Wasn't Pen Computing a theft of Go? Not so much ahead of their time, just ripped off from another company (not just inspired - flat out stolen). Its sad that the dominant company in tech has always resorted to this type of behavior through its history, but the results speak for themselves.
Citing Wendy Goldman Rohm's liner notes from her book "The Microsoft File" (thanks google) on Bill Gates and Microsoft's interaction with Go:
The accounts of Go Corp.'s interaction with the FTC were based on extensive interviews with Go officials as well as government officials closely involved.
The July 8,1988, nondisclosure agreement signed by Bill Gates, cited on page 93, is in my possession, as is the February 13, 1989, agreement signed by Microsoft's Jeff Raikes.
My statement on page 93 that Microsoft "copied from Go everything it could," is based on my review of Go's documents, including detailed explanations and symbols that it had created for the handwritten gestures that would be interpreted by the new pen-based computer, compared with Microsoft's subsequent handwritten gestures it had "created" for use with its own pen operating system. These documents are in my possession and were also turned over to the Federal Trade Commission by Go Corp.
The details of Go's meetings with Microsoft and subsequent events are based on thorough documentation of meetings, in handwritten notes taken by numerous Go officials. These documents were also turned over to the FTC by Go, and are in my possession.
To some extent you could say they were an IBM granted monopoly.
Sure IBM just got them in a great position to start with - but you have to admit that without them being granted DOS its pretty likely they would have gone nowhere. They certainly couldn't have used DOS to get Windows, then Windows to get Office, web browsers, and anything else they are strong in.
Yea, but how do they know its YOU sitting at the computer? How do they know your machine hasn't been compromised? There seem to be a lot of possible 'outs' here. This mostly seems like a scare tactic - to make examples out of people.
What will they do when kazaa adapts and it becomes impossible to trace? Go out of business Im guessing.
Boy Im glad I don't share/download music on P2P for right now though.
I doubt they are losing money on mice and keyboards or else they would drop them. Don't confuse the fact that only two divisions are making money with only two products are making money. Not the same!
Don't get me wrong, with Windows and Office MS would be in a serious world of hurt - but not ALL of their other products lose money - just many of them.
With the PDC support coming in Panther (based on OpenLDAP and Samba 3.0) why can't you run whatever Windows clients you want? Why can't you run Linux clients right now? You act as if Apple is still selling Appleshare IP, but the fact is that Apple sells a pay, slightly behind, easier to use version of much of what you can do with open source. Even now you can compile just about any of the Linux command line software on OS X - and it gets even better come the next OS revision.
OS X is not a threat to Microsoft like Linux is simply because it does not run on Intel hardware (that and the biases of IT people around the world - but thats changing). Unfortunately for it to do so would be suicide for reasons that aren't worth getting into. Its got two way SMP support, which while not threatening and high end OS, is still good enough for 99 percent plus of computer buyers out there. Its not datacenter, but how much money does MS make in the datacenter anyway? They made their money by starting at the PC end and moving up by using platform dependencies and bundling. And CAD? OS X is much better designed for CAD than Linux is - or rather I should say that Quartz is better for CAD than X. It just needs the high end CAD apps to show up, but Im willing to bet they are coming. And clustering? I just think you haven't done any research as there are XServe clusters popping up all over the place. Email servers? Huh? Almost nobody (percentage wise) is running Exchange replacements using Linux, they are running exim and postfix and sendmail and whatever just like they have been for years on Unix. Its true that you can do all these things on Linux, but to point them out like they are the reason that MS is scared is kind of silly. If MS lost their desktop/office monopoly to a significant degree they would be in a world of hurt (well, except 40 bill lets you buy lots of other companies I suppose) - so things like what happened in Munich are truly what scare Microsoft. Not because Suse lets you pay to run an alternate version of Exchange like server.
Linux, on the other hand, can survive in thrive even in the climate on x86 (its pretty much impossible to sell an alternate OS and sustain a closed source model on x86).
When you say "When you buy a linux server, you buy whatever the hell you want." you are coming close to getting it. Its more like "When you buy a linux server, you DO whatever the hell you want." Its freedom, and openness, and so far in the computing industry the more open solution has tended to win in the marketplace.
I don't mean to be rude, but +5 is definitely "overrated".
I don't think offering a competing, paid product is doing any disservice to your platforms developers. Products like iTunes certainly hurt the Mac MP3 player market because they are free, but when you have something like FCP whose development wasn't being subsidized by operating system or hardware sales you have a (relatively) fair ground on which to compete.
If Adobe were to ever reach the point where they would consider dropping Photoshop because Apple had a competing program it would be because their Mac sales had dropped so much from Apple producing that much better of a product.
As far as Apple driving away developers I think they would disagree. I read today how Joz pointed out that Apple had 3 times the developers it did before OS X. As a classic Mac user who is now using OS X that fact is quite obvious.
I think its also quite obvious that FCP is a strength of the Mac, not a weakness. Apple has gained many more Mac sales with the creation (purchase) and development of a mac only Final Cut Pro versus the loss of users of the cross platform Adobe Premiere.
Im glad Apple did this as its exactly what I asked our rep for as soon as the Adobe announcement was made.
Adobe has decided that not only can it not compete with a better product (its competing when its not bundled for free with the OS), but that it wants to push a much more serious rival's media software (WMP).
FCP is a great reason to own a Mac, and offering free or inexpensive cross grades to FCP from Premiere on both platforms is exactly what Apple needs to do to stay competitive.
The media technologies are actually the key to the Premiere/FCP battle. Keeping MPEG4 at the front of the game is extremely important to all of us who are interested in seeing open media technologiers (and who don't want another reason to be stuck on Windows). Having Adobe push Microsoft's solution (not saying you can't do anything else - but notice the prominent mention of MS technologies in their PR release for Premiere) is bad for all of us.
My point? Apple competing hard for open media standards via products like FCP is great for those people who will never use either piece of software.
Adobe isn't talking about competing with iMovie, which is bundled for free - but rather referring to competing with Final Cut Pro (and Express) which are 999 and 249 respectively.
I'm sure Apple has known about this for some time. FCP Express was certainly a shot across the bow of Adobe (because of its power for the price).
It looks like Adobe felt it couldn't compete with FCP for whatever reason, so it decided to throw in with Intel/Microsoft and support their hardware and media technologies, respectively.
I think this has been expected in the Mac world for some time - the writing has been on the wall.
You make some good points, but one thing about maintaining open source projects is that you can always just release the code under the GPL (which you probably should so you can be a good member of the community) and then if its a good start you will watch it grow and improve on its own. Particularily if you spend the money you would have spent on licensing you will continue to improve the product - and your people will know it inside and out. Add to that the 'free' development of other companies and before you know it you have an excellent product that exactly fits your needs, that your vendor will never drop support for, and that you will never need to wait for a vendor supplied patch (although you may have to crack the whip on your programmers:) ). You gain control and flexibility, and to many of us, thats worth the costs.
Of course if your software sucks then you were better off buying bad software that came with support and maintenance (which of course isn't perpetual anyway) in the first place.
Im not telling you to do this, Im just pointing out that this is really how its supposed to work in the open source world.
A reason Business Week has a 'Byte of the Apple' columnist is because he covers all sorts of things in the 'Mac World'. Having a column about Ford would make no sense as its not really a separate universe like Mac versus Wintel.
Another reason is that lots of Mac people probably read just about anything Mac related. So, page hits and ad revenue.
I don't think a lot of Mac users will miss it, however. With Safari doing the things that people would have bought Opera for, its a tough sell. Of course, Opera could have made it better for themselves by making a browser that wasn't dog slow on the Mac.
I couldn't get the ultra high or high resolution ones to play on my iBook 500 or G4-400 (lots O ram on both) with any acceptable performance. The fact is that they look incredible, and there is a price in size and performance for this.
Quicktime is slower than say WMP, but in my experience it has nicer video at higher resolutions. Of course Im not running the latest WMP, so take that with a grain of salt. Its not just a "Quicktime for Windows sucks" thing (its far better than WMP for Mac btw), its a "holy crap thats some high resolution" thing.
Quicktime is a great cross platform solution for movie trailers, thats why everyone uses it. Its not 'lazy crap', it took a great deal of effort to make Quicktime run on Windows at all. Oh yea, and the server is free $$ with source included.
I suggest to upgrade to version 6. Its quite a bit faster.
With that said, you may also boot back into OS 9. Virtual PC took something like a 50 percent performance hit with the X upgrade. It was actually getting pretty fast under classic.
Re:What I want to know - We need benchmarks!
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
Its very very difficult to directly compare performance between emulated and real systems. You can have one app that runs like its running on a P3-500, and another that runs like its on a 486. Its just the nature of emulation, it does some things better than others.
Anything requiring extensive disk access will tend to be slow, as well as anything video intensive. In my experience anyway.
If you are talking about buying a new Mac, and the Windows (obviously the Linux stuff has probably been ported to some degree) software you have isn't games or anything too intense, it should probably run great on a Powermac.
Excellent post.. except for the part about cars being light nowadays. The compact cars of 10 years ago were quite a bit lighter than those of today. Its rare to find any car under 2600 lbs and most of them are over 3000 (especially if it's a luxury marquee).
The J Bodys you referenced are over 2600 lbs. Thats a far cry from the ~2000 lb 1990 (4th gen?) Civic hatchback.
And Apple isn't giving anything away. Those computers are certainly leased from the company. Apple makes a profit and holds the line on market share. Even more importantly from Apple's perspective it shows that it can be done.
As far as getting these kids on a free Unix, well thats a different battle. But going from OS X to Linux is less of a jump than from MS Win to Linux, don't you think? Besides, ANY alternative OS legitimizes the others to some extent because they prove that you don't HAVE to use Windows to get things done. Thats half the battle in getting people to try something else.
The Mac is almost always slower.. unless you use the superior SIMD implementation in the G4. Then you can often get the 'Pentium toasting performance'... how else would Apple get those benchmarks?:)
Its a good thing so many things can be enhanced by SIMD. Now if only it did double precision floats...
Windows XP responsive? You must be on crack - Microsoft managed to slow the GUI way down while adding no real features (that I've noticed anyway) to the GDI besides 'pretty shapes and colors'...
Compared to OS X? Well, its easy to pick the slowest moving UI out there and compare to that. Take XP and compare it to 2K... 2K feels much faster.. to me anyway. Of course, OS X under 10.2 with a good video card feels pretty responsive nowadays...
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iChat isn't a true third party AOL client - its sanctioned by AOL (while being developed by Apple).
Unfortunately MSN Messenger has no such third parties (to bring this back on topic) that I know of.
Wasn't Pen Computing a theft of Go? Not so much ahead of their time, just ripped off from another company (not just inspired - flat out stolen). Its sad that the dominant company in tech has always resorted to this type of behavior through its history, but the results speak for themselves.
Citing Wendy Goldman Rohm's liner notes from her book "The Microsoft File" (thanks google) on Bill Gates and Microsoft's interaction with Go:
The accounts of Go Corp.'s interaction with the FTC were based on extensive interviews with Go officials as well as government officials closely involved.
The July 8,1988, nondisclosure agreement signed by Bill Gates, cited on page 93, is in my possession, as is the February 13, 1989, agreement signed by Microsoft's Jeff Raikes.
My statement on page 93 that Microsoft "copied from Go everything it could," is based on my review of Go's documents, including detailed explanations and symbols that it had created for the handwritten gestures that would be interpreted by the new pen-based computer, compared with Microsoft's subsequent handwritten gestures it had "created" for use with its own pen operating system. These documents are in my possession and were also turned over to the Federal Trade Commission by Go Corp.
The details of Go's meetings with Microsoft and subsequent events are based on thorough documentation of meetings, in handwritten notes taken by numerous Go officials. These documents were also turned over to the FTC by Go, and are in my possession.
To some extent you could say they were an IBM granted monopoly.
Sure IBM just got them in a great position to start with - but you have to admit that without them being granted DOS its pretty likely they would have gone nowhere. They certainly couldn't have used DOS to get Windows, then Windows to get Office, web browsers, and anything else they are strong in.
Apple did nothing but bleed money when they had cloners - and it STILL didn't expand their market.
... and even if you have Apple hardware, you can always run Linux.
The situation is not that simple
Yea, but how do they know its YOU sitting at the computer? How do they know your machine hasn't been compromised? There seem to be a lot of possible 'outs' here. This mostly seems like a scare tactic - to make examples out of people.
What will they do when kazaa adapts and it becomes impossible to trace? Go out of business Im guessing.
Boy Im glad I don't share/download music on P2P for right now though.
I doubt they are losing money on mice and keyboards or else they would drop them. Don't confuse the fact that only two divisions are making money with only two products are making money. Not the same!
Don't get me wrong, with Windows and Office MS would be in a serious world of hurt - but not ALL of their other products lose money - just many of them.
With the PDC support coming in Panther (based on OpenLDAP and Samba 3.0) why can't you run whatever Windows clients you want? Why can't you run Linux clients right now? You act as if Apple is still selling Appleshare IP, but the fact is that Apple sells a pay, slightly behind, easier to use version of much of what you can do with open source. Even now you can compile just about any of the Linux command line software on OS X - and it gets even better come the next OS revision.
OS X is not a threat to Microsoft like Linux is simply because it does not run on Intel hardware (that and the biases of IT people around the world - but thats changing). Unfortunately for it to do so would be suicide for reasons that aren't worth getting into. Its got two way SMP support, which while not threatening and high end OS, is still good enough for 99 percent plus of computer buyers out there. Its not datacenter, but how much money does MS make in the datacenter anyway? They made their money by starting at the PC end and moving up by using platform dependencies and bundling. And CAD? OS X is much better designed for CAD than Linux is - or rather I should say that Quartz is better for CAD than X. It just needs the high end CAD apps to show up, but Im willing to bet they are coming. And clustering? I just think you haven't done any research as there are XServe clusters popping up all over the place. Email servers? Huh? Almost nobody (percentage wise) is running Exchange replacements using Linux, they are running exim and postfix and sendmail and whatever just like they have been for years on Unix. Its true that you can do all these things on Linux, but to point them out like they are the reason that MS is scared is kind of silly. If MS lost their desktop/office monopoly to a significant degree they would be in a world of hurt (well, except 40 bill lets you buy lots of other companies I suppose) - so things like what happened in Munich are truly what scare Microsoft. Not because Suse lets you pay to run an alternate version of Exchange like server.
Linux, on the other hand, can survive in thrive even in the climate on x86 (its pretty much impossible to sell an alternate OS and sustain a closed source model on x86).
When you say "When you buy a linux server, you buy whatever the hell you want." you are coming close to getting it. Its more like "When you buy a linux server, you DO whatever the hell you want." Its freedom, and openness, and so far in the computing industry the more open solution has tended to win in the marketplace.
I don't mean to be rude, but +5 is definitely "overrated".
I don't think offering a competing, paid product is doing any disservice to your platforms developers. Products like iTunes certainly hurt the Mac MP3 player market because they are free, but when you have something like FCP whose development wasn't being subsidized by operating system or hardware sales you have a (relatively) fair ground on which to compete.
If Adobe were to ever reach the point where they would consider dropping Photoshop because Apple had a competing program it would be because their Mac sales had dropped so much from Apple producing that much better of a product.
As far as Apple driving away developers I think they would disagree. I read today how Joz pointed out that Apple had 3 times the developers it did before OS X. As a classic Mac user who is now using OS X that fact is quite obvious.
I think its also quite obvious that FCP is a strength of the Mac, not a weakness. Apple has gained many more Mac sales with the creation (purchase) and development of a mac only Final Cut Pro versus the loss of users of the cross platform Adobe Premiere.
Im glad Apple did this as its exactly what I asked our rep for as soon as the Adobe announcement was made.
Adobe has decided that not only can it not compete with a better product (its competing when its not bundled for free with the OS), but that it wants to push a much more serious rival's media software (WMP).
FCP is a great reason to own a Mac, and offering free or inexpensive cross grades to FCP from Premiere on both platforms is exactly what Apple needs to do to stay competitive.
The media technologies are actually the key to the Premiere/FCP battle. Keeping MPEG4 at the front of the game is extremely important to all of us who are interested in seeing open media technologiers (and who don't want another reason to be stuck on Windows). Having Adobe push Microsoft's solution (not saying you can't do anything else - but notice the prominent mention of MS technologies in their PR release for Premiere) is bad for all of us.
My point? Apple competing hard for open media standards via products like FCP is great for those people who will never use either piece of software.
Adobe isn't talking about competing with iMovie, which is bundled for free - but rather referring to competing with Final Cut Pro (and Express) which are 999 and 249 respectively.
I'm sure Apple has known about this for some time. FCP Express was certainly a shot across the bow of Adobe (because of its power for the price).
It looks like Adobe felt it couldn't compete with FCP for whatever reason, so it decided to throw in with Intel/Microsoft and support their hardware and media technologies, respectively.
I think this has been expected in the Mac world for some time - the writing has been on the wall.
You make some good points, but one thing about maintaining open source projects is that you can always just release the code under the GPL (which you probably should so you can be a good member of the community) and then if its a good start you will watch it grow and improve on its own. Particularily if you spend the money you would have spent on licensing you will continue to improve the product - and your people will know it inside and out. Add to that the 'free' development of other companies and before you know it you have an excellent product that exactly fits your needs, that your vendor will never drop support for, and that you will never need to wait for a vendor supplied patch (although you may have to crack the whip on your programmers :) ). You gain control and flexibility, and to many of us, thats worth the costs.
Of course if your software sucks then you were better off buying bad software that came with support and maintenance (which of course isn't perpetual anyway) in the first place.
Im not telling you to do this, Im just pointing out that this is really how its supposed to work in the open source world.
A reason Business Week has a 'Byte of the Apple' columnist is because he covers all sorts of things in the 'Mac World'. Having a column about Ford would make no sense as its not really a separate universe like Mac versus Wintel.
Another reason is that lots of Mac people probably read just about anything Mac related. So, page hits and ad revenue.
The G4 is the supercomputer :)
(the (in?)famous ad came out with the altivec powered G4 - not with the 1997 era G3)
You must have been asleep for most of the 90s when the PPC was kicking x86 butt.
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-982314.html
from January has some interesting quotes from the Opera CEO with regard to further Mac support.Many Mac users don't seem to be expecting Opera to continue on the Mac (if web BBs are any indication).
It looks like they have indeed given up on working on the Mac version.
? pl atform=mac
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/index.dml
I don't think a lot of Mac users will miss it, however. With Safari doing the things that people would have bought Opera for, its a tough sell. Of course, Opera could have made it better for themselves by making a browser that wasn't dog slow on the Mac.
I couldn't get the ultra high or high resolution ones to play on my iBook 500 or G4-400 (lots O ram on both) with any acceptable performance. The fact is that they look incredible, and there is a price in size and performance for this.
Quicktime is slower than say WMP, but in my experience it has nicer video at higher resolutions. Of course Im not running the latest WMP, so take that with a grain of salt. Its not just a "Quicktime for Windows sucks" thing (its far better than WMP for Mac btw), its a "holy crap thats some high resolution" thing.
Quicktime is a great cross platform solution for movie trailers, thats why everyone uses it. Its not 'lazy crap', it took a great deal of effort to make Quicktime run on Windows at all. Oh yea, and the server is free $$ with source included.
I suggest to upgrade to version 6. Its quite a bit faster.
With that said, you may also boot back into OS 9. Virtual PC took something like a 50 percent performance hit with the X upgrade. It was actually getting pretty fast under classic.
Its very very difficult to directly compare performance between emulated and real systems. You can have one app that runs like its running on a P3-500, and another that runs like its on a 486. Its just the nature of emulation, it does some things better than others.
Anything requiring extensive disk access will tend to be slow, as well as anything video intensive. In my experience anyway.
If you are talking about buying a new Mac, and the Windows (obviously the Linux stuff has probably been ported to some degree) software you have isn't games or anything too intense, it should probably run great on a Powermac.
Connectix/Microsoft can't readd video card support because of endian issues.
The reason the early voodoo cards were supported is because they were 3d only. If another 3d only card came on the market it could be done.
Excellent post .. except for the part about cars being light nowadays. The compact cars of 10 years ago were quite a bit lighter than those of today. Its rare to find any car under 2600 lbs and most of them are over 3000 (especially if it's a luxury marquee).
The J Bodys you referenced are over 2600 lbs. Thats a far cry from the ~2000 lb 1990 (4th gen?) Civic hatchback.
Eh, it sorta comes with some flavor of Unix ...
And Apple isn't giving anything away. Those computers are certainly leased from the company. Apple makes a profit and holds the line on market share. Even more importantly from Apple's perspective it shows that it can be done.
As far as getting these kids on a free Unix, well thats a different battle. But going from OS X to Linux is less of a jump than from MS Win to Linux, don't you think? Besides, ANY alternative OS legitimizes the others to some extent because they prove that you don't HAVE to use Windows to get things done. Thats half the battle in getting people to try something else.
The Mac is almost always slower .. unless you use the superior SIMD implementation in the G4. Then you can often get the 'Pentium toasting performance' ... how else would Apple get those benchmarks? :)
...
Its a good thing so many things can be enhanced by SIMD. Now if only it did double precision floats
Exactly. I put this guy at about the same credibility level as Apple showing its 'PC killing' benchmarks ...
Windows XP responsive? You must be on crack - Microsoft managed to slow the GUI way down while adding no real features (that I've noticed anyway) to the GDI besides 'pretty shapes and colors' ...
... 2K feels much faster .. to me anyway. Of course, OS X under 10.2 with a good video card feels pretty responsive nowadays ...
Compared to OS X? Well, its easy to pick the slowest moving UI out there and compare to that. Take XP and compare it to 2K