ISPs and and other hosting environments, this grossly inflates the apparent popularity of Apache in the survey. As small time or 'unused' domains disappear, you should see the Apache continue to decline.
(After I typed all of that, I actually read the Netcraft report: The drop has had particularly evident impact this month at the popular registrar register.com, which has seen the number of registered but unused sites parked at futuresite.register.com drop by 300k, accounting for the drop in Apache numbers this month.)
Speaking of which -- VA Research Buys linux.com for $5 Million
The funny thing is that Microsoft bid up the price just to help accelerate the eventual doom of our fav Linux community website company.
Macrovision is actually now legally required (by the DMCA, of course).
As the AC points out, you are correct.
Here it is from the horse's mouth on MSDN: Creating a UNIX Application Using the Win32 API
Let me clarify - these were corporate machines (PC300 and ThinkPad) that shipped with the full version of OS/2 (with Win-OS2) and a seperate install of Windows 3.11 and IBM DOS.
The OS/2 customers (real, live MIS people, not Teamers) were unhappy with this (according to the IBM rep) because it meant there was many megabytes of duplicate Windows code and utilites that they had to delete. They might have like OS/2 but not the extra work, or the free opportunity for thier users to buck using their standard OS.
It was an interesting experiement, especially because OS/2 was the default boot, and you could only get to DOS with a commandline utility (and even finding the command prompt icon and the reboot command was non-obvious in OS/2's jumbled UI).
But ultimately, whatever the (arguable IMHO) merits of WinOS2, the dualboot config was big clusterfuck because the OS/2 install didn't include networking software and therefore was useless in a corporate setting.
Umm, wouldn't you say that the "broadcasters" (which more and more means "television networks" after the 96 telcom act) are big businesses with lots of money and big political payoffs? It's not like the telcoms are in an exclusive spot here (and a good portion of the existing PCS spectrum hasn't even been built out yet). The point is that $$$ + Regular Voters = Big Juice.
... Turning off the analog system will be a huge pain in the ass for a very large portion of the population. I don't think the merits of this idea have been properly debated outside of the $5K TV club.)
:)
Chairman Powell might be "business friendly", but to which businesses? He's smart enough not to show his cards before the bets are all in. (Oh yeah, public policy
As for # of channels. It's true that most people are happy with 20-30 'basic cable' level service. Now imagine you could get this with rabbit-ears, for free, at near DVD SD quality. It's possible with DTV, just as soon as we forget this pretty picture hi-def nonsense
Well, sure there's HD programming _now_ during the political beta test. The open issue is how long it will last, and ain't nobody 'informed' enough to tell you that.
But, my guess is Just Enough so that your local CBS affiliate can point at all 3 of you with a HD set and then replace HD CSI with another channel running CNN.
Post #2757651 sums it up best, but the fix looked to be in on the beginning. Which is personally fine with me, because I'd rather have more crap than better crap, and face it, CSI and one NCAA game is crap, and everything else you mentioned falls into the luxury category.
My question is are you some sort of TV astroturfer, or are you just feeling a little nervous about your "investment"?
Both pure Linux and dual-boot Linux/Windows machines from top-tier OEMs will start to appear in the marketplace...
Can anyone explain where the market demand for dual-boot OSes is?
I can see a small number of Slashdot MCSE-types that want to play around parttime in Linux but are too lazy to install it, but I can't see what good it will do in the real world. It would increase support costs and therefore the total price of the system, though.
The only argument is that it would be good for advocacy reasons, but, sorry, that does not cut it.
(As a datapoint, IBM shipped all of their corp machines dualboot OS/2 and Windows 3.1 for a while back in the day, and both the OS/2 and the Windows customers bitched to high heaven.)
On the other hand, we're already seeing pre-installed Linux for the corporate market, and that's only going to get bigger. You just need to be a big enough account that you have the right phone number over at Dell or whatever, but I'd bet that it will be come a mainstream OS choice shortly enough. But the last thing corporate MIS wants is their users choosing which OS to boot!
True, but there's still been a delay in getting the sets out while they diddled around defining a DRM spec for the firewire cables. That's something that people didn't anticipate even a few years ago.
Well, I would say that a very high quality picture is a good idea, but I agree that the economics are all wrong.
Cable and Satellite have demonstrated that people want more channels, and it will be tough arguing that 30 over-the-air channels is not in the public's and in the broadcasters' interest, despite the interest of those with $3000 TVs. And Americans in general will choose quantity over quality every time.
HD programming will be available, but my guess is that it will be sold as a luxury service, and even then subsidized in that it won't be priced proportionally to the bandwidth used.
Another thing - Analog TV will not go dark in 2006. The sets/converter boxes aren't being mass-marketed now and it's almost 2002. Your congressman will listen to the little old ladys on social security that worry about their TVs being turned off. I'd even be surprised if it goes dark by 2016.
My advice? Save your cash until the open question of whether HD will be mass-marketed is resolved. Unless you want to go all the way and build the cost-is-no-object dream system, and are willing to put up with scarce programming in the meanwhile.
BeOS was nice, but face it, there was no market for it as a general desktop OS, and as you point out, it was years away from being feature-comparable to Windows or MacOS.
The "focus shift" that killed Be was when they abandonded being a nitch "media OS" and thought they could take on Microsoft. Willful suicide or stupidity?
Ogg is a great format, I'm not sure how well it is for streaming but is sounds a hell of alot better at 128k than mp3 does.
Excuse me for being ignorant, but what's the "streaming" market like for > 56K?
I always thought that Real and WMA ruled this market (over MP3) because they at least sound like something for modem users. Either Real or Ogg would necessarily be broadband-only, no?
If [MS-DOS] was never pirated, it would never have become nearly as popular as it was.
What? MS-DOS was almost never pirated by users. 99.9% of PC users got it with their system and didn't think about it at all. MS-DOS wasn't even a retail product until v5. (Now it could be that cruddy low-level OEMs were using counterfit copies of DOS, but that has nothing to do with the end user.)
Besides your argument is faulty. If people weren't too cheap to buy a $50 copy of DOS, they would have gone out and legally purchased a $300 copy of OS/2? I think not. It's not like there was a 'free' Linux distribution as an alternative in those days.
You could make the real argument that MS Office spread partially due to MS turning a blindeye to piracy, but I don't think it holds up for DOS or Windows (a lossleader for Office in the early days).
In previous years, the percentages of computer users who actually were real computer users
"Real computer users"? Are you talking about people who overclock their AMD Durons and play 20 hours of counterstrike a day? Yeah, those guys are keepin it real.
I think what you are trying to say is that in the past, a greater % of PC users were business users that ran only business applications, and it's only recently that the PC has become a home entertainment device.
In my experience, it's totally believable that business piracy rates are much lower, primarily due to fear of being audited/ratted out.
As for home users, for the most part any software they might need is either free or less than $50. For most people it's easier to drop the change than dink around on P2P and IRC to save a couple b bucks.
The Windows monopoly has -won-.
Hey -- The Windows monopoly "won" back in 1993 or so. I think JL Gasse should have been smart enough to figure that out.
It's too bad about BeOS, but trying to market themselves as a general purpose desktop OS (the exact same market segment as Windows) was really fucking stupid. Whatever advantage Be had in that space was elimated by Moore's Law back in 1996 or so.
It they would have stuck to a veritcal nitch as a "media OS" (or started the embedded strategy sooner), they might have had a chance to survive.
As for Apple as being a general solution for "the masses" -- Apple itself won't let it happen. As demand for their systems goes up, Apple will choose higher profits over a larger marketshare, and raise it's prices. It's a great system, but the marketing is all high-profit elitism aimed at a specific 5-10% sector.
Are you talking about setting the DOCTYPE header? That seems to me like a perfectly good way to preserve backward compatibility. (Mozilla does the same thing.)
I have a suspicion that the quirky UI is partly a consequence of the cross-platform nature of the product
Correct. Notes actually predates Windows 3.0 and is from back when nobdody knew who would win: OS/2 PM or Macintosh. Consequentally, it's got some alien widgets.
Part of the problem too is that Lotus developers themselves would produce ugly apps with purple text on yellow backgrounds and terrible usability, and the user community copied them. Much of what the "UI Hall of Shame" is ragging on is not the core product but some misguided corporate developer's work. (Their counterargument is that the core product should prevent such stupidity.)
But, to be fair, I think the reason those Exchange servers only handle a fraction of the workload is that they are really being asked to do a lot more work behind the scenes
True that Exchange versus Sendmail is radically unfair. But if you want Apples To Apples, Exchange is significantly less scalable than Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise. Significantly Less users per server, less mail moved per hour, etc etc.
Now, I'm not saying that scalability concerns outweigh the pretty client. They probably don't.
But, Fact: Exchange is just not built for speed -- Look at the architecture diagram! There's about 2000 little boxes on there as old early 90s X.400 system was adapted for modern usage. It's an overly complex bloatpile that works only because MS has massive resources to make it work.
I never understood why the extra stuff (calendaring and file storage, mostly) was in the *mail client*
1) It solves a technological problem by allowing a mail-based workflow for meeting scheduling (which turns out to be a pretty complex process: invite-respond-reschedule-accept-etc).
2) It solves a lUser problem by putting everything in one place.
3) It solves a political problem by putting one sticker price on a broad range of functionality. Shared calendaring software has been around forever, but nobody bought or used it until it was tacked onto the mail client.
Man, I can't wait to find a ROM of the McDonald's game.
Yeah, I wonder if McDonald's has "the subject of speculation for many years by Atari collectors" and "one of the most sought-after Atari 2600 prototypes". The sad thing is that it probably is.
(Actually, I collect old 2600 games, and 90% of them are crap, which is sorta the fun part. McDonalds would have no doubt supass other Atari spam classics like Chase The Chuckwagon, Kool-Aid Man, and Tooth Protectors.)
If you aren't using WINS, you are using broadcasts. Doesn't work very well -- install a name server.
(IPX has the ability to advertise behind routers - NBT does not. This sort of autoconfig was why the old NetWare guys held out for so long.)
My guess: the Windows Master Browser election is pretty fragile and you occasionally get Win95 boxes thinking they've "won" the election and fucking up everyone's network neighborhood. IPX basically gives the real MB 2 chances at winning.
There's a util in the reskit which lets you view the browser election process. Or just use policies and disable everyone's ability to participate in browser elections except the domain and wins boxes.
But since you didn't mention what the problems were specifically, that's all out of my ass.
It occurred to me, but I figured that any data feed would probably have to be a subscription service (since Taco has previously indicated that there will be more ads).
You remember the Mark Andreeson quote about "a loosely debugged collection of device drivers"? It's starting to sink in everywhere except Linux-land.
The fact is, from an IT perspective, the operating system is not the most important platform any more. It's only interesting as a $billions legacy business for Microsoft. Combine that with migration costs, and you can see why people are ho-humish about Linux.