We note your concerns and indeed if personal computing had started in the manner you suggested, then it would be a different world. For instance, IBM would not have had any need for Microsoft to provide BASIC so users of their new device could write their own utility programs. No BASIC, no asking Microsoft for an operating system. Is your mind blown? My mind's blown. I'm taking a moment.
And with that wavy cross-dissolve my Scene 2 what-if speculation/flashback concludes and I'm back from the alternate scenario. A dream, but it was so real. And you were there. And you. And... but I digress.
I'm soon off to walk to work. Now I could drive and when I get in the car, I sort of understand implicitly that my freedoms are restricted as to what routes and lanes I take and how fast I may go and what colors I correlate with acceleration, but I do accept it. I like writing programs and I like what free and open software has done to make my life better. I can't write programs for my iPhone. On the other hand, telephoning on my computer, though improved, is problematic. It sure doesn't fit in my pocket. I guess the point I'm making is give us some credit. We understand what we are and are not getting. When we need more, we'll use something else. In my case that something else is running Linux or FreeBSD.
In conclusion, I hope you have a good day and while we will keep a chair available, we'll plan to have someone else bring the cookies to our inaugural iPad User Group meeting.
Cheers, Dan
P.S. I could write programs for my iPhone, but the hassle isn't worth it. It'd make more sense to deliver custom functionality via a webhost under my control and that way any networked computer I have access to could use it.
Has BusinessWeek learned nothing about Apple over the last 13 years?
Apple does not need to be the only or number one product in a sector to make money. It's nice when they are, because they really, really, make money when it happens. So Google now makes a phone. It is not likely to harm the phone with the better interface as much as the phones with lousy or no interface.
Meanwhile, Google pays Apple for the customers it delivers. I'm sure if Microsoft wants to pay, Apple will cordially listen, but it won't say yes just to frost off Google. They'll say yes if the green comes in from Redmond.
By fleshing out an implementation, perhaps this pre-empts someone patenting "Controlled Leak, Product" (as opposed to nuclear power plant, hot air balloon, disinformation, tire, etc.)
If Apple's execs were pissed, they were pissed all the way to the bank because Apple had unit sales growth during the laptop hunters run.
Meanwhile, the pc makers showed declines except in the netbook sector. Microsoft's gross revenues take a hit when a netbook is bought as opposed to a laptop. (Not that every netbook sold is a laptop not sold, but Microsoft, in order to fight off the Linux threat in the netbook market, discounted OEM Windows heavily and I wouldn't be surprised if, to break even, Microsoft needed 3 OEM netbook sales to offset an OEM laptop not sold, prior to Win7's release.)
Plus, what was the one common element in all commercials? The glance at and dismissal of the Macs as more expensive. This is not news. Go back and check the Apple/Windows flamewars and you'll note the cost point is conceded and the arguments are whether the differential is overstated and whether the higher cost makes sense because of a higher value. An ad which shows someone making a decision primarily on cost does not really help Microsoft's partners sell their premium high-profit systems. And, in retrospect, it didn't deter enough people from buying a Mac. In a deep recession.
Now I suppose it gave the Windows polemicists plenty of chances to go "neener, neener" as the Apple fanbois and the advertising theoreticians - like me, though I do use and like my Macs - would explain why we thought the ads were not that good, and perhaps that counts as effective. Sure why not? And when did Microsoft have its worst quarter in history?
The only advantage C has as a language is speed. It is difficult to read and relies on the programmer knowing enough not to shoot themselves in the foot. C++ has bolting upon bolting upon bolting of things in order to deliver OOP, and its primary advantage is the speed of C: it is semantic/syntactic goulash.
As to today's problem, I gather one of the unspoken issues is picking a language the teacher knows well enough so as to answer the student's questions. Assuming from the phrasing of the question that the asker would like to know the better imperative languages to teach, then, maybe python is the answer. I've heard reports from a teacher of an undergraduate course that the students respond to it fairly well.
But that brings us to another issue, the age of the student. How we learn differs as we grow through childhood and adolescence and the best language for an 18 year old may be totally unsuited for a 12 year old. Logo and SmallTalk (Squeak) are languages and runtimes which teach children the message and response paradigm of computing application. The Carnegie Mellon people are really excited about Alice as a teaching language.
The way I look at it, one doesn't teach children about chemistry by launching into the shell model of electrons and discussing valences and bondings. No, one puts some lemon juice on baking soda and then explain what the child saw and in simple terms. Regarding teaching computing and an introduction to languages, I'd want to not bother the child with memory allocations and deallocations and I'm not sure the entry form bias of the Visual languages is all that energizing a subject matter. Interactively creating objects, moving them through space, and causing them to draw seems a lot more promising for introducing a child to the concept of programming.
As for me - I watched most of part 1 and a snippet of part 2 - I found the inclusion of personal "details" disturbing, especially if they are true. I understand that with the internet, ratcheting up the rude is de riguer but, I was hoping that perhaps film criticism could withstand the tenor of the times.
As for his specific critique of Episode I regarding character arc, I think his argument that Annakin Skywalker could not be the protagonist due to late arrival point in the film is not particularly compelling. Episodes I-III are the rise and fall of Annakin Skywalker. Episode I, being an origins story, necessarily has to introduce the major characters for the trilogy and establish relationships. Even though we think we understood the Republic, in fact, there had to be tedious exposition regarding the politics so as to explain the crisis and motivate the major characters.
On balance, I like Episode I, but I acknowledge the flaws, which are plain to see. In its defense, I liked the restaging of the "Ben Hur" chariot race. The production design of Nabu alluded to some of my favorite artists and for my money, nobody tops Lucas and team for art, sound design, conceptualization and creation of a universe, even if particulars are derivative. I also think that it could be argued that some of the flaws in the first Episodes come from the revisiting of the "universe" at a point 30 years prior with film technology that was advanced 20 years. With "Star Wars" and "American Graffiti, Lucas had already shown a predilection for parallel action sequences, fast editing, and dense visuals. Well, Episodes I-III were even more so because the CGI enabled it. It's a fair criticism that there was too much visual density and to little point and I wonder if that made the exposition even more dreary. Still, when the drone army deployed from the carrier, I thought that looked cool, and especially because the numbers made an interesting visual pattern.
There's no denying that Lucas had lost some of his story telling bravado in his late middle ages, as evident from re-editing Han to shoot later. Han shooting first came out of Howard Hawks' manual - you may read in Bogdanovich's book exactly why Hawks had his heroes shoot first - and maybe the ultimate point is that Lucas should have either stuck with his masters or thought harder about how to replace them. In "Phantom Menace" we had a John Ford door framing, we had a tableau which echoed Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood," but, we didn't have the cutting-edge bravery, as in Episode IV and taken from Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress," to tell the story from the point of view of minor, reactive, characters.
Good points nonetheless, Episode I is only marginally better than Episode VI and I fully understand those who hate both.
Let's say that they make $40 on Rebel EFI. We'll call that one profit unit. Let's say they make $400 on each pc they sell or 10 profit units. Since they agreed to pay Apple 2.7 million, the first 67,500.00 profit units they gain go to Apple, then they can settle down to making themselves a living.
How much had they sold? Under 800 pcs? In a year?
Oh yes, how much do they owe their attorneys?
And let me understand the business model: sell a pc and a doodad, direct the customer to a website where someone else has posted instructions how to self-hack a Mac, and communicate to the customer - maybe via mime - that they will need to buy a copy of OS X and install and mess around with it. I imagine that would be without their help, otherwise they may be afoul of the injunction. And the customer would get service and support handled by two guys in Florida instead of an international top brand? Customers who magically laugh off any Apple updates to OS X that breaks the Rebel EFI, since they have fire in their eye, hackery mojo up the yin yang and who will roll up their sleeves, hack it back, nod their head in understanding when Psystar explains why they can't patch Rebel EFI in any way which appears to contribute to OS X infringement, and will be loving it? Oh. I see. It makes sense because the customer saves a few hundred dollars, doesn't want Windows, somehow hasn't heard of Linux and wants to stick it to Steve Jobs, so called Executive of the Decade. That's what they call a niche market. Well, that there's a business plan I can under...
Who am I kidding? That's insane. That's why the shutter up and Chapter 7 it out of town made a lot sense to me.
Because the answer is no. Why increase support and development costs? Why go head to head with Microsoft when, as the world is today, Microsoft will win. Why make it easy for someone to have the "experience" without buying the iron? Why make it easier for Dell, HP, or Lenovo to sell their pcs? Because hackintoshers may have hurt feelings?
That was the last question this news item could possibly raise.
And who wants to spend money looking at decades old code in order to make explicit implicit blocks, or dare to risk breakage by tweaking the code to be concurrency amenable?
No. Don't think so. The browser people were bothered over bundling in that it killed a software sales market. (People used to buy their browsers.) I think the court ended up with the position that this was not illegal anti-competitive behavior. However, what Microsoft did with java, i.e., replace Sun libraries with incompatible libraries, and other things to block a possible end around their desktop monopoly via internet service, was a problem.
As a remedy for their 90s behavior, the DOJ and Microsoft agreed that Redmond would release interoperability documentation.
Microsoft was sued by Novell's proxy regarding DrDOS. In that case, it was alleged that Microsoft put code into Windows (3) that would flag an error if DrDOS was being used instead of MS-DOS, even though DrDOS was compatible and capable of hosting Windows 3. Microsoft settled without admitting wrongdoing and paid money to Novell via its beard for the case, Caldera (SCO).
Novell is suing over WordPerfect. It is alleged that Microsoft withheld technical information that it was providing other ISVs so as to give Word an advantage when Windows 95 was released.
In neither case was the issue of publicly available but inferior apis raised. And neither DrDOS nor WordPerfect 6 pretended to be Microsoft products.
The problem: someone nefarious cracks the server, and -boom- the law changes and it isn't clear what exactly the legislators approved and the Executive signed.
The finding of patent infringement was upheld. The remand is, as you mention, to address the appeals court's concern that the process in setting the award amount was incorrect. There isn't going to be any reopening of the facts regarding infringement.
Books nonetheless, I was 22 when TMI happened and the experts called in to address the situation seemed really worried about something for the first 72 hours. Incidentally I was in a news room at the time seeing the reports coming off of the Associated Press. Now, before you jump up and down about how the beat reporters don't have the technical expertise to understand the technology and the crisis (and the release of "The China Syndrome" a few weeks earlier may have predisposed the reportage), the point was the experts weren't dispensing homilies, they were way too busy to say any thing.
Now maybe in the heat of a crisis they overestimated the probabilities of the worse case scenarios, but those troubleshooters were worried.
Still, perhaps the time has come. I tend to suspect that if any thing happens it won't be TMI or Chernobyl again, exactly. So, tell you what, remove the Congressionally imposed limits on liabilities for a nuclear accident and have all users of the nuclear waste repositories take out 1000 year bonds (each in the amount of 0.1% of estimated clean-up/relocation costs of any one potentially in threat from ground water contamination) and I'll take the industry's assertions that the safety and waste problems have been solved a lot more seriously.
I would add that past costs, having been paid, are irrelevant. No matter whether you sunk $1,000, $500, $5,000 into that system, it will cost you $29 to upgrade that Mac and $100 to upgrade that Windows system. Let us not forget that while one may find Wintel pcs that have a lower price than a Mac, one can also find ones that are more expensive. Let's assume that there's an implicit basic satisfaction with the system's value if its owner is considering an upgrade.
That said, here's my bone to pick. I've been using Photoshop CS2 on Leopard. My $29 upgrade will mean either no Photoshop or another few hundred bucks additional cost in order to get CS4. Only Thursday did we start to get reports of incompatible software and, of course, all the reviews overlooked real world considerations in favor of revealing the same features we could have seen on Apple's web site. Nothing was really said with regards to the real reason we run operating systems: so we get stuff done with the software that runs on top. I don't care whether OS X boots faster than Win7 - I've made my choices. But if an upgrade means purchase of hardware or software, than that is a lot more important to me than the interface of QuickTimeX.
All the subtle and not so subtle ways Windows advocates want to remind everyone that "Gadzooks, Apple charges for Service Packs." Pah. Death Panel Discourse.
To me the interesting question is why did this release get moved up 28 days? It was so good that there was no point to delay? I suppose that's a possibility. But I think Apple wanted 28 more days of OS revenue in the quarter. Perhaps they are seeing disappointing system sales and hope the new os will improve that. This could be realized by a) there being people who have held off until they can get a system with the new os, b) it gives Apple a reason to advertise, and/or c) the new systems with new os will be available at the store 60 days before the new Wintels are available.
They could also be seeing an opportunity to go from great sales to outstanding sales. It better be better out of the box, by a large margin, than Leopard is all I can say.
In any case, I'm guessing this is about improving the quarter's financials and I guess the question I have is "Why?"
For free upgrades, you need to run a Linux or a *BSD system on an Admin-it-yourself basis.
Companies that sell software will eventually charge for some amount of improvement, because otherwise they can't afford to pay the people to do the improving. You can beat them at their game by never upgrading beyond whatever free ones they offer.
But most people look at expenses on a cost/benefit basis, with the note that "benefits" may be measured subjectively or objectively.
The successor to Snow Leopard is likely to be a feature-rich release (again, a subjective term) and will cost at least $129 and probably arrive no earlier than 2011. That's the operating system. Your interest in the MacBook is not to run OS X (you may even be buying it to put Windows on it), but to run applications. I would expect that iLife and iWorks will have one or two updates before 2011 and it is upgrading those where you will first encounter the "Is it worth the money?" quandary.
And Apple said today it isn't killed, but still under review because it interferes with the iPhone interface. Here is their rationalization for their actions in what they claim is their response to the FCC.
My thanks to daringfireball and John Gruber for bringing this letter to my attention.
I wonder what the reason for this is and how frequently is this request granted.
Any way, that's at least the second thing I remember this summer (the first being the buy now at 60% off deal on the various Windows 7s) that suggests Microsoft has a cash flow issue at the moment.
Regarding the judgment, remember 90 million was tacked on by the judge to make Microsoft pay for its lawyers' behavior.
I think the first point about bankruptcy court is that the debtors are given time to reorganize and to become viable and the creditors are given an opportunity to get some of the money they are owed paid back.
The Judge is saying the guys who were running SCO were not taking bankruptcy seriously. The Judge called them out for bleeding cash, wasting time, requesting and missing multiple extensions on the deadline for them to produce a reorganizing plan, and coming up with the half-baked sales agreements all predicated on, after the particular assets are sold, creditors paid off, and attorneys funded, if, the big vaporous if, there's litigation proceeds, then SCO's owners and managers do very well. When he referenced "Waiting for Godot" and SCO's management "waiting for the dough" and betting the company on litigation, I think he chose the Chapter 11 Trustee plan so that when the appeals in Novell are decided (it is suggested that that will be by Aug. 31) someone with a clear eye can look at that decision and decide if there's truly money for the estate in pursuit of the litigation or whether it's time to turn out the lights.
In the decision he repeats SCO's assertion that customers will miss them and I think he does that not as an endorsement of SCO's position but to signal that there is a profitable going concern in the server products and somebody will be glad to be in that business, i.e., there will be a serious buyer.
Between the lines, I think he does not like what SCO's management has done by following the litigation business model and I further think he sees that the only way for the smaller creditors to get their money back is to put less sue-happy people in charge. I'm sure the judge was not pleased with the way some bills got paid by subsidiaries and how Darl McBride paid for one suitor/rainmaker out of his own pocket. SCO was racing the clock and the clock ran out.
Once upon a time it had factories that used assembly line techniques and shipping of physical product. Back in the 1970s, the coolest thing about Santa Maria, California, to us Santa Barbara folks were its name on a very tasty style of outdoor cook-out and the CBS plant that pressed vinyl.
Now the record companies give every indication that they'd prefer to be licensing administrators, but we call them an industry just as some of us call a collection of mp3s an album.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure we all recall that Calvin's Dad was a patent attorney.
We note your concerns and indeed if personal computing had started in the manner you suggested, then it would be a different world. For instance, IBM would not have had any need for Microsoft to provide BASIC so users of their new device could write their own utility programs. No BASIC, no asking Microsoft for an operating system. Is your mind blown? My mind's blown. I'm taking a moment.
And with that wavy cross-dissolve my Scene 2 what-if speculation/flashback concludes and I'm back from the alternate scenario. A dream, but it was so real. And you were there. And you. And... but I digress.
I'm soon off to walk to work. Now I could drive and when I get in the car, I sort of understand implicitly that my freedoms are restricted as to what routes and lanes I take and how fast I may go and what colors I correlate with acceleration, but I do accept it. I like writing programs and I like what free and open software has done to make my life better. I can't write programs for my iPhone. On the other hand, telephoning on my computer, though improved, is problematic. It sure doesn't fit in my pocket. I guess the point I'm making is give us some credit. We understand what we are and are not getting. When we need more, we'll use something else. In my case that something else is running Linux or FreeBSD.
In conclusion, I hope you have a good day and while we will keep a chair available, we'll plan to have someone else bring the cookies to our inaugural iPad User Group meeting.
Cheers, Dan
P.S. I could write programs for my iPhone, but the hassle isn't worth it. It'd make more sense to deliver custom functionality via a webhost under my control and that way any networked computer I have access to could use it.
Has BusinessWeek learned nothing about Apple over the last 13 years?
Apple does not need to be the only or number one product in a sector to make money. It's nice when they are, because they really, really, make money when it happens. So Google now makes a phone. It is not likely to harm the phone with the better interface as much as the phones with lousy or no interface.
Meanwhile, Google pays Apple for the customers it delivers. I'm sure if Microsoft wants to pay, Apple will cordially listen, but it won't say yes just to frost off Google. They'll say yes if the green comes in from Redmond.
By fleshing out an implementation, perhaps this pre-empts someone patenting "Controlled Leak, Product" (as opposed to nuclear power plant, hot air balloon, disinformation, tire, etc.)
If Apple's execs were pissed, they were pissed all the way to the bank because Apple had unit sales growth during the laptop hunters run.
Meanwhile, the pc makers showed declines except in the netbook sector. Microsoft's gross revenues take a hit when a netbook is bought as opposed to a laptop. (Not that every netbook sold is a laptop not sold, but Microsoft, in order to fight off the Linux threat in the netbook market, discounted OEM Windows heavily and I wouldn't be surprised if, to break even, Microsoft needed 3 OEM netbook sales to offset an OEM laptop not sold, prior to Win7's release.)
Plus, what was the one common element in all commercials? The glance at and dismissal of the Macs as more expensive. This is not news. Go back and check the Apple/Windows flamewars and you'll note the cost point is conceded and the arguments are whether the differential is overstated and whether the higher cost makes sense because of a higher value. An ad which shows someone making a decision primarily on cost does not really help Microsoft's partners sell their premium high-profit systems. And, in retrospect, it didn't deter enough people from buying a Mac. In a deep recession.
Now I suppose it gave the Windows polemicists plenty of chances to go "neener, neener" as the Apple fanbois and the advertising theoreticians - like me, though I do use and like my Macs - would explain why we thought the ads were not that good, and perhaps that counts as effective. Sure why not? And when did Microsoft have its worst quarter in history?
The only advantage C has as a language is speed. It is difficult to read and relies on the programmer knowing enough not to shoot themselves in the foot. C++ has bolting upon bolting upon bolting of things in order to deliver OOP, and its primary advantage is the speed of C: it is semantic/syntactic goulash.
As to today's problem, I gather one of the unspoken issues is picking a language the teacher knows well enough so as to answer the student's questions. Assuming from the phrasing of the question that the asker would like to know the better imperative languages to teach, then, maybe python is the answer. I've heard reports from a teacher of an undergraduate course that the students respond to it fairly well.
But that brings us to another issue, the age of the student. How we learn differs as we grow through childhood and adolescence and the best language for an 18 year old may be totally unsuited for a 12 year old. Logo and SmallTalk (Squeak) are languages and runtimes which teach children the message and response paradigm of computing application. The Carnegie Mellon people are really excited about Alice as a teaching language.
The way I look at it, one doesn't teach children about chemistry by launching into the shell model of electrons and discussing valences and bondings. No, one puts some lemon juice on baking soda and then explain what the child saw and in simple terms. Regarding teaching computing and an introduction to languages, I'd want to not bother the child with memory allocations and deallocations and I'm not sure the entry form bias of the Visual languages is all that energizing a subject matter. Interactively creating objects, moving them through space, and causing them to draw seems a lot more promising for introducing a child to the concept of programming.
As for me - I watched most of part 1 and a snippet of part 2 - I found the inclusion of personal "details" disturbing, especially if they are true. I understand that with the internet, ratcheting up the rude is de riguer but, I was hoping that perhaps film criticism could withstand the tenor of the times.
As for his specific critique of Episode I regarding character arc, I think his argument that Annakin Skywalker could not be the protagonist due to late arrival point in the film is not particularly compelling. Episodes I-III are the rise and fall of Annakin Skywalker. Episode I, being an origins story, necessarily has to introduce the major characters for the trilogy and establish relationships. Even though we think we understood the Republic, in fact, there had to be tedious exposition regarding the politics so as to explain the crisis and motivate the major characters.
On balance, I like Episode I, but I acknowledge the flaws, which are plain to see. In its defense, I liked the restaging of the "Ben Hur" chariot race. The production design of Nabu alluded to some of my favorite artists and for my money, nobody tops Lucas and team for art, sound design, conceptualization and creation of a universe, even if particulars are derivative. I also think that it could be argued that some of the flaws in the first Episodes come from the revisiting of the "universe" at a point 30 years prior with film technology that was advanced 20 years. With "Star Wars" and "American Graffiti, Lucas had already shown a predilection for parallel action sequences, fast editing, and dense visuals. Well, Episodes I-III were even more so because the CGI enabled it. It's a fair criticism that there was too much visual density and to little point and I wonder if that made the exposition even more dreary. Still, when the drone army deployed from the carrier, I thought that looked cool, and especially because the numbers made an interesting visual pattern.
There's no denying that Lucas had lost some of his story telling bravado in his late middle ages, as evident from re-editing Han to shoot later. Han shooting first came out of Howard Hawks' manual - you may read in Bogdanovich's book exactly why Hawks had his heroes shoot first - and maybe the ultimate point is that Lucas should have either stuck with his masters or thought harder about how to replace them. In "Phantom Menace" we had a John Ford door framing, we had a tableau which echoed Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood," but, we didn't have the cutting-edge bravery, as in Episode IV and taken from Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress," to tell the story from the point of view of minor, reactive, characters.
Good points nonetheless, Episode I is only marginally better than Episode VI and I fully understand those who hate both.
Let's say that they make $40 on Rebel EFI. We'll call that one profit unit. Let's say they make $400 on each pc they sell or 10 profit units. Since they agreed to pay Apple 2.7 million, the first 67,500.00 profit units they gain go to Apple, then they can settle down to making themselves a living.
How much had they sold? Under 800 pcs? In a year?
Oh yes, how much do they owe their attorneys?
And let me understand the business model: sell a pc and a doodad, direct the customer to a website where someone else has posted instructions how to self-hack a Mac, and communicate to the customer - maybe via mime - that they will need to buy a copy of OS X and install and mess around with it. I imagine that would be without their help, otherwise they may be afoul of the injunction. And the customer would get service and support handled by two guys in Florida instead of an international top brand? Customers who magically laugh off any Apple updates to OS X that breaks the Rebel EFI, since they have fire in their eye, hackery mojo up the yin yang and who will roll up their sleeves, hack it back, nod their head in understanding when Psystar explains why they can't patch Rebel EFI in any way which appears to contribute to OS X infringement, and will be loving it? Oh. I see. It makes sense because the customer saves a few hundred dollars, doesn't want Windows, somehow hasn't heard of Linux and wants to stick it to Steve Jobs, so called Executive of the Decade. That's what they call a niche market. Well, that there's a business plan I can under...
Who am I kidding? That's insane. That's why the shutter up and Chapter 7 it out of town made a lot sense to me.
Because the answer is no. Why increase support and development costs? Why go head to head with Microsoft when, as the world is today, Microsoft will win. Why make it easy for someone to have the "experience" without buying the iron? Why make it easier for Dell, HP, or Lenovo to sell their pcs? Because hackintoshers may have hurt feelings?
That was the last question this news item could possibly raise.
Exactly!!!!! I think Cervantes said it best: "My hovercraft is full of eels"
A question he posed via browser to a community and website via html.
And 60 years down the line, finally, we have Mr. Carey to articulate the fundamental flaw and folly of the broadcast television model.
And who wants to spend money looking at decades old code in order to make explicit implicit blocks, or dare to risk breakage by tweaking the code to be concurrency amenable?
No. Don't think so. The browser people were bothered over bundling in that it killed a software sales market. (People used to buy their browsers.) I think the court ended up with the position that this was not illegal anti-competitive behavior. However, what Microsoft did with java, i.e., replace Sun libraries with incompatible libraries, and other things to block a possible end around their desktop monopoly via internet service, was a problem.
As a remedy for their 90s behavior, the DOJ and Microsoft agreed that Redmond would release interoperability documentation.
Microsoft was sued by Novell's proxy regarding DrDOS. In that case, it was alleged that Microsoft put code into Windows (3) that would flag an error if DrDOS was being used instead of MS-DOS, even though DrDOS was compatible and capable of hosting Windows 3. Microsoft settled without admitting wrongdoing and paid money to Novell via its beard for the case, Caldera (SCO).
Novell is suing over WordPerfect. It is alleged that Microsoft withheld technical information that it was providing other ISVs so as to give Word an advantage when Windows 95 was released.
In neither case was the issue of publicly available but inferior apis raised. And neither DrDOS nor WordPerfect 6 pretended to be Microsoft products.
The problem: someone nefarious cracks the server, and -boom- the law changes and it isn't clear what exactly the legislators approved and the Executive signed.
The finding of patent infringement was upheld. The remand is, as you mention, to address the appeals court's concern that the process in setting the award amount was incorrect. There isn't going to be any reopening of the facts regarding infringement.
Books nonetheless, I was 22 when TMI happened and the experts called in to address the situation seemed really worried about something for the first 72 hours. Incidentally I was in a news room at the time seeing the reports coming off of the Associated Press. Now, before you jump up and down about how the beat reporters don't have the technical expertise to understand the technology and the crisis (and the release of "The China Syndrome" a few weeks earlier may have predisposed the reportage), the point was the experts weren't dispensing homilies, they were way too busy to say any thing.
Now maybe in the heat of a crisis they overestimated the probabilities of the worse case scenarios, but those troubleshooters were worried.
Still, perhaps the time has come. I tend to suspect that if any thing happens it won't be TMI or Chernobyl again, exactly. So, tell you what, remove the Congressionally imposed limits on liabilities for a nuclear accident and have all users of the nuclear waste repositories take out 1000 year bonds (each in the amount of 0.1% of estimated clean-up/relocation costs of any one potentially in threat from ground water contamination) and I'll take the industry's assertions that the safety and waste problems have been solved a lot more seriously.
I would add that past costs, having been paid, are irrelevant. No matter whether you sunk $1,000, $500, $5,000 into that system, it will cost you $29 to upgrade that Mac and $100 to upgrade that Windows system. Let us not forget that while one may find Wintel pcs that have a lower price than a Mac, one can also find ones that are more expensive. Let's assume that there's an implicit basic satisfaction with the system's value if its owner is considering an upgrade.
That said, here's my bone to pick. I've been using Photoshop CS2 on Leopard. My $29 upgrade will mean either no Photoshop or another few hundred bucks additional cost in order to get CS4. Only Thursday did we start to get reports of incompatible software and, of course, all the reviews overlooked real world considerations in favor of revealing the same features we could have seen on Apple's web site. Nothing was really said with regards to the real reason we run operating systems: so we get stuff done with the software that runs on top. I don't care whether OS X boots faster than Win7 - I've made my choices. But if an upgrade means purchase of hardware or software, than that is a lot more important to me than the interface of QuickTimeX.
All the subtle and not so subtle ways Windows advocates want to remind everyone that "Gadzooks, Apple charges for Service Packs." Pah. Death Panel Discourse.
To me the interesting question is why did this release get moved up 28 days? It was so good that there was no point to delay? I suppose that's a possibility. But I think Apple wanted 28 more days of OS revenue in the quarter. Perhaps they are seeing disappointing system sales and hope the new os will improve that. This could be realized by a) there being people who have held off until they can get a system with the new os, b) it gives Apple a reason to advertise, and/or c) the new systems with new os will be available at the store 60 days before the new Wintels are available.
They could also be seeing an opportunity to go from great sales to outstanding sales. It better be better out of the box, by a large margin, than Leopard is all I can say.
In any case, I'm guessing this is about improving the quarter's financials and I guess the question I have is "Why?"
For free upgrades, you need to run a Linux or a *BSD system on an Admin-it-yourself basis.
Companies that sell software will eventually charge for some amount of improvement, because otherwise they can't afford to pay the people to do the improving. You can beat them at their game by never upgrading beyond whatever free ones they offer.
But most people look at expenses on a cost/benefit basis, with the note that "benefits" may be measured subjectively or objectively.
The successor to Snow Leopard is likely to be a feature-rich release (again, a subjective term) and will cost at least $129 and probably arrive no earlier than 2011. That's the operating system. Your interest in the MacBook is not to run OS X (you may even be buying it to put Windows on it), but to run applications. I would expect that iLife and iWorks will have one or two updates before 2011 and it is upgrading those where you will first encounter the "Is it worth the money?" quandary.
I would need somebody to tell me about the news on Apple's main page, because it generally isn't news and I never visit it looking for reportage.
As I did read Apple's response via another's linking, as a point of ethics, I credited the one who told me about it.
And Apple said today it isn't killed, but still under review because it interferes with the iPhone interface. Here is their rationalization for their actions in what they claim is their response to the FCC.
My thanks to daringfireball and John Gruber for bringing this letter to my attention.
I wonder what the reason for this is and how frequently is this request granted.
Any way, that's at least the second thing I remember this summer (the first being the buy now at 60% off deal on the various Windows 7s) that suggests Microsoft has a cash flow issue at the moment.
Regarding the judgment, remember 90 million was tacked on by the judge to make Microsoft pay for its lawyers' behavior.
I think the first point about bankruptcy court is that the debtors are given time to reorganize and to become viable and the creditors are given an opportunity to get some of the money they are owed paid back.
The Judge is saying the guys who were running SCO were not taking bankruptcy seriously. The Judge called them out for bleeding cash, wasting time, requesting and missing multiple extensions on the deadline for them to produce a reorganizing plan, and coming up with the half-baked sales agreements all predicated on, after the particular assets are sold, creditors paid off, and attorneys funded, if, the big vaporous if, there's litigation proceeds, then SCO's owners and managers do very well. When he referenced "Waiting for Godot" and SCO's management "waiting for the dough" and betting the company on litigation, I think he chose the Chapter 11 Trustee plan so that when the appeals in Novell are decided (it is suggested that that will be by Aug. 31) someone with a clear eye can look at that decision and decide if there's truly money for the estate in pursuit of the litigation or whether it's time to turn out the lights. In the decision he repeats SCO's assertion that customers will miss them and I think he does that not as an endorsement of SCO's position but to signal that there is a profitable going concern in the server products and somebody will be glad to be in that business, i.e., there will be a serious buyer.
Between the lines, I think he does not like what SCO's management has done by following the litigation business model and I further think he sees that the only way for the smaller creditors to get their money back is to put less sue-happy people in charge. I'm sure the judge was not pleased with the way some bills got paid by subsidiaries and how Darl McBride paid for one suitor/rainmaker out of his own pocket. SCO was racing the clock and the clock ran out.
Once upon a time it had factories that used assembly line techniques and shipping of physical product. Back in the 1970s, the coolest thing about Santa Maria, California, to us Santa Barbara folks were its name on a very tasty style of outdoor cook-out and the CBS plant that pressed vinyl.
Now the record companies give every indication that they'd prefer to be licensing administrators, but we call them an industry just as some of us call a collection of mp3s an album.