Efficiency is still a perfectly valid goal... We may have computers a thousand times more powerful than a few years ago, but we might want to reduce the consumption of electrical power, by using less powerful less power hungry machines to do the same thing, or consolidate the work of many machines onto a much smaller number by using more efficient code.
Personally, i'd love an ARM based laptop with the processing power of an ipod, but more ram and a bigger screen, and a bigger battery so i can get several hours battery life. Perfect for writing text while travelling.
I like the tv commercial advertising television sets... They show you example images of how great the set they're trying to advertise is supposed to look, but its being displayed on your existing set and will therefore never look any better than what you currently have.
Yes the situation is improving, but microsoft are still powerful enough to make it very difficult to run anything else... Once those barriers are gone, the situation should change very rapidly.
That's also exactly why ME was such garbage... They wanted the world to migrate from 98se to 2000, when that didn't happen they brought out ME and then XP.. ME to convince them what a steaming pile of crap the 9x series was, and XP as a slightly improved 2000.
Which is exactly the problem... You should be able to get security patches WITHOUT having to install lots of other unrelated cruft alongside it, and that includes things like stability related patches where the issue they address wasn't affecting you in the first place.
The addition of new features could potentially bring new security holes (more code to exploit), as well as harming performance and wasting space... Try comparing the speed of XP with and without SP2 side by side on the same hardware.
It just goes to show what can be achieved in an open market with multiple competitors (intel, amd, cyrix, via, idt etc), as opposed to a stifled closed market with one party or a small number of collaborators (alpha, hppa, ia64)....
A few years ago, x86 was utter garbage compared to virtually every other architecture out there... But the size and competitiveness of the x86 compatible market has forced companies to invest lots of money in improving their products, to the point that x86 is now ahead of most if not all of it's proprietary counterparts.
The sooner microsoft's strangle hold on the industry is broken, the better, so that the software world can start providing the benefits we got from the x86 compatible hardware market.
Hence a "burst rate"... You can download faster for a short period of time, but won't get that speed sustained. You will get the rate you paid for sustained.
You can even put a USB or IDE controller in it, and you can get a pci controller (the catweasel) that will allow a generic pc to read from amiga floppy drives, or you can take the hard drive from the amiga if it has one (almost certainly scsi) and connect it to a modern pc, where linux will read the disk just fine.
The Amiga is probably the easiest old machine to transfer data from these days, people are even still making new hardware and software for these old machines too.
Interestingly, someone just released a USB controller for the Amiga, that would work in your 2000. You can also get ethernet controllers for those machines, and it will read double density dos format floppies too (720kb ones)... And if you have a hard drive in there, chances are it's SCSI or possibly IDE, which is easy enough to hook up to a modern machine, and linux will read from it.
Transferring data from an Amiga is relatively easy.
I actually prefer the ISPs who are up front about the cap, even if the limit is ridiculously low... Virgin are one of the worst offenders, because like comcast they also have a cap but won't tell you what it is until you go over it and get billed or disconnected.
At least if you know up front, you can avoid such ISPs... If leased lines were cheaper, i would consider one (true uncapped service)... In the US you can get a T1 line for around $350/month which isn't too bad for guaranteed up/down rates and business class service.
250GB equates to just over 800kbit/sec over a month, or well under 1mbit. Now i wouldn't have an issue if that's how the service was sold (800kb service, burstable to 10mb or whatever)... But ISP marketing tries to make the service out to be something it's not. And then have the nerve to complain when people try to actually use what they thought they were buying.
I believe the default kernel actually has a bios update driver for dell systems... I've certainly seen it during configuration, but haven't tried using it. I do have an older dell laptop here, so i might see if it works on that.
Props to dell tho, for having a standard way to update their bios, rather than every manufacturer releasing their own crummy dos based update program which expect to boot from floppy and requires you to make your own dos based boot disk.
One of the most common reasons cited for not adopting Linux, is that people perceive things that don't cost anything as being worthless...
In this case, the Linux option is more expensive, and demonstrably superior (larger storage, boots quicker, comes with a much wider selection of applications). How many people will consider the extra $50 worth it for a significantly better package?
Also perhaps people might like to buy the cheaper windows version, and then "pirate" linux to get some of the additional features only usually available on the more expensive model?
OSX 10.3 is far from current, the virtual workspaces feature in 10.5 alone makes it usable for me (couldnt live without virtual workspaces, which windows still lacks).
Red yellow and green dots seem intuitive enough, red means stop (close), green means go (make it bigger) and yellow goes in the middle... You also get icons if you hover over the dots (not sure if 10.3 did that).
The shared menu at the top makes a lot of sense, it's always in the same place so you know exactly where to expect it... AmigaOS had the same feature, and it worked well there too.
Having a small subset of hardware won't make something run faster, it will make it more stable because you can test a small number of possible configurations far more thoroughly. If you want to compare speed between OSX and windows, try running the two side by side on identical machines, which is possible on modern macs easily, and doable on clones with hacked OSX.
Upgrades are pricey bought direct from Apple, as they are from most vendors, which is why very few people buy them direct. I'm typing this on a macbook pro, which has an extra 2gb ram (bought from crucial.com), and a larger hard drive (bought online somewhere). Very few people ever upgrade their machines anyway, most users keep a machine as-is until it dies or is replaced by a newer model. However, Apple should really make a model below the mac pro, a desktop system that is upgradeable but not so high end (and therefore expensive) as the mac pro. Perhaps imac specs, but in a regular case with pci slots and drives in bays etc. Some people even like the imac way of doing things, and buy non apple systems which are just as difficult to upgrade.
I don't like closed source software or hardware, but i wouldn't say that today's apple hardware is any worse than any other vendor. It runs standard x86 compatible CPUs, it can boot linux, windows, freebsd etc, just like any other off the shelf computer. Apple are just one of many vendors, but their value-add comes from offering a complete package, a combination of hardware and software from the same place, supported centrally and guaranteed to work together properly. This is fairly unique at the low end, and only matched at the high end by the likes of Sun and IBM.
The market isn't really the same... Some people want a tiny and cheap laptop, or an ultra cheap desktop, where Linux seems to be making inroads lately.
In the 80s, it wasnt really dos/windows that succeeded, it was the IBM compatible that succeeded, and dos was dragged along for the ride because it was cheap compared to the cost of hardware. Now people are gradually realising that while they gained significantly on the hardware side, software has gone the opposite way... They don't have the same open choices that IBM compatible hardware offers, and they have sacrificed the software choice that once existed too, even if most of the choices were tied to expensive proprietary hardware.
Microsoft have managed a classic trap, by using people's desire for open competition to bring better/cheaper hardware, and keeping the price of Dos low enough that the overall package was still cheaper than the proprietary hardware offered by others, they successfully got millions of users locked in to their closed proprietary software.
I, like many people i'm sure, would like the same freedom with software as i currently have with hardware.
Linux does well in the opposite end from OSX too, the cheap hardware where the extra cost of commercial software would make a significant difference to the price.
Most of the stability problems with the 360 are due to rushing it out a year ahead of Sony and Nintendo.. The 360 has a massively higher failure rate than either of the other competing consoles. Sony and Nintendo waited longer, and had better quality control / testing procedures in place to ensure their consoles were fit for market from the get go. That said, they do offer a 3 year warrantee on the 360 to try and make up for the stability problems.
Why is it bullshit that the EU, an elected governmental body, has the power to control how a company does business within it's borders?
And you hit the nail on the head about it being better for consumers, the EU politicians are elected by and paid for by european consumers, the government exists for the benefit of all of it's people. Doing what's better for european consumers is exactly the purpose of the EU and i'm glad to see it doing it's job.
Sure it's retarded that MS should have to open their protocols and formats to competitors, it's retarded that closed formats and protocols existed in the first place and the EU is trying to fix that.
This should be applied to other companies too, the use of closed protocols should be banned entirely, with a requirement that full documentation is released at the same time as the first implementation.
The ugliness is the least of the issues, since it's relatively themeable. Having a faster computer does not make up for the slowness... Imagine that faster computer running less bloated software. The bloat merely offsets the benefit you would have gotten from the faster machine, as well as increasing it's running costs (power usage, modern CPUs can severely reduce their power consumption when idle).
It also doesn't matter how bad it is, so long as new computers come with it. People who don't know any better will end up with it, and learn to suffer along with it and work arounds its problems as if such problems are normal, just like they did with previous windows versions.
They do that across the board... On the desktop space it doesn't hurt them too badly, because the linux/mac users they alienate are relatively few.. In the mobile space it's doing them no good whatsoever, as you pointed out.
They're stuck in the mentality of trying to force people to use their products, and their products alone, for everything. As well as leveraging the few successful products they do have (arguably illegal) they are making some of their unsuccessful products tie down others.
What the EU really need to do instead of handing out fines and wrist slaps, is force companies to interoperate and rally around true open standards, not just microsoft but other vendors too. This would benefit the industry as a whole, consumers as a whole and would actually help some of the less successful divisions of microsoft stand on their own.
Aside from the MSN and mobile examples you cited, I would like to see the Xbox able to stream from something other than a windows box using a proprietary protocol... The idea of using a games console to play video is so you don't need a computer running, i have a hard drive connected to my wireless access point, my modded xbox will play video from it via SMB but the 360 won't. The 360 also only recently got support for some non-ms video formats, but the support is still nowhere near that offered by XBMC that runs on the original xbox, and they only support these extra formats in response to Sony doing it first.
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Efficiency is still a perfectly valid goal...
We may have computers a thousand times more powerful than a few years ago, but we might want to reduce the consumption of electrical power, by using less powerful less power hungry machines to do the same thing, or consolidate the work of many machines onto a much smaller number by using more efficient code.
Personally, i'd love an ARM based laptop with the processing power of an ipod, but more ram and a bigger screen, and a bigger battery so i can get several hours battery life. Perfect for writing text while travelling.
I like the tv commercial advertising television sets...
They show you example images of how great the set they're trying to advertise is supposed to look, but its being displayed on your existing set and will therefore never look any better than what you currently have.
But you can download the direct3d runtime from microsoft without having to buy windows...
Yes the situation is improving, but microsoft are still powerful enough to make it very difficult to run anything else... Once those barriers are gone, the situation should change very rapidly.
That's also exactly why ME was such garbage...
They wanted the world to migrate from 98se to 2000, when that didn't happen they brought out ME and then XP.. ME to convince them what a steaming pile of crap the 9x series was, and XP as a slightly improved 2000.
Which is exactly the problem...
You should be able to get security patches WITHOUT having to install lots of other unrelated cruft alongside it, and that includes things like stability related patches where the issue they address wasn't affecting you in the first place.
The addition of new features could potentially bring new security holes (more code to exploit), as well as harming performance and wasting space... Try comparing the speed of XP with and without SP2 side by side on the same hardware.
It just goes to show what can be achieved in an open market with multiple competitors (intel, amd, cyrix, via, idt etc), as opposed to a stifled closed market with one party or a small number of collaborators (alpha, hppa, ia64)....
A few years ago, x86 was utter garbage compared to virtually every other architecture out there... But the size and competitiveness of the x86 compatible market has forced companies to invest lots of money in improving their products, to the point that x86 is now ahead of most if not all of it's proprietary counterparts.
The sooner microsoft's strangle hold on the industry is broken, the better, so that the software world can start providing the benefits we got from the x86 compatible hardware market.
Well, you can already download linux using bittorrent, it's even indexed on the pirate bay!
Hence a "burst rate"... You can download faster for a short period of time, but won't get that speed sustained. You will get the rate you paid for sustained.
You can even put a USB or IDE controller in it, and you can get a pci controller (the catweasel) that will allow a generic pc to read from amiga floppy drives, or you can take the hard drive from the amiga if it has one (almost certainly scsi) and connect it to a modern pc, where linux will read the disk just fine.
The Amiga is probably the easiest old machine to transfer data from these days, people are even still making new hardware and software for these old machines too.
Interestingly, someone just released a USB controller for the Amiga, that would work in your 2000. You can also get ethernet controllers for those machines, and it will read double density dos format floppies too (720kb ones)... And if you have a hard drive in there, chances are it's SCSI or possibly IDE, which is easy enough to hook up to a modern machine, and linux will read from it.
Transferring data from an Amiga is relatively easy.
I actually prefer the ISPs who are up front about the cap, even if the limit is ridiculously low...
Virgin are one of the worst offenders, because like comcast they also have a cap but won't tell you what it is until you go over it and get billed or disconnected.
At least if you know up front, you can avoid such ISPs...
If leased lines were cheaper, i would consider one (true uncapped service)... In the US you can get a T1 line for around $350/month which isn't too bad for guaranteed up/down rates and business class service.
250GB equates to just over 800kbit/sec over a month, or well under 1mbit.
Now i wouldn't have an issue if that's how the service was sold (800kb service, burstable to 10mb or whatever)... But ISP marketing tries to make the service out to be something it's not. And then have the nerve to complain when people try to actually use what they thought they were buying.
I believe the default kernel actually has a bios update driver for dell systems... I've certainly seen it during configuration, but haven't tried using it. I do have an older dell laptop here, so i might see if it works on that.
Props to dell tho, for having a standard way to update their bios, rather than every manufacturer releasing their own crummy dos based update program which expect to boot from floppy and requires you to make your own dos based boot disk.
One of the most common reasons cited for not adopting Linux, is that people perceive things that don't cost anything as being worthless...
In this case, the Linux option is more expensive, and demonstrably superior (larger storage, boots quicker, comes with a much wider selection of applications). How many people will consider the extra $50 worth it for a significantly better package?
Also perhaps people might like to buy the cheaper windows version, and then "pirate" linux to get some of the additional features only usually available on the more expensive model?
OSX 10.3 is far from current, the virtual workspaces feature in 10.5 alone makes it usable for me (couldnt live without virtual workspaces, which windows still lacks).
Red yellow and green dots seem intuitive enough, red means stop (close), green means go (make it bigger) and yellow goes in the middle... You also get icons if you hover over the dots (not sure if 10.3 did that).
The shared menu at the top makes a lot of sense, it's always in the same place so you know exactly where to expect it... AmigaOS had the same feature, and it worked well there too.
Having a small subset of hardware won't make something run faster, it will make it more stable because you can test a small number of possible configurations far more thoroughly. If you want to compare speed between OSX and windows, try running the two side by side on identical machines, which is possible on modern macs easily, and doable on clones with hacked OSX.
Upgrades are pricey bought direct from Apple, as they are from most vendors, which is why very few people buy them direct. I'm typing this on a macbook pro, which has an extra 2gb ram (bought from crucial.com), and a larger hard drive (bought online somewhere). Very few people ever upgrade their machines anyway, most users keep a machine as-is until it dies or is replaced by a newer model.
However, Apple should really make a model below the mac pro, a desktop system that is upgradeable but not so high end (and therefore expensive) as the mac pro. Perhaps imac specs, but in a regular case with pci slots and drives in bays etc.
Some people even like the imac way of doing things, and buy non apple systems which are just as difficult to upgrade.
I don't like closed source software or hardware, but i wouldn't say that today's apple hardware is any worse than any other vendor. It runs standard x86 compatible CPUs, it can boot linux, windows, freebsd etc, just like any other off the shelf computer. Apple are just one of many vendors, but their value-add comes from offering a complete package, a combination of hardware and software from the same place, supported centrally and guaranteed to work together properly. This is fairly unique at the low end, and only matched at the high end by the likes of Sun and IBM.
The market isn't really the same...
Some people want a tiny and cheap laptop, or an ultra cheap desktop, where Linux seems to be making inroads lately.
In the 80s, it wasnt really dos/windows that succeeded, it was the IBM compatible that succeeded, and dos was dragged along for the ride because it was cheap compared to the cost of hardware.
Now people are gradually realising that while they gained significantly on the hardware side, software has gone the opposite way... They don't have the same open choices that IBM compatible hardware offers, and they have sacrificed the software choice that once existed too, even if most of the choices were tied to expensive proprietary hardware.
Microsoft have managed a classic trap, by using people's desire for open competition to bring better/cheaper hardware, and keeping the price of Dos low enough that the overall package was still cheaper than the proprietary hardware offered by others, they successfully got millions of users locked in to their closed proprietary software.
I, like many people i'm sure, would like the same freedom with software as i currently have with hardware.
Linux does well in the opposite end from OSX too, the cheap hardware where the extra cost of commercial software would make a significant difference to the price.
Most of the stability problems with the 360 are due to rushing it out a year ahead of Sony and Nintendo.. The 360 has a massively higher failure rate than either of the other competing consoles. Sony and Nintendo waited longer, and had better quality control / testing procedures in place to ensure their consoles were fit for market from the get go.
That said, they do offer a 3 year warrantee on the 360 to try and make up for the stability problems.
Why is it bullshit that the EU, an elected governmental body, has the power to control how a company does business within it's borders?
And you hit the nail on the head about it being better for consumers, the EU politicians are elected by and paid for by european consumers, the government exists for the benefit of all of it's people. Doing what's better for european consumers is exactly the purpose of the EU and i'm glad to see it doing it's job.
Sure it's retarded that MS should have to open their protocols and formats to competitors, it's retarded that closed formats and protocols existed in the first place and the EU is trying to fix that.
This should be applied to other companies too, the use of closed protocols should be banned entirely, with a requirement that full documentation is released at the same time as the first implementation.
The ugliness is the least of the issues, since it's relatively themeable.
Having a faster computer does not make up for the slowness... Imagine that faster computer running less bloated software. The bloat merely offsets the benefit you would have gotten from the faster machine, as well as increasing it's running costs (power usage, modern CPUs can severely reduce their power consumption when idle).
It also doesn't matter how bad it is, so long as new computers come with it.
People who don't know any better will end up with it, and learn to suffer along with it and work arounds its problems as if such problems are normal, just like they did with previous windows versions.
They do that across the board...
On the desktop space it doesn't hurt them too badly, because the linux/mac users they alienate are relatively few.. In the mobile space it's doing them no good whatsoever, as you pointed out.
They're stuck in the mentality of trying to force people to use their products, and their products alone, for everything. As well as leveraging the few successful products they do have (arguably illegal) they are making some of their unsuccessful products tie down others.
What the EU really need to do instead of handing out fines and wrist slaps, is force companies to interoperate and rally around true open standards, not just microsoft but other vendors too. This would benefit the industry as a whole, consumers as a whole and would actually help some of the less successful divisions of microsoft stand on their own.
Aside from the MSN and mobile examples you cited, I would like to see the Xbox able to stream from something other than a windows box using a proprietary protocol... The idea of using a games console to play video is so you don't need a computer running, i have a hard drive connected to my wireless access point, my modded xbox will play video from it via SMB but the 360 won't.
The 360 also only recently got support for some non-ms video formats, but the support is still nowhere near that offered by XBMC that runs on the original xbox, and they only support these extra formats in response to Sony doing it first.
Yeah, that's true enough...
But you will get all the tree huggers complaining either way....
Build a coal power plant, they complain about pollution.
Build a wind farm, they complain about it blighting the landscape...
They won't be satisfied until we're living in caves again.