Correction, mirc introduced its own non standard method of using color codes... You could always use standard ANSI color codes in virtually any console based client.
As for a non english version, that just shows poor coding if you need a separate version for a different language, whats wrong with loading language catalogs at runtime? AmigaOS managed to do it in 1992...
Not sure about where you are, but some countries have telecoms regulators giving you the legal right to port your telephone service to another provider... I would never let myself depend on such a service without having an exit strategy, and being able to take your number and move it to a different provider at will is a pretty good one.
People don't buy MS because they want to, they buy it because they think they need to or because they don't realise anything else exists...
Phones are different, people know that alternatives exist... Windows is associated with crashing, blue screens, viruses and other forms of malware. People don't want that on their phones...
When people see a product with the same name from the same company they assume it will be compatible, windows mobile has never been compatible with desktop windows leaving many users severely disappointed...
Windows mobile 6.x and earlier versions were also so horrendously bad that they have left a bad taste in many peoples mouths...
MS' most successful attempts to enter new markets have actually been achieved by distancing themselves from windows, look at the xbox for instance, i doubt that would have been as successful if it had been called "Windows Game" or something.
PAE is enabled by default if your using DEP, which vista and xp/sp2 will by default (so much for compatibility problems)...
There is still an artificial limit depending on what windows version your using, so 32bit desktop variants are intentionally crippled to not support more than 4gb, trying to force you to buy the more expensive versions...
I utterly detest arbitrary limitations like this, they must have made extra effort to implement such restrictions... Linux with PAE support enabled has no such restrictions, and will happily use as much memory as the hardware can physically support.
You will find that they actually prioritise the common speedtest sites, so you will appear to get faster speeds from them... Try downloading from a random fast site (eg a linux mirror) and see what rates you get.
They also only use fibre from the head end up, from you to the street cabinet and from the street cabinet to the head end is all copper coax cable, also the 5mbps upload option has not been rolled out everywhere yet.
International rates to india are actually very cheap...
What you have to watch out for are 084/087 numbers which are very expensive (especially from mobiles) and less regulated than the typical 09 numbers, and the recipient of the call takes a cut too which gives them incentive to keep you on hold.
And they didn't catch the tethering app, what makes you think they would catch malware? Malware could simply do something mundane until after Apple have done their tests, and then activate its malicious functions later down the line when lots of users have it installed.
You don't typically play games on a small low power netbook anyway...
Linux already offers browsers and media players, but selling windows on arm will probably hurt their brand more than anything because users will buy it expecting it to be the same as x86 windows, and then be sorely disappointed... At least if they buy linux, they wont be expecting x86 compatibility and will use it for what it is.
Windows 64bit is different, most 32bit applications run on it just fine and the 32bit consumer versions are crippled (ie wont support more than 4gb of address space, even tho the hardware is capable of it using PAE)...
Windows on ARM won't run x86 applications natively, and if they provide an emulation option it will be almost certainly be extremely slow.
Exposing the micro-ops would mean they have to keep some compatibility, keeping them hidden behind x86 means they can change the micro-op functions all they like without impacting compatibility.
What would work better for transportation, is to reduce the need to transport anything... How many people could work from home? How many people could live closer to where they work? How many businesses could move out of business districts and into areas where their employees can actually afford to live?
They have a limited catalog, and their media is drm encumbered... Paying a flat fee for totally unencumbered legal content is what sounds enticing, not a crippled service that can get taken away at any time.
Not only that but with guaranteed revenue, the encumbants would have even less incentive to produce a quality product. Expect them to scale back and produce garbage output as cheaply as possible in just enough quantity to ensure they still get their state handout.
There are already standards for authenticating the sender of mail and encrypting the contents of those mails, it would be far better to encourage use of these existing standards rather that come up with something completely new and incompatible with everything else.
Some consoles enforce region restrictions, meaning that these imported games may not run after you import them... Also people have been known to get banned from xbox live for playing out of region games (where MS simply assumes they were pirated).
Supporting hardware was easier in those days because hardware was hardware, you couldn't emulate hardware functions at the driver layer... Plus many people still used DOS...
Most soundcards were soundblaster compatible... Most video cards were VGA or VESA compatible... There was a standard for early non DMA IDE controllers... Most ethernet cards were NE2000 compatible... Most printers at the very least supported generic text mode, and there weren't that many different graphics modes, higher end printers just did postscript... Modems were straight serial devices supporting the standard hayes command set...
You mean anyone who runs the skype client... Skype is not an open spec, so you are at their mercy to provide a client for your platform of choice, and for skype to provide you with service. I prefer Apple's facetime, and i doubt it will be too long before there are third party implementations.
Not distribute, provide access to... If the original developer provides microsoft with a link to the source, all ms have to do is pass that url on to their users since they are not performing any modifications to the code.
Also it wouldn't really be a great hardship to host the gpl code themselves (which they already do via codeplex i believe) and provide a link to that.
The OS is just the start, in time open source versions of mass market apps will become available too and they will gradually improve until they become good enough, at which point the commercial stuff becomes overpriced and obsolete or very niche market. Gimp and OpenOffice are already good enough to satisfy the needs of most photoshop or msoffice users, the reverse is also true but only a fool would pay a premium price for a "good enough" replacement for something they already have. Some applications have already become commoditised, look at web browsers - back in the days browsers used to cost money, now noone would consider paying for a browser and many of the browsers today are based on open source code.
Also the widespread use of open source in the browser market has allowed others to innovate... Apple would have needed to do a lot more work to create safari (including the iphone version) were it not for the open source KHTML, and the work of KHTML plus Apple's work built a foundation on which google were able to innovate with Chrome and Android. Imagine if both Google and Apple did not have access to the KHTML/Webkit sources, and had to write their own browsers from scratch? Open source allows a new party to enter the market and innovate by building on whats already there, Google/Apple would not have had much time for innovation if they had been forced to write their own html rendering engine from scratch.
Commercial software will get forced into ever smaller niches...
Open source development ensures that all the previous improvements are available for reuse, so you get a steady stream of improvements over time.
Games are perhaps another story, there are very few games that can be developed slowly and steadily over time, users always want new games and the game engine is only a small part, most of a game is based on level design, graphics and sound which require different skills to software development.
So the only way for someone living in australia to get a copy of this game is pretty much to pirate it? It's highly likely that australians will stumble across advertisements for the game online, or people talking about it...
At least it's not the actual publisher creating the restriction for once.
Apple software may be proprietary, but they are generally pretty good at implementing open standards...
The iPhone is another good example, they let you sync your email using imap, your calendar using caldav, your contacts using ldap... Most phones support imap, but does even android support caldav/ldap?
People should be free to choose proprietary tools, providing any point at which those tools interacts with others is based on open standards - ie choose what you want, but don't force that choice on me.
Because actually competing is far less profitable, they would need to invest a lot of money into updating (their codebase is years old and probably very difficult to maintain), take big hits on pricing... Meanwhile, open source competitors would still be improving at a gradual pace, and sooner or later will reach "good enough" status if not feature parity, at which point it all comes down to price and you cannot compete with free.
Don't underestimate the power of "Good enough", when the product is much cheaper (ie free) or well marketed it doesn't need to be the best, it just needs to be adequate... That has always been the MS selling point against proprietary unix, novell, wordperfect etc.
If an open standard is still being used, then someone will write a viewer for it... Chances are there will be multiple viewers available and at least one of them will be available under an open license. If not, you can always hire someone to implement one (or a plugin to an existing similar program) from scratch based on the available spec, which is going to cost a lot less than also paying someone to reverse engineer the proprietary program to create a spec.
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Correction, mirc introduced its own non standard method of using color codes... You could always use standard ANSI color codes in virtually any console based client.
As for a non english version, that just shows poor coding if you need a separate version for a different language, whats wrong with loading language catalogs at runtime? AmigaOS managed to do it in 1992...
Not sure about where you are, but some countries have telecoms regulators giving you the legal right to port your telephone service to another provider...
I would never let myself depend on such a service without having an exit strategy, and being able to take your number and move it to a different provider at will is a pretty good one.
People don't buy MS because they want to, they buy it because they think they need to or because they don't realise anything else exists...
Phones are different, people know that alternatives exist...
Windows is associated with crashing, blue screens, viruses and other forms of malware. People don't want that on their phones...
When people see a product with the same name from the same company they assume it will be compatible, windows mobile has never been compatible with desktop windows leaving many users severely disappointed...
Windows mobile 6.x and earlier versions were also so horrendously bad that they have left a bad taste in many peoples mouths...
MS' most successful attempts to enter new markets have actually been achieved by distancing themselves from windows, look at the xbox for instance, i doubt that would have been as successful if it had been called "Windows Game" or something.
And as that very page says...
PAE is enabled by default if your using DEP, which vista and xp/sp2 will by default (so much for compatibility problems)...
There is still an artificial limit depending on what windows version your using, so 32bit desktop variants are intentionally crippled to not support more than 4gb, trying to force you to buy the more expensive versions...
I utterly detest arbitrary limitations like this, they must have made extra effort to implement such restrictions... Linux with PAE support enabled has no such restrictions, and will happily use as much memory as the hardware can physically support.
56K modems only supported 33.6k on the upstream path...
You will find that they actually prioritise the common speedtest sites, so you will appear to get faster speeds from them...
Try downloading from a random fast site (eg a linux mirror) and see what rates you get.
They also only use fibre from the head end up, from you to the street cabinet and from the street cabinet to the head end is all copper coax cable, also the 5mbps upload option has not been rolled out everywhere yet.
International rates to india are actually very cheap...
What you have to watch out for are 084/087 numbers which are very expensive (especially from mobiles) and less regulated than the typical 09 numbers, and the recipient of the call takes a cut too which gives them incentive to keep you on hold.
And they didn't catch the tethering app, what makes you think they would catch malware?
Malware could simply do something mundane until after Apple have done their tests, and then activate its malicious functions later down the line when lots of users have it installed.
You don't typically play games on a small low power netbook anyway...
Linux already offers browsers and media players, but selling windows on arm will probably hurt their brand more than anything because users will buy it expecting it to be the same as x86 windows, and then be sorely disappointed...
At least if they buy linux, they wont be expecting x86 compatibility and will use it for what it is.
Windows 64bit is different, most 32bit applications run on it just fine and the 32bit consumer versions are crippled (ie wont support more than 4gb of address space, even tho the hardware is capable of it using PAE)...
Windows on ARM won't run x86 applications natively, and if they provide an emulation option it will be almost certainly be extremely slow.
Exposing the micro-ops would mean they have to keep some compatibility, keeping them hidden behind x86 means they can change the micro-op functions all they like without impacting compatibility.
You used to be able to emulate x86 on the Amiga too, using applications such as PC-Task or PCX...
What would work better for transportation, is to reduce the need to transport anything...
How many people could work from home?
How many people could live closer to where they work?
How many businesses could move out of business districts and into areas where their employees can actually afford to live?
They have a limited catalog, and their media is drm encumbered... Paying a flat fee for totally unencumbered legal content is what sounds enticing, not a crippled service that can get taken away at any time.
Not only that but with guaranteed revenue, the encumbants would have even less incentive to produce a quality product. Expect them to scale back and produce garbage output as cheaply as possible in just enough quantity to ensure they still get their state handout.
There are already standards for authenticating the sender of mail and encrypting the contents of those mails, it would be far better to encourage use of these existing standards rather that come up with something completely new and incompatible with everything else.
Some consoles enforce region restrictions, meaning that these imported games may not run after you import them...
Also people have been known to get banned from xbox live for playing out of region games (where MS simply assumes they were pirated).
Supporting hardware was easier in those days because hardware was hardware, you couldn't emulate hardware functions at the driver layer... Plus many people still used DOS...
Most soundcards were soundblaster compatible...
Most video cards were VGA or VESA compatible...
There was a standard for early non DMA IDE controllers...
Most ethernet cards were NE2000 compatible...
Most printers at the very least supported generic text mode, and there weren't that many different graphics modes, higher end printers just did postscript...
Modems were straight serial devices supporting the standard hayes command set...
You mean anyone who runs the skype client...
Skype is not an open spec, so you are at their mercy to provide a client for your platform of choice, and for skype to provide you with service. I prefer Apple's facetime, and i doubt it will be too long before there are third party implementations.
Not distribute, provide access to... If the original developer provides microsoft with a link to the source, all ms have to do is pass that url on to their users since they are not performing any modifications to the code.
Also it wouldn't really be a great hardship to host the gpl code themselves (which they already do via codeplex i believe) and provide a link to that.
The OS is just the start, in time open source versions of mass market apps will become available too and they will gradually improve until they become good enough, at which point the commercial stuff becomes overpriced and obsolete or very niche market.
Gimp and OpenOffice are already good enough to satisfy the needs of most photoshop or msoffice users, the reverse is also true but only a fool would pay a premium price for a "good enough" replacement for something they already have. Some applications have already become commoditised, look at web browsers - back in the days browsers used to cost money, now noone would consider paying for a browser and many of the browsers today are based on open source code.
Also the widespread use of open source in the browser market has allowed others to innovate... Apple would have needed to do a lot more work to create safari (including the iphone version) were it not for the open source KHTML, and the work of KHTML plus Apple's work built a foundation on which google were able to innovate with Chrome and Android. Imagine if both Google and Apple did not have access to the KHTML/Webkit sources, and had to write their own browsers from scratch?
Open source allows a new party to enter the market and innovate by building on whats already there, Google/Apple would not have had much time for innovation if they had been forced to write their own html rendering engine from scratch.
Commercial software will get forced into ever smaller niches...
Open source development ensures that all the previous improvements are available for reuse, so you get a steady stream of improvements over time.
Games are perhaps another story, there are very few games that can be developed slowly and steadily over time, users always want new games and the game engine is only a small part, most of a game is based on level design, graphics and sound which require different skills to software development.
So the only way for someone living in australia to get a copy of this game is pretty much to pirate it?
It's highly likely that australians will stumble across advertisements for the game online, or people talking about it...
At least it's not the actual publisher creating the restriction for once.
Apple software may be proprietary, but they are generally pretty good at implementing open standards...
The iPhone is another good example, they let you sync your email using imap, your calendar using caldav, your contacts using ldap... Most phones support imap, but does even android support caldav/ldap?
People should be free to choose proprietary tools, providing any point at which those tools interacts with others is based on open standards - ie choose what you want, but don't force that choice on me.
Because actually competing is far less profitable, they would need to invest a lot of money into updating (their codebase is years old and probably very difficult to maintain), take big hits on pricing...
Meanwhile, open source competitors would still be improving at a gradual pace, and sooner or later will reach "good enough" status if not feature parity, at which point it all comes down to price and you cannot compete with free.
Don't underestimate the power of "Good enough", when the product is much cheaper (ie free) or well marketed it doesn't need to be the best, it just needs to be adequate... That has always been the MS selling point against proprietary unix, novell, wordperfect etc.
If an open standard is still being used, then someone will write a viewer for it... Chances are there will be multiple viewers available and at least one of them will be available under an open license. If not, you can always hire someone to implement one (or a plugin to an existing similar program) from scratch based on the available spec, which is going to cost a lot less than also paying someone to reverse engineer the proprietary program to create a spec.