The Amiga was huge in it's day, at least in Europe, and a lot of that was down to how easy it was to copy the games (they came on floppies, and many had no attempt at copy protection whatsoever)...Most people i know who had Amigas would have a handful of bought games, and a huge box of pirated ones - usually copied from friends in school.
The difference is that the Xbox and the Wii don't release firmware updates which remove functionality that is explicitly present in previous versions and actively marketed as a selling point of the machine...
The alpha didn't even attempt to do out of order execution until the EV6 chip... The EV4 and EV5 chips were strict in-order processors.
The difference with the P4, is that the p4 was expected to run code that was originally optimized for a 386, whereas the original alpha had code that specifically targeted it... In-order execution works very well when you can specifically target a particular processor (see games consoles), since you can tune the code to the available resources of the processor... The compiler for the alpha was also pretty good, it could beat gcc hands down at floating point code for instance.
In terms of alphas getting hot, the only workstation i remember which had heat problems was the rather poorly designed multia (which used a cut down alpha chip anyway).. other alpha systems i used were rock solid reliable and i still have several in the loft somewhere - one of which ran for 6 months after the fans failed before i noticed and shut it down...
Clock for clock the alpha was pretty quick too, unlike the p4 that was considerably slower than a p3 at the same clock... http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=11606 shows alphas getting specfp2000 scores higher than x86 chips running at 3x the clock rate.
A lot of people, myself included, think itanium should never have existed, and that the development effort should have been put into alpha instead - an architecture that already had a good software and user base...
Itanium was killed primarily by closed source software... A few years ago, an Itanium box made a very good but expensive linux box, as did alpha for that matter...
However, while windows was ported to itanium most of the apps people wanted to run weren't, windows was effectively useless on the itanium because it had no applications... Very few commercial software companies would write software for it because of the small number of users, and the number of users won't increase because of the lack of software. What few applications were ported, were usually done because hp or intel paid for them in one way or another.
Most open source apps however, were easily recompiled for itanium making it a pretty decent architecture if you only wanted to run open source on it... Unfortunately, because such people are relatively few in number, there was never the economies of scale necessary to make itanium systems affordable...
Linux may break backwards compatibility at a binary level, but rarely at the source level - most old apps can easily be recompiled (as can many apps intended for other unixes which predate linux by many years)... Combined with the fact that most apps come as sourcecode it's not a huge issue..
Windows on the other hand, not only retains backwards compatibility, but does so with a lot of significant design flaws inherent in earlier versions which are subsequently still present in current versions. Unix is a much older design, but is also much simpler and with less serious design flaws.
Only 2003 is not a current version, it's the previous version, is 7 years old (a lifetime in computing terms) and soon to become 2 versions out of date. Compare the old version to 2007 or 2010 and there are huge differences.
Apple cater to a different market, they cater to the people who follow fashion and very few of those people will use anything that's more than a couple of years old. MS cater more towards business users who want long term support. Your mac that couldn't run newer than 10.3 must be pretty old, G3 based? I would have thought anything that could run 10.3 would also run 10.4, and it was 10.5 which cut off anything below the G4.... I have a 400mhz G4 powermac which runs 10.4 well, and 10.5 if you bypass the 877mhz check on the install. This system was released in 1999, officially supports osx 10.4 (released 2005) and unofficially (or you can upgrade the cpu) can run 10.5 released in 2007.
Your old win98 laptop is unlikely to run the latest browsers, microsoft don't support ie7 or newer on win98, not sure if current versions of firefox or chrome would work either. You could probably reinstall the machine to run windows xp but without knowing the spec there's no telling how usable that would be.
It's not Apple that insists you must upgrade to run firefox, it is the firefox developers who chose to drop support for older versions of OSX... There's nothing to stop you compiling your own version, which you could do with safari/webkit too if you wanted...
MS occupy a middle ground between apple and linux... those things you tout as advantages of ms - long term support, ability to run new browsers on old os, cost effectiveness etc, apply even more to linux..
The commercial world in general is about moving you away from older hardware to make you buy new stuff... I have various peripherals that aren't supported by the current offerings from ms/apple, but which are supported out of the box by current linux distributions.
Microsoft bought most of those games, and as you've pointed out those games have generally gone downhill since MS bought them... Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market. MS is wasting lots of money trying to out-do google, but they are pretty much following the same strategy they always have - release inferior products, and leverage existing market share in other areas to promote the inferior products... Do you think anyone at all would use msn/bing if it wasn't the default on windows? and the fact that despite being the default, it's market share is so low says a lot.
Smoking does seem to correlate with low income, which is all the more amusing considering how expensive smoking is in some places... People with very little money, wasting it all on smoking, and then having insufficient money for food and other basic necessities...
So take regular 5 minute breaks to do non addictive things... Drink fruit juice, or just go outside and stare into space. Emptying your mind completely and staring at the sky will probably do you good.
So it's not the smoking itself, rather the fact you take regular breaks... What's to stop you taking regular breaks for other reasons? I find that taking 5 minutes to stand outside in the sun helps me greatly.
Ironically, i used to work for a company where smokers were allowed regular breaks to go outside and smoke, but non smokers weren't allowed to take equivalent breaks...
Yes, STANDARDS should be decided by the FREE market... Microsoft however, have subverted the free market by wielding an extremely detrimental level of influence over it, so that instead of a free market you have corporate bullies instead of government bullies...
What the government should should do, is ensure that the market remains free so that we can all receive the benefits that free market competition brings... One way to do this, is to ensure that open standards are used and that no single entity can pervert the free market.
You will notice that there is no pressure to mandate basic networking protocols like IP, why? because we already have an open standard that anyone is free to support and that doesn't unduly favor any particular vendor. If the government corrects other areas of the market, then we will all benefit. Sure, it's not ideal that the government has to intervene but it's necessary because microsoft are able to bully the free market.
While IBM may have some influence over open standards like ODF, they do not control it and are not the only company with influence...
MS formats are created by a single company for the sole benefit of that company... Like a dictatorship, where it's easy for changes to be made which are detrimental to everyone else.
ODF is created by many companies and non profit organizations with competing goals, so the end result is a compromise between all the different goals... Having something in here which benefits one company to the detriment of everyone else is far less likely to happen because "everyone else" actually has a say in the process. This is more like a democratic process, where compromise is necessary.
MS would compete using open standards if they were forced to, but keeping everyone locked in benefits them at the expense of everyone else. The EU does not exist to ensure MS makes profits, they should be working for the benefit of the majority of people (you know, how democracy is supposed to work) rather than harming the majority to help a select few.
Google know very little about me, i am just an unknown internet user who occasionally searches for things... Sure, they know what i search for and have searched for assuming i don't clear the cookies, but they have no idea who i actually am. Microsoft can actually count many end users as paying customers and thus have their details on file...
Surely ignoring the least common queries is the most stupid thing to do... For the most common things, most people generally know where to go anyway... Search engines are for when you're actually looking for something.
Your not forced to use Ubuntu, even if you do use Ubuntu you aren't forced to use the default theme.. Far too much time gets wasted arguing over how the default themes etc will look, much better to have someone simply dictate the defaults. If you don't like it, you can change the settings or choose a different distro.
You'd download a browser using the system package manager... Most linux distros work this way, with a single command or selection in a gui you can choose a browser and have it downloaded and installed for you.
Not only that, but OO already supports macros, and does so in several existing languages as well as their own nonstandard language... As you said, MS are trying to deprecate VBA so everyone will have to drop it sooner or later (and lets not forget that msoffice had a different macro language before VBA which is now long deprecated)... I would much rather write macros in python or javascript as supported by openoffice - languages which have other uses and will teach me other skills i can reuse outside of writing office macros. Also being based on standard languages, there is nothing stopping third parties implementing openoffice compatible macros.
It is quite common for commercial vendors to offer loss leaders, ie the initial purchase has very thin margins or even incur a loss (unlikely in the case of software as the production cost is close to 0)... Now this only works in situations where you can lock people in, eg games consoles and locked cellphones etc. You couldn't do this with a standard product such as a dvd player, because there is nothing to stop users from buying their dvds from someone else thus denying you the profit.
It is also fairly common for suppliers to outright lie about the costs, they provide a really cheap quote and the project gets started, once it reaches a certain point the budget suddenly starts slipping... By this time, they've already invested (ie lost) their original budget and got some progress so they have to continue pouring money into it because thats less risky and hopefully cheaper than starting again. There are countless projects which have gone massively over budget, and many suppliers actually design their quotes that way.
Buying proprietary software doesn't benefit everyone, it only benefits the single vendor of that software (to your own detriment often, as you get locked in)... Buying locally shifts that benefit away from a single foreign entity, to one or more local entities which is beneficial for government who get their tax revenue from those same local entities.
However, by using open source they are contributing benefits to everyone... Any development they contribute back will benefit everyone, even any bug reports they make will ultimately benefit the community as a whole.
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The Amiga was huge in it's day, at least in Europe, and a lot of that was down to how easy it was to copy the games (they came on floppies, and many had no attempt at copy protection whatsoever)...Most people i know who had Amigas would have a handful of bought games, and a huge box of pirated ones - usually copied from friends in school.
The difference is that the Xbox and the Wii don't release firmware updates which remove functionality that is explicitly present in previous versions and actively marketed as a selling point of the machine...
The alpha didn't even attempt to do out of order execution until the EV6 chip...
The EV4 and EV5 chips were strict in-order processors.
The difference with the P4, is that the p4 was expected to run code that was originally optimized for a 386, whereas the original alpha had code that specifically targeted it... In-order execution works very well when you can specifically target a particular processor (see games consoles), since you can tune the code to the available resources of the processor... The compiler for the alpha was also pretty good, it could beat gcc hands down at floating point code for instance.
In terms of alphas getting hot, the only workstation i remember which had heat problems was the rather poorly designed multia (which used a cut down alpha chip anyway).. other alpha systems i used were rock solid reliable and i still have several in the loft somewhere - one of which ran for 6 months after the fans failed before i noticed and shut it down...
Clock for clock the alpha was pretty quick too, unlike the p4 that was considerably slower than a p3 at the same clock...
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=11606 shows alphas getting specfp2000 scores higher than x86 chips running at 3x the clock rate.
A lot of people, myself included, think itanium should never have existed, and that the development effort should have been put into alpha instead - an architecture that already had a good software and user base...
Itanium was killed primarily by closed source software...
A few years ago, an Itanium box made a very good but expensive linux box, as did alpha for that matter...
However, while windows was ported to itanium most of the apps people wanted to run weren't, windows was effectively useless on the itanium because it had no applications... Very few commercial software companies would write software for it because of the small number of users, and the number of users won't increase because of the lack of software. What few applications were ported, were usually done because hp or intel paid for them in one way or another.
Most open source apps however, were easily recompiled for itanium making it a pretty decent architecture if you only wanted to run open source on it... Unfortunately, because such people are relatively few in number, there was never the economies of scale necessary to make itanium systems affordable...
Linux may break backwards compatibility at a binary level, but rarely at the source level - most old apps can easily be recompiled (as can many apps intended for other unixes which predate linux by many years)... Combined with the fact that most apps come as sourcecode it's not a huge issue..
Windows on the other hand, not only retains backwards compatibility, but does so with a lot of significant design flaws inherent in earlier versions which are subsequently still present in current versions. Unix is a much older design, but is also much simpler and with less serious design flaws.
Software wise you're right, hardware wise ibm and apple surpassed the amiga several years earlier but were hampered by massively inferior software.
Only 2003 is not a current version, it's the previous version, is 7 years old (a lifetime in computing terms) and soon to become 2 versions out of date.
Compare the old version to 2007 or 2010 and there are huge differences.
Apple cater to a different market, they cater to the people who follow fashion and very few of those people will use anything that's more than a couple of years old. MS cater more towards business users who want long term support.
Your mac that couldn't run newer than 10.3 must be pretty old, G3 based? I would have thought anything that could run 10.3 would also run 10.4, and it was 10.5 which cut off anything below the G4.... I have a 400mhz G4 powermac which runs 10.4 well, and 10.5 if you bypass the 877mhz check on the install. This system was released in 1999, officially supports osx 10.4 (released 2005) and unofficially (or you can upgrade the cpu) can run 10.5 released in 2007.
Your old win98 laptop is unlikely to run the latest browsers, microsoft don't support ie7 or newer on win98, not sure if current versions of firefox or chrome would work either. You could probably reinstall the machine to run windows xp but without knowing the spec there's no telling how usable that would be.
It's not Apple that insists you must upgrade to run firefox, it is the firefox developers who chose to drop support for older versions of OSX... There's nothing to stop you compiling your own version, which you could do with safari/webkit too if you wanted...
MS occupy a middle ground between apple and linux... those things you tout as advantages of ms - long term support, ability to run new browsers on old os, cost effectiveness etc, apply even more to linux..
The commercial world in general is about moving you away from older hardware to make you buy new stuff... I have various peripherals that aren't supported by the current offerings from ms/apple, but which are supported out of the box by current linux distributions.
Microsoft bought most of those games, and as you've pointed out those games have generally gone downhill since MS bought them...
Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market.
MS is wasting lots of money trying to out-do google, but they are pretty much following the same strategy they always have - release inferior products, and leverage existing market share in other areas to promote the inferior products... Do you think anyone at all would use msn/bing if it wasn't the default on windows? and the fact that despite being the default, it's market share is so low says a lot.
Smoking does seem to correlate with low income, which is all the more amusing considering how expensive smoking is in some places...
People with very little money, wasting it all on smoking, and then having insufficient money for food and other basic necessities...
So take regular 5 minute breaks to do non addictive things... Drink fruit juice, or just go outside and stare into space. Emptying your mind completely and staring at the sky will probably do you good.
The smoking areas is likely to be filled with co-workers too, who will similarly want to chat about inane things as they smoke...
So it's not the smoking itself, rather the fact you take regular breaks... What's to stop you taking regular breaks for other reasons? I find that taking 5 minutes to stand outside in the sun helps me greatly.
Ironically, i used to work for a company where smokers were allowed regular breaks to go outside and smoke, but non smokers weren't allowed to take equivalent breaks...
You misread the parent post tho, which states that smarter people are less likely to start smoking... It's not addictive if you've never done it.
Yes, STANDARDS should be decided by the FREE market...
Microsoft however, have subverted the free market by wielding an extremely detrimental level of influence over it, so that instead of a free market you have corporate bullies instead of government bullies...
What the government should should do, is ensure that the market remains free so that we can all receive the benefits that free market competition brings... One way to do this, is to ensure that open standards are used and that no single entity can pervert the free market.
You will notice that there is no pressure to mandate basic networking protocols like IP, why? because we already have an open standard that anyone is free to support and that doesn't unduly favor any particular vendor.
If the government corrects other areas of the market, then we will all benefit. Sure, it's not ideal that the government has to intervene but it's necessary because microsoft are able to bully the free market.
While IBM may have some influence over open standards like ODF, they do not control it and are not the only company with influence...
MS formats are created by a single company for the sole benefit of that company... Like a dictatorship, where it's easy for changes to be made which are detrimental to everyone else.
ODF is created by many companies and non profit organizations with competing goals, so the end result is a compromise between all the different goals... Having something in here which benefits one company to the detriment of everyone else is far less likely to happen because "everyone else" actually has a say in the process. This is more like a democratic process, where compromise is necessary.
To the absolute detriment of everyone else...
MS would compete using open standards if they were forced to, but keeping everyone locked in benefits them at the expense of everyone else. The EU does not exist to ensure MS makes profits, they should be working for the benefit of the majority of people (you know, how democracy is supposed to work) rather than harming the majority to help a select few.
Google know very little about me, i am just an unknown internet user who occasionally searches for things... Sure, they know what i search for and have searched for assuming i don't clear the cookies, but they have no idea who i actually am.
Microsoft can actually count many end users as paying customers and thus have their details on file...
Surely ignoring the least common queries is the most stupid thing to do... For the most common things, most people generally know where to go anyway... Search engines are for when you're actually looking for something.
Surely anyone who is concerned about this vulnerability could simply run one of the nightly builds until the official update is released?
Your not forced to use Ubuntu, even if you do use Ubuntu you aren't forced to use the default theme.. Far too much time gets wasted arguing over how the default themes etc will look, much better to have someone simply dictate the defaults. If you don't like it, you can change the settings or choose a different distro.
You'd download a browser using the system package manager... Most linux distros work this way, with a single command or selection in a gui you can choose a browser and have it downloaded and installed for you.
Not only that, but OO already supports macros, and does so in several existing languages as well as their own nonstandard language...
As you said, MS are trying to deprecate VBA so everyone will have to drop it sooner or later (and lets not forget that msoffice had a different macro language before VBA which is now long deprecated)...
I would much rather write macros in python or javascript as supported by openoffice - languages which have other uses and will teach me other skills i can reuse outside of writing office macros. Also being based on standard languages, there is nothing stopping third parties implementing openoffice compatible macros.
It is quite common for commercial vendors to offer loss leaders, ie the initial purchase has very thin margins or even incur a loss (unlikely in the case of software as the production cost is close to 0)...
Now this only works in situations where you can lock people in, eg games consoles and locked cellphones etc. You couldn't do this with a standard product such as a dvd player, because there is nothing to stop users from buying their dvds from someone else thus denying you the profit.
It is also fairly common for suppliers to outright lie about the costs, they provide a really cheap quote and the project gets started, once it reaches a certain point the budget suddenly starts slipping... By this time, they've already invested (ie lost) their original budget and got some progress so they have to continue pouring money into it because thats less risky and hopefully cheaper than starting again. There are countless projects which have gone massively over budget, and many suppliers actually design their quotes that way.
Buying proprietary software doesn't benefit everyone, it only benefits the single vendor of that software (to your own detriment often, as you get locked in)...
Buying locally shifts that benefit away from a single foreign entity, to one or more local entities which is beneficial for government who get their tax revenue from those same local entities.
However, by using open source they are contributing benefits to everyone... Any development they contribute back will benefit everyone, even any bug reports they make will ultimately benefit the community as a whole.