Netscape dropped the ball so long ago that not only did Microsoft sneak a home run, they are now back home polishing the game trophy. will anyone care if Communicator 5 ever sees the light? *ix users will run Mozilla, Windows users will run IE.
Unless the judge really kicks them up the behind, MS is going to finish the process of embracing and de-standardising the web. The W3C will become either a puppet show with MS pulling the strings, or an irrelevant joke, according to its own choosing.
The reality is that following standards takes work, and most people tend to follow the course of least resistance and develop something until it compiles and runs in their particular environment, or in the case of the web, displays as they intended on their browser setup. If the browser they use to test is IE5, or indeed 5.5, then that's the one they're going to see if their page works in or not.
I run the tech side of an internet company, and I am already getting pushback from HTML designers when I insist on cross-browser, clean and simple page design: "Why does it matter if it works in Netscape? Doesn't IE have 99% of the market anyway?"
If you actually look at sites being put up nowadays, the use of things like tables, frames and font and colour tags to try and force a particular appearance is a travesty of Tim B-L's original intent that is specify content and structure rather than display formatting. It would be more appropriate to have a web format based on something technologically more similar to PDF or Display PostScript.
It's far from impossible that something along those lines will happen, starting from a plug-in, but if so, the new "standard" will not be something like MPEG or Shockwave, but will come from Redmond and involve a ton of hooks into Windows API's.
Even today, there are sites which designers think they have designed to be cross browser that are barely usable in the X11 version of Navigator, either due to tiny fonts or because they have huge SELECT stacks which the X version of Navigator renders as an endless, many screens wide chain of pulldown menus, instead of the scroller which is used by both IE *and* Navigator on Windows. My favourite example of this in action is "choose city" (within the US) or choose country, with around 300 menu items. If the US had many more states, I'd never be able to buy anything online at all.
The slide into the abyss has started. I think the sad reality is that the best future non-Windows platforms can hope for on the web is playing catch-up based on reverse engineering. Let's hope it doesn't do too much damage to the many great "alternative" OS'es out there
It's diluting the dedication of the artists...
on
Review:Toy Story 2
·
· Score: 1
Nothing against Pixar, I'm sure this Toy Story is as good as its predecessor, but am I the only one who thinks Disney's own creations were much better when they had a warehouse full of animators sweating blood over every frame? Compare the original 7 or 8 Disney feature lengths, that were done the hard way with a Mutliplane, to the modern stuff.
For ground breaking special effects, LucasFilm's efforts for the original Star Wars flicks, and Dykstra's stuff for Battlestar Galactica, were btoh pretty amazing, but I think the top prize for stretching the limits has to go to Industrial Light and Magic for the sequence from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where the Genesis torpedo is deployed.
IIRC this was rendered one frame at a time on a VAX (at around 30 mins CPU per frame) and output with a pen plotter, and then shot onto 70mm using a Disney Multiplane, and it was the first production sequence to use a particle-based simulation. Extremely ambitious for its time.
Just unpacked our first Dell Linux preloads at work today. Dell's OEM rate for NT-WS must be around $125-$150, because the price difference between NT-WS and Red Hat preloads is $75 (with Linux being cheaper). The Red Hat preload systems come with support from LinuxCare and a plastic shrink-wrap with install manual and CD/floppy kit, much like the NT OEM one in fact - figure those at $50-$75 total, hence the figure. You also get a nice pamphlet from Microsoft on how to use a mouse (yes, really) which comes with the 2.5 button rodent (little wheel) supplied.
I think Win98 OEM's at around $30-40 in bulk, and around $75-85 for mom 'n' pop shops - many "build you own" places in the UK will resell Win98 OEM kits at this latter kind of rate, if bought with certain components (ISTR it's actually the HD, not the motherboard, that counts).
If you check into successful MS-Tax refund stories you might get more data; when Toshiba did it I think they used to sink the full "list" price of an OEM, rather than disclose their pricing deal with Micro$oft.
If you're doing more than playing, use co-located hosting (e.g. exodus.net), it's a lot cheaper than buying bandwidth. They will change tapes for you, and if you use anything other than NT you won't need to go down there apart from collecting offsite backup media.
If you intend to make a serious business out of it, and raise venture capital, first thing is to form a balanced team. For Slashdot readers, this means, find some MBA's and marketing types. DO NOT form a team of all Linux hackers. DO plan to own most of the founder's stock. DO NOT expect to be CEO; recruit someone who knows how to write a business plan.
VC's don't care about technology; given the right credentials they will assume you have that covered. They care about how you will make a $1bn company and make yourself and them lots of $$$.
If you need advice in this area, email me offline.
Most important - DON'T USE RAID 5. It's not right for that application. RAID-5 assumes read-mostly, and is aimed at things like user home directories and app software; it is slower at writing large amounts of traffic than a single disk.
Take the time to understand how different RAID types ("levels") work and what is needed. RAID-1 is obvious but is space-inefficient (50% usable capacity) and doesn't solve the performance issue without adding striping (aka RAID-0) too.
RAID-3 may work well if you can get the stripe size down to a single write for the filesystem, e.g. 4+1 discs, 512 byte disc block, 2K array stripe and 2K filesystem block. Beware that many packaged arrays are software optimised for RAID-5 and / or RAID-0+1 and suck at RAID-3.
Sounds as though your price point rules out many of the midrange and high end toys that have been bandied about. Forget about EMC:-)
There are a number of cheap SCSI to SCSI and SCSI to IDE standalone RAID boxes going round, and also PCI to SCSI or PCI to IDE cards for internal mount in server PC's. They're closer to your capacity needs (start at sub-50Gb, sub-30Mb/sec).
IDE vs SCSI for the drives is not that important up to 7,200 rpm, but will tell with 10,000 rpm units. The bandwidth from the RAID controller to the host is more important, so make it Ultra-wide or PCI.
From past experience, Sun StorageArray (or whatever they are called now) were a bit behind the technology curve; in 1996 they were still using the host OS for software RAID support, and upgrading Solaris meant hacking the array. They are all OEM anyway. Go to a storage expert instead, but one cheaper than EMC:-)
Clariion are good for plug and forget, but may not have something down in that price range. However, performance on low-end models, even FC to FC, is not stunning. The 5700 series is (was?) overall good value, but requires FibreChannel attach.
> The McDonald name (and prefixing products with 'Mc') are only valid relating to fast food items.
...and "Mc" is definitely not trademarkable under Scottish law, when about 5% of the population have it in their name. It is a contraction of the Gaelic "Mac" meaning son; the correct form for unmarried females is "Nic" but it is never used in English. The usage is much like the Icelandic "-sson" and "-djottir" suffixes, but the name is a clan one rather than the father's forename.
Fast food joints are never called "restaurant" outside North America, but subject to minor factual errors the story about the village takeaway owner is genuine.
Scotland has many quaint feudal laws which still operate, and a clan cheiftan really would have a chance of having the name pulled from every golden arched burger joint in the country. To set it in context, legal recognition of clans in Scotland dates back to when you guys were a few British, French and Spanish colonies:-)
> The quality of Netscape on non-microsoft platforms certainly may be something to debate about, but it's certainly not anything more then your opinion that Netscape sucks on other platforms. Certainly there are many people who believe that IE on Solaris and HP sucks worse.
So, could it be argued that POSIX sucks as a platform for building browsers on?
I used to work for a company that has two versions of its data encapsulation platform, one in COM/ODBC, the other for portability in Java/JDBC.
A developer recently ported the back-end, number crunching engine of his app from C++/COM to pure Java to run on the Java platform, and tested it on NT.... and found it was FASTER.
With all the layers of API's and multi-tier stuff in modern apps, the emulation/JIT overhead of Java gets lost in the noise. With an hour of developer labour costing the price of a 500MHz Pentium, it's doubly less of an issue every day.
> Try Risc OS it's not a unix a like system but it's not meant to be.
Is it even for sale outside Europe? I know of one Archimedes user in Australia....
It's great tech, but made by a tiny company in a bunch of shacks on the southern fringe of a market town in East Anglia who are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy or takeover.
To be fair, I'd have to put it on a par with Win98. But there is RISC-ix of course....
Not just number theory, Computer Science too - though that's become an obscure specialism around here lately.:-)
As a corollary to the fact that they have to work at all, which means that (a) the algorithm to perform them executes quickly and (b) the plaintext contains sufficient redundancy to verify it has been successfully decrypted, most if not all public key systems are subject to an NP exploit based on simply guessing a key and trying it.
> I can get as good a deal locally as *anywhere* on the net (shipping and handeling costs bux boys).
Not with this country's quaint laws on sales tax - I'm in Austin TX, Dell's here in town, so I pay 8.25% to the Lone Star tax collector for the privilege of doing e-commerce with them. But Red Hat's in North Carolina, so I don't pay sales tax to *either* state when buying from them. More than makes up for the postage. But does it make sense?
Whole towns with names like like Nowhere NM and Brigadoon ID subsist on the mail order business due to this quirk in US law. (Get your combined bean slicer and back scratcher, just 19.95 + 5.95 shipping and handling...)
I won't even get started on the fact that there are 6,500 local state tax regions all with their own concept of what should and shouldn't be taxed, and different categories and sets of rates. In Europe, they think they need to simplify the fact that each whole country has a different, single VAT rate, poor souls.
On the security issue, apart from the fact that it is harder to judge who you're dealing with, using credit cards on the net is generally safer than using them over the phone.
In a physical store, at least here in Texas, no-one EVER checks signatures, so if you lose a card, you're hosed. A colleague's wallet got swiped from work, and they ran up $9000 in 90 minutes before Amex's computer jangled alarm bells. Don't know if it was smart software, or it just hit the credit limit - probably just the latter.
...when will I be able to buy a decent (branded) laptop without paying the MS-tax? The OEM licenses are the root of this problem. If the only remedy is to force vendors to honour the refund on OEM Windows licenses and to make Microsoft pick up the tab then I'll be more than content.
I don't see any reason why MS should not bundle IE, nor why they shouldn't integrate it into Windows. This is no more or less reasonable than every major Linux distro bundling bash.
If you don't like it, don't buy it - which brings us neatly back to the crux of the matter.
Forcing schools to teach creationism is the sort of religious fundamentalism has no place in the 20th century. Superstition replaced by organised religion replaced by science is a natural progression of a civilised society. Ours has arrived at the scientific age, the religious one is ending. Deal with it.
On a related note, are inner city schools in Chicago still teaching that Beethoven was black? Equally scary.
Standardisation is necessary for a product to succeed - be that the pedal layout in cars, or the user features and API's in an OS. Uniformity and market share are what perpetuates Microsoft Windows and QWERTY.
Right now, Linux needs standardisation to become a more viable mainstream platform, and it needs backing from serious industry players; Red Hat are a driving force in both areas. Whether you see this as good or bad probably depends on the future you'd like to see for Linux.
I just re-installed Star Office, from the new Sun distributed kit. It promised me during the install that it had updated the KDE menus; had I been running SuSE I dare say it probably would have, but it doesn't show up on my RH6 system. The failure is a minor inconvenience to me, but a showstopper to a non-techie.
There will be an inevitable shakeout with the number of Linux distributions (of significance) coming down, and Red Hat is positioned well to be on top at the end of the shakeout. Let's just hope the open source model really works, and that they're not alone.
IIRC some Apple//c (sic) 8 bit home machines shipped with the Dvorak layout in smaller letters on the otherwise QWERTY keyboard keys. Never owned one myself so I won't claim certainty.
I've got better news for you - gcc produces better code than commercial compilers - that's why the majority of CLOSED SOURCE operating system kernels are compiled with gcc. In HP's case I had this verified by one of the developers when dealing with a bug in the pre-release of HP-UX 11.00 - why do they use it? Because it produces tighter, faster code than their own compiler.
The monetary price of software is almost 100% orthogonal to its intrinsic quality - you're paying mostly for things like support and marketing. How much do you think Microsoft spends, in terms of $ per license sold, on Win9x development? It can't be more than 20 or 30 cents. How much on marketing? How much on tech support?
I think that using digital mobile phones for data in the US is relatively beta technology, but in Europe with GSM it's a mainstream service.
In Europe omputer utility software falls in two main areas - one is interfacing to the phone in order to use it as a wireless dialup, the other is for interfacing to GSM-SMS messaging systems (c.f. paging). This is one of the main uses of "GSM cellphone on a PCI card" type gadgets.
All but the basic GSM phones have a built in Hayes-compatible (ATDT) "modem" (remember, it's all digital here). So you just need cabling; older/basic ones need a data interface which you can get in the form of a PCMCIA card that looks like a generic modem to the laptop's OS.
I know of several people in the UK who run an SMSemail gateway on their home PC's; most of these run Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Netscape dropped the ball so long ago that not only did Microsoft sneak a home run, they are now back home polishing the game trophy. will anyone care if Communicator 5 ever sees the light? *ix users will run Mozilla, Windows users will run IE.
Unless the judge really kicks them up the behind, MS is going to finish the process of embracing and de-standardising the web. The W3C will become either a puppet show with MS pulling the strings, or an irrelevant joke, according to its own choosing.
The reality is that following standards takes work, and most people tend to follow the course of least resistance and develop something until it compiles and runs in their particular environment, or in the case of the web, displays as they intended on their browser setup. If the browser they use to test is IE5, or indeed 5.5, then that's the one they're going to see if their page works in or not.
I run the tech side of an internet company, and I am already getting pushback from HTML designers when I insist on cross-browser, clean and simple page design: "Why does it matter if it works in Netscape? Doesn't IE have 99% of the market anyway?"
If you actually look at sites being put up nowadays, the use of things like tables, frames and font and colour tags to try and force a particular appearance is a travesty of Tim B-L's original intent that is specify content and structure rather than display formatting. It would be more appropriate to have a web format based on something technologically more similar to PDF or Display PostScript.
It's far from impossible that something along those lines will happen, starting from a plug-in, but if so, the new "standard" will not be something like MPEG or Shockwave, but will come from Redmond and involve a ton of hooks into Windows API's.
Even today, there are sites which designers think they have designed to be cross browser that are barely usable in the X11 version of Navigator, either due to tiny fonts or because they have huge SELECT stacks which the X version of Navigator renders as an endless, many screens wide chain of pulldown menus, instead of the scroller which is used by both IE *and* Navigator on Windows. My favourite example of this in action is "choose city" (within the US) or choose country, with around 300 menu items. If the US had many more states, I'd never be able to buy anything online at all.
The slide into the abyss has started. I think the sad reality is that the best future non-Windows platforms can hope for on the web is playing catch-up based on reverse engineering. Let's hope it doesn't do too much damage to the many great "alternative" OS'es out there
Nothing against Pixar, I'm sure this Toy Story is as good as its predecessor, but am I the only one who thinks Disney's own creations were much better when they had a warehouse full of animators sweating blood over every frame? Compare the original 7 or 8 Disney feature lengths, that were done the hard way with a Mutliplane, to the modern stuff.
For ground breaking special effects, LucasFilm's efforts for the original Star Wars flicks, and Dykstra's stuff for Battlestar Galactica, were btoh pretty amazing, but I think the top prize for stretching the limits has to go to Industrial Light and Magic for the sequence from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where the Genesis torpedo is deployed.
IIRC this was rendered one frame at a time on a VAX (at around 30 mins CPU per frame) and output with a pen plotter, and then shot onto 70mm using a Disney Multiplane, and it was the first production sequence to use a particle-based simulation. Extremely ambitious for its time.
Just unpacked our first Dell Linux preloads at work today. Dell's OEM rate for NT-WS must be around $125-$150, because the price difference between NT-WS and Red Hat preloads is $75 (with Linux being cheaper). The Red Hat preload systems come with support from LinuxCare and a plastic shrink-wrap with install manual and CD/floppy kit, much like the NT OEM one in fact - figure those at $50-$75 total, hence the figure. You also get a nice pamphlet from Microsoft on how to use a mouse (yes, really) which comes with the 2.5 button rodent (little wheel) supplied.
I think Win98 OEM's at around $30-40 in bulk, and around $75-85 for mom 'n' pop shops - many "build you own" places in the UK will resell Win98 OEM kits at this latter kind of rate, if bought with certain components (ISTR it's actually the HD, not the motherboard, that counts).
If you check into successful MS-Tax refund stories you might get more data; when Toshiba did it I think they used to sink the full "list" price of an OEM, rather than disclose their pricing deal with Micro$oft.
What about FibreChannel ???
If you're doing more than playing, use co-located hosting (e.g. exodus.net), it's a lot cheaper than buying bandwidth. They will change tapes for you, and if you use anything other than NT you won't need to go down there apart from collecting offsite backup media.
If you intend to make a serious business out of it, and raise venture capital, first thing is to form a balanced team. For Slashdot readers, this means, find some MBA's and marketing types. DO NOT form a team of all Linux hackers. DO plan to own most of the founder's stock. DO NOT expect to be CEO; recruit someone who knows how to write a business plan.
VC's don't care about technology; given the right credentials they will assume you have that covered. They care about how you will make a $1bn company and make yourself and them lots of $$$.
If you need advice in this area, email me offline.
Most important - DON'T USE RAID 5. It's not right for that application. RAID-5 assumes read-mostly, and is aimed at things like user home directories and app software; it is slower at writing large amounts of traffic than a single disk.
:-)
:-)
Take the time to understand how different RAID types ("levels") work and what is needed. RAID-1 is obvious but is space-inefficient (50% usable capacity) and doesn't solve the performance issue without adding striping (aka RAID-0) too.
RAID-3 may work well if you can get the stripe size down to a single write for the filesystem, e.g. 4+1 discs, 512 byte disc block, 2K array stripe and 2K filesystem block. Beware that many packaged arrays are software optimised for RAID-5 and / or RAID-0+1 and suck at RAID-3.
Sounds as though your price point rules out many of the midrange and high end toys that have been bandied about. Forget about EMC
There are a number of cheap SCSI to SCSI and SCSI to IDE standalone RAID boxes going round, and also PCI to SCSI or PCI to IDE cards for internal mount in server PC's. They're closer to your capacity needs (start at sub-50Gb, sub-30Mb/sec).
IDE vs SCSI for the drives is not that important up to 7,200 rpm, but will tell with 10,000 rpm units. The bandwidth from the RAID controller to the host is more important, so make it Ultra-wide or PCI.
From past experience, Sun StorageArray (or whatever they are called now) were a bit behind the technology curve; in 1996 they were still using the host OS for software RAID support, and upgrading Solaris meant hacking the array. They are all OEM anyway. Go to a storage expert instead, but one cheaper than EMC
Clariion are good for plug and forget, but may not have something down in that price range. However, performance on low-end models, even FC to FC, is not stunning. The 5700 series is (was?) overall good value, but requires FibreChannel attach.
> The McDonald name (and prefixing products with 'Mc') are only valid relating to fast food items.
:-)
...and "Mc" is definitely not trademarkable under Scottish law, when about 5% of the population have it in their name. It is a contraction of the Gaelic "Mac" meaning son; the correct form for unmarried females is "Nic" but it is never used in English. The usage is much like the Icelandic "-sson" and "-djottir" suffixes, but the name is a clan one rather than the father's forename.
Fast food joints are never called "restaurant" outside North America, but subject to minor factual errors the story about the village takeaway owner is genuine.
Scotland has many quaint feudal laws which still operate, and a clan cheiftan really would have a chance of having the name pulled from every golden arched burger joint in the country. To set it in context, legal recognition of clans in Scotland dates back to when you guys were a few British, French and Spanish colonies
> Hell, ever hear of Yale Locks?
The cylinder lock was *invented* by Linus Yale. I think anyone has a good case for using their own surname.
> The quality of Netscape on non-microsoft platforms certainly may be something to debate about, but it's certainly not anything more then your opinion that Netscape sucks on other platforms. Certainly there are many people who believe that IE on Solaris and HP sucks worse.
So, could it be argued that POSIX sucks as a platform for building browsers on?
I didn't see any qualification in the trailer as to what this was the first hardware 3D X server for.
Hardware accelerated 3D integrated with X has been around for a looooong time - Tektronix, SGI, etc.
As for current standards, OpenGL in X has been supported for 2-3 years by SGI, HP, Sun and countless others.
Are we in danger of becoming as introspective as the boys in Redmond....
I used to work for a company that has two versions of its data encapsulation platform, one in COM/ODBC, the other for portability in Java/JDBC.
.... and found it was FASTER.
A developer recently ported the back-end, number crunching engine of his app from C++/COM to pure Java to run on the Java platform, and tested it on NT
With all the layers of API's and multi-tier stuff in modern apps, the emulation/JIT overhead of Java gets lost in the noise. With an hour of developer labour costing the price of a 500MHz Pentium, it's doubly less of an issue every day.
> Try Risc OS it's not a unix a like system but it's not meant to be.
Is it even for sale outside Europe? I know of one Archimedes user in Australia....
It's great tech, but made by a tiny company in a bunch of shacks on the southern fringe of a market town in East Anglia who are constantly on the verge of bankruptcy or takeover.
To be fair, I'd have to put it on a par with Win98. But there is RISC-ix of course....
RPM is GPL'ed. Get a POSIX library for NT and get porting....
"Zed" is actually the correct pronunciation. It's only 'Merkins that have a "Zee" in their alphabet :-)
Not just number theory, Computer Science too - though that's become an obscure specialism around here lately. :-)
As a corollary to the fact that they have to work at all, which means that (a) the algorithm to perform them executes quickly and (b) the plaintext contains sufficient redundancy to verify it has been successfully decrypted, most if not all public key systems are subject to an NP exploit based on simply guessing a key and trying it.
Roll out that quantum computer.....
> I can get as good a deal locally as *anywhere* on the net (shipping and handeling costs bux boys).
Not with this country's quaint laws on sales tax - I'm in Austin TX, Dell's here in town, so I pay 8.25% to the Lone Star tax collector for the privilege of doing e-commerce with them. But Red Hat's in North Carolina, so I don't pay sales tax to *either* state when buying from them. More than makes up for the postage. But does it make sense?
Whole towns with names like like Nowhere NM and Brigadoon ID subsist on the mail order business due to this quirk in US law. (Get your combined bean slicer and back scratcher, just 19.95 + 5.95 shipping and handling...)
I won't even get started on the fact that there are 6,500 local state tax regions all with their own concept of what should and shouldn't be taxed, and different categories and sets of rates. In Europe, they think they need to simplify the fact that each whole country has a different, single VAT rate, poor souls.
On the security issue, apart from the fact that it is harder to judge who you're dealing with, using credit cards on the net is generally safer than using them over the phone.
In a physical store, at least here in Texas, no-one EVER checks signatures, so if you lose a card, you're hosed. A colleague's wallet got swiped from work, and they ran up $9000 in 90 minutes before Amex's computer jangled alarm bells. Don't know if it was smart software, or it just hit the credit limit - probably just the latter.
There is one sure-fire way to control spam - the same mechanism that controls paper junk mail. Charge by volume for internet access.
...when will I be able to buy a decent (branded) laptop without paying the MS-tax? The OEM licenses are the root of this problem. If the only remedy is to force vendors to honour the refund on OEM Windows licenses and to make Microsoft pick up the tab then I'll be more than content.
I don't see any reason why MS should not bundle IE, nor why they shouldn't integrate it into Windows. This is no more or less reasonable than every major Linux distro bundling bash.
If you don't like it, don't buy it - which brings us neatly back to the crux of the matter.
Forcing schools to teach creationism is the sort of religious fundamentalism has no place in the 20th century. Superstition replaced by organised religion replaced by science is a natural progression of a civilised society. Ours has arrived at the scientific age, the religious one is ending. Deal with it.
On a related note, are inner city schools in Chicago still teaching that Beethoven was black? Equally scary.
Today's high end chips are tomorrow's consumer items and the day after's scrap. No-one introduces new chips at the consumer level.
Standardisation is necessary for a product to succeed - be that the pedal layout in cars, or the user features and API's in an OS. Uniformity and market share are what perpetuates Microsoft Windows and QWERTY.
Right now, Linux needs standardisation to become a more viable mainstream platform, and it needs backing from serious industry players; Red Hat are a driving force in both areas. Whether you see this as good or bad probably depends on the future you'd like to see for Linux.
I just re-installed Star Office, from the new Sun distributed kit. It promised me during the install that it had updated the KDE menus; had I been running SuSE I dare say it probably would have, but it doesn't show up on my RH6 system. The failure is a minor inconvenience to me, but a showstopper to a non-techie.
There will be an inevitable shakeout with the number of Linux distributions (of significance) coming down, and Red Hat is positioned well to be on top at the end of the shakeout. Let's just hope the open source model really works, and that they're not alone.
IIRC some Apple //c (sic) 8 bit home machines shipped with the Dvorak layout in smaller letters on the otherwise QWERTY keyboard keys. Never owned one myself so I won't claim certainty.
1. How many times in the life of an RPM update do you have to reapply it after installing software?
2. WTF does NT still come as SP1, with a separate service pack disc?
I've got better news for you - gcc produces better code than commercial compilers - that's why the majority of CLOSED SOURCE operating system kernels are compiled with gcc. In HP's case I had this verified by one of the developers when dealing with a bug in the pre-release of HP-UX 11.00 - why do they use it? Because it produces tighter, faster code than their own compiler.
The monetary price of software is almost 100% orthogonal to its intrinsic quality - you're paying mostly for things like support and marketing. How much do you think Microsoft spends, in terms of $ per license sold, on Win9x development? It can't be more than 20 or 30 cents.
How much on marketing? How much on tech support?
I think that using digital mobile phones for data in the US is relatively beta technology, but in Europe with GSM it's a mainstream service.
In Europe omputer utility software falls in two main areas - one is interfacing to the phone in order to use it as a wireless dialup, the other is for interfacing to GSM-SMS messaging systems (c.f. paging). This is one of the main uses of "GSM cellphone on a PCI card" type gadgets.
All but the basic GSM phones have a built in Hayes-compatible (ATDT) "modem" (remember, it's all digital here). So you just need cabling; older/basic ones need a data interface which you can get in the form of a PCMCIA card that looks like a generic modem to the laptop's OS.
I know of several people in the UK who run an SMSemail gateway on their home PC's; most of these run Linux.