And it also maintained very good compatibility with the old DOS and 16-bit Windows applications (games) at the same time. Quite an achievement actually.
Until Classic emulation of OS 9 apps in OS X came on the scene, anyway.
When I look back on OS 9 I can't help but think of how much it works like Windows 3.1. But yes you've got a point, there was really just no way to "fix" OS 9, it just had too many fundamental designs forming massive barriers to the progress that was necessary.
OS's probably have to evolve that way though... making a major design leap, and spend the next several years tweaking it, then suddenly leap again and repeat.
For Mac OS, at least back to my memory, that was the unifinder present up to what, mac os 6, and then the jump to the unifinder in OS 7, which just tweaked its way to OS 9, and then another leap to OS X. We're about due for another jump here I think.
With MS it was dos, then windows 3, then windows 95. I don't really see any fundamental leap in Windows after that point. They're long overdue.
Well, 98SE anyway. That was the only windows system I ever was able to use properly without totally wanting to throw the mouse across the room. Lots of fixes to 98 in SE.
I'm not tlaking about the smothness of graphics, clearly we're way beyond that. But look at how it was orginized on the desktop. Easy to see what you want, you knew at a glance where to go.
Isn't that going to just get the old issue of "who invented the modern computer desktop" rehashed all over again? First we'll hear from the mac users, then someone will bring up Xerox.
OK maybe that's discussing the industry as a whole. Maybe that was the defining moment for Windows though. It'll be interesting to watch for the next revolutionary new idea in computer interface design though.
The fact that a brand has become so successful that many people informally but incorrectly use it to refer to anything in that generic class doesn't mean anything in that generic class should be allowed to call *itself* by that trademark.
Actually if you let your term fall into generic everyday use without defending it you can lose it. Companies that are in danger of losing a trademark because if common use often mix in their company name in all their ads.
Microsoft Office Kleenex Brand Tissues Ziploc Brand Zip-Locs (you never hear the ad say just "Zip-Loc") BandAid brand Band-aids
The latter variant is the most common. The formula is simply "(company name) Brand (trademark in danger name)" Listen for that pattern and you'll be amazed how much you hear it. That's the sound of a company trying desperately to hang onto their trademark.
Some of them I don't know the status of, and will probably never know who if anyone ever had the trademark for them. "Duct Tape" and the like. I wonder who actually first marketed the magic grey rolls? I'd like to say 3-M but that's just because they're known for stuff like that. Whoever it is lost that round of the trademark game, badly.
Some words got defended heavily and as a result, the "next best thing" market invented name stuck better than the trademark. (sorry, you lose, please try again!) "CD" is my favorite. Who really calls it a Compact Disk(tm) anymore? This is basically the result of the combined marketing campaigns of all your competitors doing a better job of marketing than you.
I've heard the same realtor's ad on the radio here for a month now, and one of its catch-phrases at the end is "Only Realtors are members of the National Association of Realtors.".
That always struck me as an "orly?" (/duh?) statement every time I heard their ad, but now reading this I wonder if they are trying to strengthen their "name brand" (NAR) so to speak since they are losing their lock-in? Since now merely looking for a Realtor doesn't necessarily mean they will get your business.
too bad it's not a dime to rent it for say, a month or something like that. Or to just have unlimited access to it.
A decent application of this would be to allow people to build their own playlist, of any songs in lala's library. (lets assume for the sake of argument they have most of what we want) Pay a flat monthly fee, say $2, or some amount relative to the songs in your list. (say one penny/song) $2/month is not a bad amount to pay for a month of access to your customized 200 song playlist from any internet computer. Certainly cheaper than trying to build that library on your ipod at the ITMS, which you only half own, or buying the at least 15-30 CDs to truly own it.
I currently listen to internet radio at work (at a pathetic bitrate too) and would love something like that if it were reasonably priced.
There are a lot of people complaining in this article about that they just don't like it or are against the entire idea. How about some more people with ideas on how to make it work for you?
just thinking about it, although having a fast reboot time is surely nice, it's not something you should have to benefit from often? I beat my system to death here and reboot about every other week. I know some people that haven't restarted their machine more than a dozen times since they bought it a year ago.
Early adopters, start your engines, because someone's gotta find out.
I was rather expecting a "iWantOne" tag on this article, because I DO.
I've been an early adopter on hard drives more than once. Back in '98 my laptop had a 23gb (yes, 23) HDD in it, and that was awesome to have that kind of portable storage. It made that nasty "I'm about to die" click about ten times a day, for every day of the two years I owned it too, when I sold it in working condition.
If it's not too painful I may bite. My laptop syncs with the backup every night so I'm not too worried if it tanks. In fact I hope it does. That means they'll give me a new, better one a couple months later. Maybe more than once. That can be one advantage of early adopter. By the time things settle down, you have the same thing that everyone else did, but you've just had it a lot longer. (at a price of course)
Too bad TFA didn't give a guesstimate on MSRP. One thread I found suggests $8k which is a little steep even for me.
One person tested a MBP booting off a 64GB SDD. OMG. The gear didn't even have a chance to spin. A good chunk of the boot time was taken waiting for hardware to come ready.
In some cases landers have to deal with what color of light makes it to the surface. Earth has a clear atmosphere, which is uncommon. Mars's atmosphere makes everything look sepia.
is the extra little props they sometimes tossed in the box. The Ultima series was good for this. What's some of the more interesting props people have seen way back when?
haven't you heard? when you can't find a way to solve the problem, you do the second best thing. Solve some other problem instead, and market it as a solution to the first problem.
Driver level can make certain assumptions about the physical drive, such as seek time, and for example, work to decrease disk fragmentation. Fragmentation is very minor issue with SSDs. So there will be a minor performance hit (from maximum possible in the SDD) due to the things the drivers and os do to try to get the most performance out of a HDD.
The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software.
I could see other minor tweaks. I'm sure no OS seriously expects a new hard drive to spin up reliably in anything under 2 seconds. Imagine how fast wake times on laptops can be when restoring RAM from storage? As long as the hardware is being worked on to wake up that fast. But right now they know they have a few seconds to wait for the HDD to spin up so they're not necessarily seeing a need to optimize wakeup. I'm sure there are other similar issues.
A very useful change would be to alter the standard block size from 512 bytes to something larger, say 32k. Since it's more efficient to flash larger blocks at a time, we may see native block sizes go up for optimal performance on SDDs. No telling how well the OS and software will handle that sort of change. I bet that is hardcoded all over the place. That would dramatically improve write speeds though. So there will be growing pains
"good" means different things to different people. I'm assuming we're discussing the random average of people, not specifically the computer-savvy. If only 10% of the people using Vista are computer-savvy, should those be the only people we listen to? Maybe those 10% will give the opinion which best matches yours, but that doesn't speak accurately for the product as perceived by the masses.
it's probably more of a matter of people not realizing they have a choice in the matter. they feel they can choose what computer they buy, be it a dell or a compaq or a beige box, but they just don't see that the OS is also a choice they (should) have.
I bet if you asked 100 people that were about to buy a pc, "so are you getting that with windows?" I bet over 90 of them would look at you like a dog listening to an opera. (head cocked, with that "huuuuh?" look on their face) The other 10 would say "you mean I have a choice?"
I suppose when you (1) force manufacturers to bundle your product, and then (2) make it very hard to return it, then yes I suppose you can say it's selling well...
not everyone that calls for technical support is unhappy. A lot of calls are people asking (sometimes very stupid) questions. "How do I empty the trash?" Of the ones that are unhappy, a lot of the time you can make them happy very quickly and easily by helping them solve their problem. "It keeps doing xxx and I can't make it stop!" "click here and here and check that box." "oh, I didn't know that was there. that was simple. thank you!"
The certs thing is another angle. I personally am in that particular position where I work - the certs I have are required to keep our doors open. (and one of them is very hard to get and I have to renew yearly) No matter how much I point this out, everyone is always "oh ya we need to get xxx to get those certs as well, as soon as we have time". And that going on for 2+ years now. Reality is going to be painful when I decide to move on, but they've been given way more warning than they should need so I'm not going to shed a tear over it.
Some lessons I think in most cases just have to be learned the hard way. Whether or not they survive the lesson, seems largely a matter of luck.
That's what I was working on figuring out, from the wording of the article ("explosion") it made it sound like a big deal, like when a rocket launch goes bad. (see various youtube links in this thread)
But when I got to reading, they use the word "explosion" for solder. Solder is not big. It's not like a fuel tank went up - this is a little bit of electronics. That sounds like a smaller explosion than you get with your average match when you strike it.
That's like talking about buildings and saying there was a "collapse", and if you RTFA close enough you find what they're actually referring to is the water glass on the table in the lounge tipped over.
We discussed this, and she said, well, lets not repeat it here. But short summary is "not a chance". She quit before retirement age but still got a good pension, she'd been working there since she was like 22. They would not go contract, but they would allow her to continue working a few months with bonuses to train someone. She was very confident they intended to wait until she got someone bare-minimum trained, and then cook up some excuse to fire her, which would have erased her pension.
It was interesting to observe. They even somehow got the president of her union to call her and see if she couldn't convince her to come back to work for a bit. They clearly knew they were in serious trouble when she quit, but they were never willing to contract her, which I don't understand. That was the last she heard from them. Best guess is they were afraid of setting a precedent and others jumping ship at about the same time to collect the same fat contract time.
no one is irreplaceable, but you can't generalize that anyone that quits will cause only "minor glitches".
I personally know someone that cost a large company what likely turned out to be a few million dollars when she left. She quit because she couldn't schedule vacation time without working her butt off for 2 weeks preparing things in advance, and then returning buried for 2 months playing catchup because nobody was willing to let her train anyone else (in the WORLD) to do what she did, which was quite a few obscure yet important things. (imagine a 40+ story building that occupies a city block, and 4+ floors of that building can't do their jobs, (jobs where work snowballs when not done) for several weeks, and ongoing impacts to parts of the building for the next 4 months) The result was a lot of heads rolled and several new policies were instituted after about 6 months of unbelievable chaos. "this will never be allowed to happen again" was heard by one of her coworkers as things wound down. At least it looks like they learned their lesson.
Given, that's an exception and not the rule, but it's fun to look at what can happen.
Slashdot Mirror
OK we saw the Air and now we have the Wind.
Who's up for earth? Dell for some reason comes to mind. Something to do with dirt I think.
And who better for a laptop Fire than Sony?
And it also maintained very good compatibility with the old DOS and 16-bit Windows applications (games) at the same time. Quite an achievement actually.
Until Classic emulation of OS 9 apps in OS X came on the scene, anyway.
When I look back on OS 9 I can't help but think of how much it works like Windows 3.1. But yes you've got a point, there was really just no way to "fix" OS 9, it just had too many fundamental designs forming massive barriers to the progress that was necessary.
OS's probably have to evolve that way though... making a major design leap, and spend the next several years tweaking it, then suddenly leap again and repeat.
For Mac OS, at least back to my memory, that was the unifinder present up to what, mac os 6, and then the jump to the unifinder in OS 7, which just tweaked its way to OS 9, and then another leap to OS X. We're about due for another jump here I think.
With MS it was dos, then windows 3, then windows 95. I don't really see any fundamental leap in Windows after that point. They're long overdue.
Well, 98SE anyway. That was the only windows system I ever was able to use properly without totally wanting to throw the mouse across the room. Lots of fixes to 98 in SE.
I'm not tlaking about the smothness of graphics, clearly we're way beyond that.
But look at how it was orginized on the desktop.
Easy to see what you want, you knew at a glance where to go.
Isn't that going to just get the old issue of "who invented the modern computer desktop" rehashed all over again? First we'll hear from the mac users, then someone will bring up Xerox.
OK maybe that's discussing the industry as a whole. Maybe that was the defining moment for Windows though. It'll be interesting to watch for the next revolutionary new idea in computer interface design though.
Quite possibly NASA's first ever major problem that not even the magical duct tape could save the day.
Now watch, we'll read tomorrow about them making a new makeshift toilet with duct tape...
The fact that a brand has become so successful that
many people informally but incorrectly use it to refer to anything in that generic class doesn't mean anything in that generic class should be allowed to call *itself* by that trademark.
Actually if you let your term fall into generic everyday use without defending it you can lose it. Companies that are in danger of losing a trademark because if common use often mix in their company name in all their ads.
Microsoft Office
Kleenex Brand Tissues
Ziploc Brand Zip-Locs (you never hear the ad say just "Zip-Loc")
BandAid brand Band-aids
The latter variant is the most common. The formula is simply "(company name) Brand (trademark in danger name)" Listen for that pattern and you'll be amazed how much you hear it. That's the sound of a company trying desperately to hang onto their trademark.
Some of them I don't know the status of, and will probably never know who if anyone ever had the trademark for them. "Duct Tape" and the like. I wonder who actually first marketed the magic grey rolls? I'd like to say 3-M but that's just because they're known for stuff like that. Whoever it is lost that round of the trademark game, badly.
Some words got defended heavily and as a result, the "next best thing" market invented name stuck better than the trademark. (sorry, you lose, please try again!) "CD" is my favorite. Who really calls it a Compact Disk(tm) anymore? This is basically the result of the combined marketing campaigns of all your competitors doing a better job of marketing than you.
I've heard the same realtor's ad on the radio here for a month now, and one of its catch-phrases at the end is "Only Realtors are members of the National Association of Realtors.".
That always struck me as an "orly?" (/duh?) statement every time I heard their ad, but now reading this I wonder if they are trying to strengthen their "name brand" (NAR) so to speak since they are losing their lock-in? Since now merely looking for a Realtor doesn't necessarily mean they will get your business.
too bad it's not a dime to rent it for say, a month or something like that. Or to just have unlimited access to it.
A decent application of this would be to allow people to build their own playlist, of any songs in lala's library. (lets assume for the sake of argument they have most of what we want) Pay a flat monthly fee, say $2, or some amount relative to the songs in your list. (say one penny/song) $2/month is not a bad amount to pay for a month of access to your customized 200 song playlist from any internet computer. Certainly cheaper than trying to build that library on your ipod at the ITMS, which you only half own, or buying the at least 15-30 CDs to truly own it.
I currently listen to internet radio at work (at a pathetic bitrate too) and would love something like that if it were reasonably priced.
There are a lot of people complaining in this article about that they just don't like it or are against the entire idea. How about some more people with ideas on how to make it work for you?
just thinking about it, although having a fast reboot time is surely nice, it's not something you should have to benefit from often? I beat my system to death here and reboot about every other week. I know some people that haven't restarted their machine more than a dozen times since they bought it a year ago.
Early adopters, start your engines, because someone's gotta find out.
I was rather expecting a "iWantOne" tag on this article, because I DO.
I've been an early adopter on hard drives more than once. Back in '98 my laptop had a 23gb (yes, 23) HDD in it, and that was awesome to have that kind of portable storage. It made that nasty "I'm about to die" click about ten times a day, for every day of the two years I owned it too, when I sold it in working condition.
If it's not too painful I may bite. My laptop syncs with the backup every night so I'm not too worried if it tanks. In fact I hope it does. That means they'll give me a new, better one a couple months later. Maybe more than once. That can be one advantage of early adopter. By the time things settle down, you have the same thing that everyone else did, but you've just had it a lot longer. (at a price of course)
Too bad TFA didn't give a guesstimate on MSRP. One thread I found suggests $8k which is a little steep even for me.
One person tested a MBP booting off a 64GB SDD. OMG. The gear didn't even have a chance to spin. A good chunk of the boot time was taken waiting for hardware to come ready.
In some cases landers have to deal with what color of light makes it to the surface. Earth has a clear atmosphere, which is uncommon. Mars's atmosphere makes everything look sepia.
it's at http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
which gets me to
mms://63.250.197.126/bcpenc252181?StreamID=63028387&pl_auth=260dc337232994e3effab4ac6815cac2&ht=30&pl_b=00448ED8EB43295F2A427EA386483A2A83&CG_ID=1369080&Segment=149773
(you can open that in VLC, quicktime player, or just in your browser)
But I wasn't able to find anything that could save it properly. VLC was able to save it but it wasn't in a format i could play.
didn't one of the halo limited sets come in a case that looked like master sgt's helmet?
is the extra little props they sometimes tossed in the box. The Ultima series was good for this. What's some of the more interesting props people have seen way back when?
haven't you heard? when you can't find a way to solve the problem, you do the second best thing. Solve some other problem instead, and market it as a solution to the first problem.
Driver level can make certain assumptions about the physical drive, such as seek time, and for example, work to decrease disk fragmentation. Fragmentation is very minor issue with SSDs. So there will be a minor performance hit (from maximum possible in the SDD) due to the things the drivers and os do to try to get the most performance out of a HDD.
The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software.
I could see other minor tweaks. I'm sure no OS seriously expects a new hard drive to spin up reliably in anything under 2 seconds. Imagine how fast wake times on laptops can be when restoring RAM from storage? As long as the hardware is being worked on to wake up that fast. But right now they know they have a few seconds to wait for the HDD to spin up so they're not necessarily seeing a need to optimize wakeup. I'm sure there are other similar issues.
A very useful change would be to alter the standard block size from 512 bytes to something larger, say 32k. Since it's more efficient to flash larger blocks at a time, we may see native block sizes go up for optimal performance on SDDs. No telling how well the OS and software will handle that sort of change. I bet that is hardcoded all over the place. That would dramatically improve write speeds though. So there will be growing pains
"good" means different things to different people. I'm assuming we're discussing the random average of people, not specifically the computer-savvy. If only 10% of the people using Vista are computer-savvy, should those be the only people we listen to? Maybe those 10% will give the opinion which best matches yours, but that doesn't speak accurately for the product as perceived by the masses.
it's probably more of a matter of people not realizing they have a choice in the matter. they feel they can choose what computer they buy, be it a dell or a compaq or a beige box, but they just don't see that the OS is also a choice they (should) have.
I bet if you asked 100 people that were about to buy a pc, "so are you getting that with windows?" I bet over 90 of them would look at you like a dog listening to an opera. (head cocked, with that "huuuuh?" look on their face) The other 10 would say "you mean I have a choice?"
I suppose when you (1) force manufacturers to bundle your product, and then (2) make it very hard to return it, then yes I suppose you can say it's selling well...
not everyone that calls for technical support is unhappy. A lot of calls are people asking (sometimes very stupid) questions. "How do I empty the trash?" Of the ones that are unhappy, a lot of the time you can make them happy very quickly and easily by helping them solve their problem. "It keeps doing xxx and I can't make it stop!" "click here and here and check that box." "oh, I didn't know that was there. that was simple. thank you!"
The certs thing is another angle. I personally am in that particular position where I work - the certs I have are required to keep our doors open. (and one of them is very hard to get and I have to renew yearly) No matter how much I point this out, everyone is always "oh ya we need to get xxx to get those certs as well, as soon as we have time". And that going on for 2+ years now. Reality is going to be painful when I decide to move on, but they've been given way more warning than they should need so I'm not going to shed a tear over it.
Some lessons I think in most cases just have to be learned the hard way. Whether or not they survive the lesson, seems largely a matter of luck.
That's what I was working on figuring out, from the wording of the article ("explosion") it made it sound like a big deal, like when a rocket launch goes bad. (see various youtube links in this thread)
But when I got to reading, they use the word "explosion" for solder. Solder is not big. It's not like a fuel tank went up - this is a little bit of electronics. That sounds like a smaller explosion than you get with your average match when you strike it.
That's like talking about buildings and saying there was a "collapse", and if you RTFA close enough you find what they're actually referring to is the water glass on the table in the lounge tipped over.
Honest perhaps, but definitely deceptive.
We discussed this, and she said, well, lets not repeat it here. But short summary is "not a chance". She quit before retirement age but still got a good pension, she'd been working there since she was like 22. They would not go contract, but they would allow her to continue working a few months with bonuses to train someone. She was very confident they intended to wait until she got someone bare-minimum trained, and then cook up some excuse to fire her, which would have erased her pension.
It was interesting to observe. They even somehow got the president of her union to call her and see if she couldn't convince her to come back to work for a bit. They clearly knew they were in serious trouble when she quit, but they were never willing to contract her, which I don't understand. That was the last she heard from them. Best guess is they were afraid of setting a precedent and others jumping ship at about the same time to collect the same fat contract time.
no one is irreplaceable, but you can't generalize that anyone that quits will cause only "minor glitches".
I personally know someone that cost a large company what likely turned out to be a few million dollars when she left. She quit because she couldn't schedule vacation time without working her butt off for 2 weeks preparing things in advance, and then returning buried for 2 months playing catchup because nobody was willing to let her train anyone else (in the WORLD) to do what she did, which was quite a few obscure yet important things. (imagine a 40+ story building that occupies a city block, and 4+ floors of that building can't do their jobs, (jobs where work snowballs when not done) for several weeks, and ongoing impacts to parts of the building for the next 4 months) The result was a lot of heads rolled and several new policies were instituted after about 6 months of unbelievable chaos. "this will never be allowed to happen again" was heard by one of her coworkers as things wound down. At least it looks like they learned their lesson.
Given, that's an exception and not the rule, but it's fun to look at what can happen.