MS was found to have a monopoly in the OS market. It is not illegal to have a monopoly. They were found guilty of violating anti-trust laws which only a company that has a monopoly can violate. There is no such thing as "monopolistic business practicies." If MS had performed any of the actions they were found guilty of while not being a monopoly it would have been perfectly legal. Get it straight.
Wordperfect died because their software was a user nightmare and they stuck in dos land for too long.
Lotus was interesting. They pretty much halted development of their flagship products and branched out into other areas, creating a number of complete and utter flops. This "diversion" they went on allowed MS to surpass them. In the early 90's I think they switched over to creating groupware/internet type software, pretty much leaving the productivity suite side of things alone. It was an interesting decision, and showed some forethought, but I think they were a few years ahead of their time. Their products are still sold and used though, except I think IBM bought them out in the mid 90's to do their own thing with it.
Netscape died because they focused more on putting adware and crap into their browser instead of improving its stability and giving their users what they wanted (4.5 would crash on me every frick'in 15 minutes for crying out loud... I could set a watch to it!). Their marketshare (90%) didn't start to decrease signifiantly until IE5, which was a substantially better product than NS4 -- bundling aside.
But hey, don't let the reality of the situation get in the way of your opinion...
There may be 8 million pixels in the camera, but that only equates to 2 million of each color!!! 3/4 of the data is interpolated in that 22.8mb picture!!!
Actually, there are 2 million red and blue sensors, and 4 million green ones.
Additionally, part of the data in that 22.8mb picture has probably been truncated (most sensors retrieve more than 8 bits of data; 12bit sensors are not uncommon).
So the raw acquired image on an 8mb camera is 12mb if the data is packed. 16mb if it's aligned on an int16 boundary. That means 1/3 to 1/2 of the interpolated image data is redundent.
the camera internally "guesses" at what the values in between would be.
It doesn't so much guess as "interpolate" using an algorythm derrived from some complicated math and physics knowledge.
The only current exception to this are cameras based on the Foveon chip
The foveon chips have their own set of problems, due to the size and arrangement of their sensors. Right now, the image quality they produce is not superior to some of the better CCD based cameras on the market.
So... until cameras get to ~30 MP, they won't be "equivalent" to the resolution of 35mm film. (that's not THAT far off). 10MP is tons for most uses, but it's not equivalent.
Actually this depends on the grain of the film you're using and the paper you're printing on. Is is also difficult to measure the absolute resolution of actual film, because each grain isn't the exact same size.
At the end of the day though, matching the resolution of 35mm film isn't as important as capturing enough data to create the size of print you want to produce.
No, I used the competition. It was crap. MS software was also crap, but not as crappy. The software industry in the early 90's was pathetic. If you expand the "scope" of competition to include other propriatary platforms, then MS software was inferior to some of the competition (Apple), but "bundled with windows" isn't a factor in that equation.
Of course, you can choose to ignore that and continue looking at history with jaded glasses. No skin off my back.
Hmmm...it's quite possible I got a few things backwards, or misunderstood some material I read on the subject. Especially if the material I was reading was showing pictures of each type of sensor with the scales out of wack...
So, if I understand you correclty...
It isn't so much "easier" to make a CMOS sensor, rather it allows easier production of large quantities of them, which is why it's cheaper to make them as opposed to CCDs as opposed to defect level.
And, the sensors do have a larger gap between them compared to CCDs, but the size of a sensor is also larger than the size of a CCD sensor.
If you're going to be saving an uncompressed images, it's going to be the raw image file, not the 24bit interpolated file.
That file will probably be in the neighborhood of 8-16mb in size, depending on how they store the image (ibpp sensor, 12bpp sensor, 16bpp sensor, packed image, peripheral data, lossless compression, etc).
You have to use software to correct images acquired from both CCD & CMOS images. The type of noise you get from each sensor is different, but work has to be done on both. Cannon is probably the first company to figure out how to perform image correction on a CMOS acquired image well enough to yield a good image (by comparison, take a look at Kodak's CMOS 12mp DSLR... the color is so bland it's not even funny, and the noise isn't that great either).
The advantage of CMOS sensors is that it can produce a larger sensor with fewer defects. You can also pack the sensors more densly, though there is more "gap" between the individual sensors (though this can be compensated somewhat through the placement of microlenses over each of the sensors, which introduces other problems that I won't get into...). CMOS sensors also allow data to be retrieved much faster.
CMOS sensors themselves are actually cheaper to make than equivilent CCDs. That's why the EOS D10 costs $500 less than the competing 6mp SLR cameras.
And yes, Canon has nailed the technology.:) I'm personally saving up for a D10...
What's the point on writing documentation for an expert on the subject? They already know what they need to know (otherwise they wouldn't be an expert).
Software documentation is supposed to educate your user on how to use your software. If it is so cryptic that only someone who already knows what they're doing can understand it, it's too cryptic to be useful and was probably meant as a reminder for the program's author on how to actually use the thing -- not as end user documentation. Which sadly, is the state of most non-howto documentation I've found in the linux world...
This is not to say that documentation shouldn't dumb down everything so much that it becomes meaningless, rather it assumes a basic level of working knowledge and has additional documentation to define the bits that a non-guru would need to know (or at least references another document that does).
I might argue that Windows 98 was a "bug fix" release of Windows 95, and Windows 98 SE was a "bug fix" release of Windows 98. Why did I have to buy Windows 98 just to get a working USB subsystem? Why did Microsoft drop the ball with Windows 95 OSR2?
Again, you're missing the upgrade path.
The upgrade path was not Win95 -> Win95OSR2 -> Win98 -> Win98SE. It was Win95 (any version) -> Win 98 (any version).
Win95 OSR2 essentially added support for new hardware (some of which still had specs in flux, like USB) since the original release of Win95. It also added FAT32 support.
Win98 used a 32bit subsystem (instead of a 16bit one). You could make the arguement that this was a "bug fix", but fact of the matter is that the bugs were "fixed" by changing the subsystem, not by actually fixing the bugs. It also added support for (more) new hardware (like multi-mon) and revised support for hardware specs that had finally settled down (like USB). It came with some extra FAT32 utilities (a FAT16-32 utility; why not in OSR2? Because OEMs don't do upgrades). It also shipped with IE 4 (which, boggle, was also a free download for Win95). The other major difference was that you could get it on a store shelf instead of through buying a new computer (Win95 OSR2 was an OEM only version).
Win98SE is really the only "worthless" item in the bunch, and was really just a vehicle to distribute the next version of IE (which was, guess what, available free for previous versions). It also included DX6 (free for download), added support for new hardware, and had a few networking enhancements (Internet Connection Sharing being the big one). I also think it was the first version with a bunch of multimedia components...
You following the pattern here? You upgrade when the new hardware you get isn't supported by the old OS you have. Most (if not all) of the extra stuff subsequent versions provided were available as a free download for previous versions.
In fact, Windows XP is merely a "bug fix" release of Windows 2000 with a new user interface plastered on top. Some features were actually "deleted" (i.e. the "Power Users" group in the Home edition.)
Making the same mistake again... you aren't going to go from Win2k to WinXP. Win2k is a server OS. WinXP is a desktop OS. It is the successor to WinME, not Win2k. It may be based on the same codebase as Win2k, but it was designed to fill a different need.
So let's put that aside for a minute and just address the bug fix "issue" you bring up. The bugs that were fixed during the development of WinXP were also provided in service packs to Win2k. As a result, any Win2k "desktop" users aren't forced to upgrade to XP to get those fixes.
The fact that there are different "versions" of WinXP targeted at different users has nothing to do with this discussion either (wow, the home version is cheaper, but is missing some features that the more expensive version has, what a shock).
You can't make that arguement with what Apple is doing. Their upgrade path is OS 10 -> OS 10.1 -> OS 10.2. New items for OS 10.2 won't work on and are not available on OS 10.1 or 10.
"good enough" is what put $40b in the bank. It was also "better than the competition" that put 40b in the bank. I don't know how much of the early 90's software industry you remember, but "good enough" quality was light years beyond most software at the time.
Yeah its more like going from 2k to XP with each.x release.
Again, not a very accurate comparison, seeing how 2k is a server platform and XP is a desktop platform. The upgrade path is not 2k->XP, it's ME->XP. The upgrade path is not XP->2k3, it's 2k->2k3. XP & Win2k are similar, but you don't buy a copy of each for the same computer -- you can, but it's kind of dumb.
And for the Mac, those things are: free, free and free. Thats what the.x.x releases are for.
Free eh? So you can run Safari on something other than OS 10.2? Major quicktime upgrade is "free" without buying OS 10.2 (the nagware version doesn't count).
Other "features" of 10.2... * an IM client (MS world -> MSM) * a mail client (MS world -> Outlook Express) * quicktime (MS world -> Media Player) * "finder" (MS world -> Find Files or Folders) * rendevous (MS world -> Network Neighborhood) * sherlock (MS world -> IE sidebar) * inkwell -- ok, I'll give you that one (MS world -> Get the tablet version of XP)
So of all the things that you get in 10.2 over 10.1, only one of them is something that shouldn't have been in there in the first place. And in it they've rolled a bunch of changes that should have been bug fixes and security updates for the previous version.
If Microsoft had to pay for every one of their products that didn't perform as advertized,
Funny, their products do perform as advertised. They don't make stupid claims like "most secure operating system ever", they claim "most secure version of windows ever". And so on. And they show gay tv commericials with people flying while not making any kind of claims about what the OS will do (which, somehow, makes people want to buy it... I'm not even gonna try and figure that one out).
That's where you are completely wrong! They are major upgrades! The jump to Jaguar (10.2.x) and the next jump to Panther (10.3.x) are paid upgrades because they include a whole bunch of new features. Jaguar included literally hundreds of updates. It would be like going from WinME to WinXP in comparision.
It is not like going from WinME to WinXP. XP is based on a completely different codebase for crying outloud. An exagerated comparison like that is not going to help your point.
The "major" releases add a few "ooh neat" features, fix some bugs, and throw in a few neat applications. By comparison, from MS you've got: bug fixes of all kinds (not just "critical" or "security fixes"), major IE upgrades (which translates to shell enhancements), major DX upgrades,.Net framework (two revisions already), major Media Player upgrades, windows installer (msi), and little utility programs. And I'm sure I missed a few in there.
The changes Apple has made in OSX are not "major" changes. They are changes, but most of them are things that were promised in the initial OSX shipment that just weren't there. If MS is "ripping" their customers off, Apple is raping theirs.
Originally Apple stated that OS Ten would run on G3's then they back peddled a little bit and the OS exceeded the hardware abilities of these older machines.
They didn't backpeddle -- that was their problem, and is why they were sued.
I doubt that we could gang up on MS and sue them with a Class Action stating we want a refund because XP won't load on my Pentium II!
That depends -- does it run on a machine as advertised on a system which meets the advertised minimum requirements? Also, for what it's worth, XP *will* run on a system as slow as a K6/233.
Apple on the other hand claimed OSX would run fully featured on all G3 macs. Which it obviously doesn't, hence the lawsuit.
Windows ME and Windows 2000 were released very close together, if not at the same time, yet you were expected to pay again to go from one to the other. Every machine sold until the release of 10.2 still could run OS 9, and there are plenty of applications available there.
Windows ME was released after Win2k. Additionally, ME was a "home" release (like XP) and Win2k was a server release. The upgrade path was not ME->Win2k, or Win2k->ME. It was 98->ME->XP. Likewise, the upgrade path for their server platform was NT4->Win2k->Win2k3.
OS 10.1 & 10.2 would be considered service packs in the Microsoft world, and Apple is charging for 'em like they're a major upgrade to the OS.
The biggest plus is that you don't have to join a domain to access its resources
You don't have to join a domain to access a domain's resources on windows either. You just have to have an account on the domain.
The people in my office who are still working away at their Beige G3's would probably disagree. I seem to remember the jump from the 286 to 386 to 486 caused the same issues (and complaints.)
Backwards compatibility today is a lot more important than it was back in 1990. Which is why the x686 architecture is still with us. But you can argue it doesn't matter -- isn't going to make people any less pissed off about it. If MS can make Windows XP work on an 8 year old 233mhz AMD chip, I don't see any reason why apple couldn't do the same with the G3.
it has plenty of speed for what most people need it for
Then why is Apple dropping the ball w/OSX on the G3?
Same problem if you're in a GUI. The problem is that the process is launched by another kernel level process (or whatever the RPC process runs under).
It just so happens that the OS level "launch" type functionality can restrict what executables launch in windows, whereas in the unix world you have to depend on apps sitting on top of that to control that process.
For an exploit of this type, MS's implementation works to the admin's advantage, where the unix implementations wouldn't have.
In any event, the only reason why it works is that the idiot who wrote the thing didn't devote much time to thinking out what he was trying to do in the first place...
That only helps if you've got processes being launched by an interactive user via the commandline... won't do squat against an app that launches a program on its own.
Man, you do not want to see my machine then... the Add/Remove control panel shows over 70 items in it...that's the kind of cruft that accumulates over 5 years I guess.
The trick isn't keeping the number of items installed on your machine to a minimum, the trick is "don't install software with crappy installers", "don't wack new files with old ones", and "don't fuck with registry settings when you don't know what they do." It also helps if you don't hit the reset button in the middle of a disk write and stay away from beta level drivers for hardware....
And I also haven't had any problems with MS software installs or patches for Win98. Albiet, there aren't a huge number of them, but they do work.
We recently had an incident here where where the power in the building went out for about a half hour. Walked into the lab to make sure everything was running ok -- greeted by the nice chorus of beeps from the various UPS units. Then we noticed that the db server appeared to have locked up. The lights were on, but nobody was home... then we noticed something else looked fishy -- the raid array for the db server didn't seem to have any power to it...
Whoever setup the machines in the lab plugged the db server into a UPS, but not the raid array... not a terribly useful arrangement.
I apologize for my misspelling of Canada. I have a tendency to miss spelling errors/typos like that for some reason (I also tend to type short words twice near the end of a line for some unknown reason...).
"Computer Science" is not an engineering discipline, and I don't know of any "engineering" societies that consider it to be one. Every University I looked at grouped it under the Liberal Arts / Humanities umbrella instead of the Engineering umbrella.
Part of the problem is that computer programming doesn't fit the format of standard "engineering disciplines" -- there are guidelines and patterns, sure, but there isn't a way to write a program to guarantee that there are no bugs, or that there are no security holes. There isn't a way to setup a system to ensure that nobody can hack it. I consider it to be, at this point in time, a creative process more than a formal process.
That being said, I think the reason why "engineer" crops up in certifications/degrees so much for areas that it shouldn't is due to the job titles and descriptions -- most programming jobs are labeled as "Software Engineer" positions.
You can slam MS on a lot of things, but documentation isn't one of them. MSDN documentation is better than anything else I've ever seen; either from a 3rd party or via man pages.
I have yet to be able to pin one problem in my code to incorrect documentation MS provides, or bugs in MS code. And believe me, it's not like I haven't tried.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Right, because we all know that nobody else will write one that is worse than the previous one...
I personally think people tend to overestimate the effect around here, but that's just me.
MS was found to have a monopoly in the OS market. It is not illegal to have a monopoly. They were found guilty of violating anti-trust laws which only a company that has a monopoly can violate. There is no such thing as "monopolistic business practicies." If MS had performed any of the actions they were found guilty of while not being a monopoly it would have been perfectly legal. Get it straight.
Wordperfect died because their software was a user nightmare and they stuck in dos land for too long.
... I could set a watch to it!). Their marketshare (90%) didn't start to decrease signifiantly until IE5, which was a substantially better product than NS4 -- bundling aside.
Lotus was interesting. They pretty much halted development of their flagship products and branched out into other areas, creating a number of complete and utter flops. This "diversion" they went on allowed MS to surpass them. In the early 90's I think they switched over to creating groupware/internet type software, pretty much leaving the productivity suite side of things alone. It was an interesting decision, and showed some forethought, but I think they were a few years ahead of their time. Their products are still sold and used though, except I think IBM bought them out in the mid 90's to do their own thing with it.
Netscape died because they focused more on putting adware and crap into their browser instead of improving its stability and giving their users what they wanted (4.5 would crash on me every frick'in 15 minutes for crying out loud
But hey, don't let the reality of the situation get in the way of your opinion...
There may be 8 million pixels in the camera, but that only equates to 2 million of each color!!! 3/4 of the data is interpolated in that 22.8mb picture!!!
Actually, there are 2 million red and blue sensors, and 4 million green ones.
Additionally, part of the data in that 22.8mb picture has probably been truncated (most sensors retrieve more than 8 bits of data; 12bit sensors are not uncommon).
So the raw acquired image on an 8mb camera is 12mb if the data is packed. 16mb if it's aligned on an int16 boundary. That means 1/3 to 1/2 of the interpolated image data is redundent.
the camera internally "guesses" at what the values in between would be.
It doesn't so much guess as "interpolate" using an algorythm derrived from some complicated math and physics knowledge.
The only current exception to this are cameras based on the Foveon chip
The foveon chips have their own set of problems, due to the size and arrangement of their sensors. Right now, the image quality they produce is not superior to some of the better CCD based cameras on the market.
So... until cameras get to ~30 MP, they won't be "equivalent" to the resolution of 35mm film. (that's not THAT far off). 10MP is tons for most uses, but it's not equivalent.
Actually this depends on the grain of the film you're using and the paper you're printing on. Is is also difficult to measure the absolute resolution of actual film, because each grain isn't the exact same size.
At the end of the day though, matching the resolution of 35mm film isn't as important as capturing enough data to create the size of print you want to produce.
Whenever I tell someone I'm color-blind (a mild form of red/green color-blindness) they always ask, "So what does red look like to you?"
:p
I always get "What color is my shirt?"
No, I used the competition. It was crap. MS software was also crap, but not as crappy. The software industry in the early 90's was pathetic. If you expand the "scope" of competition to include other propriatary platforms, then MS software was inferior to some of the competition (Apple), but "bundled with windows" isn't a factor in that equation.
Of course, you can choose to ignore that and continue looking at history with jaded glasses. No skin off my back.
Hmmm...it's quite possible I got a few things backwards, or misunderstood some material I read on the subject. Especially if the material I was reading was showing pictures of each type of sensor with the scales out of wack...
...
So, if I understand you correclty
It isn't so much "easier" to make a CMOS sensor, rather it allows easier production of large quantities of them, which is why it's cheaper to make them as opposed to CCDs as opposed to defect level.
And, the sensors do have a larger gap between them compared to CCDs, but the size of a sensor is also larger than the size of a CCD sensor.
If you're going to be saving an uncompressed images, it's going to be the raw image file, not the 24bit interpolated file.
That file will probably be in the neighborhood of 8-16mb in size, depending on how they store the image (ibpp sensor, 12bpp sensor, 16bpp sensor, packed image, peripheral data, lossless compression, etc).
You have to use software to correct images acquired from both CCD & CMOS images. The type of noise you get from each sensor is different, but work has to be done on both. Cannon is probably the first company to figure out how to perform image correction on a CMOS acquired image well enough to yield a good image (by comparison, take a look at Kodak's CMOS 12mp DSLR ... the color is so bland it's not even funny, and the noise isn't that great either).
:) I'm personally saving up for a D10...
The advantage of CMOS sensors is that it can produce a larger sensor with fewer defects. You can also pack the sensors more densly, though there is more "gap" between the individual sensors (though this can be compensated somewhat through the placement of microlenses over each of the sensors, which introduces other problems that I won't get into...). CMOS sensors also allow data to be retrieved much faster.
CMOS sensors themselves are actually cheaper to make than equivilent CCDs. That's why the EOS D10 costs $500 less than the competing 6mp SLR cameras.
And yes, Canon has nailed the technology.
What's the point on writing documentation for an expert on the subject? They already know what they need to know (otherwise they wouldn't be an expert).
Software documentation is supposed to educate your user on how to use your software. If it is so cryptic that only someone who already knows what they're doing can understand it, it's too cryptic to be useful and was probably meant as a reminder for the program's author on how to actually use the thing -- not as end user documentation. Which sadly, is the state of most non-howto documentation I've found in the linux world...
This is not to say that documentation shouldn't dumb down everything so much that it becomes meaningless, rather it assumes a basic level of working knowledge and has additional documentation to define the bits that a non-guru would need to know (or at least references another document that does).
I might argue that Windows 98 was a "bug fix" release of Windows 95, and Windows 98 SE was a "bug fix" release of Windows 98. Why did I have to buy Windows 98 just to get a working USB subsystem? Why did Microsoft drop the ball with Windows 95 OSR2?
... you aren't going to go from Win2k to WinXP. Win2k is a server OS. WinXP is a desktop OS. It is the successor to WinME, not Win2k. It may be based on the same codebase as Win2k, but it was designed to fill a different need.
Again, you're missing the upgrade path.
The upgrade path was not Win95 -> Win95OSR2 -> Win98 -> Win98SE. It was Win95 (any version) -> Win 98 (any version).
Win95 OSR2 essentially added support for new hardware (some of which still had specs in flux, like USB) since the original release of Win95. It also added FAT32 support.
Win98 used a 32bit subsystem (instead of a 16bit one). You could make the arguement that this was a "bug fix", but fact of the matter is that the bugs were "fixed" by changing the subsystem, not by actually fixing the bugs. It also added support for (more) new hardware (like multi-mon) and revised support for hardware specs that had finally settled down (like USB). It came with some extra FAT32 utilities (a FAT16-32 utility; why not in OSR2? Because OEMs don't do upgrades). It also shipped with IE 4 (which, boggle, was also a free download for Win95). The other major difference was that you could get it on a store shelf instead of through buying a new computer (Win95 OSR2 was an OEM only version).
Win98SE is really the only "worthless" item in the bunch, and was really just a vehicle to distribute the next version of IE (which was, guess what, available free for previous versions). It also included DX6 (free for download), added support for new hardware, and had a few networking enhancements (Internet Connection Sharing being the big one). I also think it was the first version with a bunch of multimedia components...
You following the pattern here? You upgrade when the new hardware you get isn't supported by the old OS you have. Most (if not all) of the extra stuff subsequent versions provided were available as a free download for previous versions.
In fact, Windows XP is merely a "bug fix" release of Windows 2000 with a new user interface plastered on top. Some features were actually "deleted" (i.e. the "Power Users" group in the Home edition.)
Making the same mistake again
So let's put that aside for a minute and just address the bug fix "issue" you bring up. The bugs that were fixed during the development of WinXP were also provided in service packs to Win2k. As a result, any Win2k "desktop" users aren't forced to upgrade to XP to get those fixes.
The fact that there are different "versions" of WinXP targeted at different users has nothing to do with this discussion either (wow, the home version is cheaper, but is missing some features that the more expensive version has, what a shock).
You can't make that arguement with what Apple is doing. Their upgrade path is OS 10 -> OS 10.1 -> OS 10.2. New items for OS 10.2 won't work on and are not available on OS 10.1 or 10.
"good enough" is what put $40b in the bank. It was also "better than the competition" that put 40b in the bank. I don't know how much of the early 90's software industry you remember, but "good enough" quality was light years beyond most software at the time.
Yeah its more like going from 2k to XP with each .x release.
.x.x releases are for.
... I'm not even gonna try and figure that one out).
Again, not a very accurate comparison, seeing how 2k is a server platform and XP is a desktop platform. The upgrade path is not 2k->XP, it's ME->XP. The upgrade path is not XP->2k3, it's 2k->2k3. XP & Win2k are similar, but you don't buy a copy of each for the same computer -- you can, but it's kind of dumb.
And for the Mac, those things are: free, free and free. Thats what the
Free eh? So you can run Safari on something other than OS 10.2? Major quicktime upgrade is "free" without buying OS 10.2 (the nagware version doesn't count).
Other "features" of 10.2...
* an IM client (MS world -> MSM)
* a mail client (MS world -> Outlook Express)
* quicktime (MS world -> Media Player)
* "finder" (MS world -> Find Files or Folders)
* rendevous (MS world -> Network Neighborhood)
* sherlock (MS world -> IE sidebar)
* inkwell -- ok, I'll give you that one (MS world -> Get the tablet version of XP)
So of all the things that you get in 10.2 over 10.1, only one of them is something that shouldn't have been in there in the first place. And in it they've rolled a bunch of changes that should have been bug fixes and security updates for the previous version.
If Microsoft had to pay for every one of their products that didn't perform as advertized,
Funny, their products do perform as advertised. They don't make stupid claims like "most secure operating system ever", they claim "most secure version of windows ever". And so on. And they show gay tv commericials with people flying while not making any kind of claims about what the OS will do (which, somehow, makes people want to buy it
That's where you are completely wrong! They are major upgrades! The jump to Jaguar (10.2.x) and the next jump to Panther (10.3.x) are paid upgrades because they include a whole bunch of new features. Jaguar included literally hundreds of updates. It would be like going from WinME to WinXP in comparision.
.Net framework (two revisions already), major Media Player upgrades, windows installer (msi), and little utility programs. And I'm sure I missed a few in there.
It is not like going from WinME to WinXP. XP is based on a completely different codebase for crying outloud. An exagerated comparison like that is not going to help your point.
The "major" releases add a few "ooh neat" features, fix some bugs, and throw in a few neat applications. By comparison, from MS you've got: bug fixes of all kinds (not just "critical" or "security fixes"), major IE upgrades (which translates to shell enhancements), major DX upgrades,
The changes Apple has made in OSX are not "major" changes. They are changes, but most of them are things that were promised in the initial OSX shipment that just weren't there. If MS is "ripping" their customers off, Apple is raping theirs.
Originally Apple stated that OS Ten would run on G3's then they back peddled a little bit and the OS exceeded the hardware abilities of these older machines.
They didn't backpeddle -- that was their problem, and is why they were sued.
I doubt that we could gang up on MS and sue them with a Class Action stating we want a refund because XP won't load on my Pentium II!
That depends -- does it run on a machine as advertised on a system which meets the advertised minimum requirements? Also, for what it's worth, XP *will* run on a system as slow as a K6/233.
Apple on the other hand claimed OSX would run fully featured on all G3 macs. Which it obviously doesn't, hence the lawsuit.
Windows ME and Windows 2000 were released very close together, if not at the same time, yet you were expected to pay again to go from one to the other. Every machine sold until the release of 10.2 still could run OS 9, and there are plenty of applications available there.
Windows ME was released after Win2k. Additionally, ME was a "home" release (like XP) and Win2k was a server release. The upgrade path was not ME->Win2k, or Win2k->ME. It was 98->ME->XP. Likewise, the upgrade path for their server platform was NT4->Win2k->Win2k3.
OS 10.1 & 10.2 would be considered service packs in the Microsoft world, and Apple is charging for 'em like they're a major upgrade to the OS.
The biggest plus is that you don't have to join a domain to access its resources
You don't have to join a domain to access a domain's resources on windows either. You just have to have an account on the domain.
The people in my office who are still working away at their Beige G3's would probably disagree. I seem to remember the jump from the 286 to 386 to 486 caused the same issues (and complaints.)
Backwards compatibility today is a lot more important than it was back in 1990. Which is why the x686 architecture is still with us. But you can argue it doesn't matter -- isn't going to make people any less pissed off about it. If MS can make Windows XP work on an 8 year old 233mhz AMD chip, I don't see any reason why apple couldn't do the same with the G3.
it has plenty of speed for what most people need it for
Then why is Apple dropping the ball w/OSX on the G3?
Google does not have infinite bandwidth, or infinite processing power. Say no more.
Same problem if you're in a GUI. The problem is that the process is launched by another kernel level process (or whatever the RPC process runs under).
It just so happens that the OS level "launch" type functionality can restrict what executables launch in windows, whereas in the unix world you have to depend on apps sitting on top of that to control that process.
For an exploit of this type, MS's implementation works to the admin's advantage, where the unix implementations wouldn't have.
In any event, the only reason why it works is that the idiot who wrote the thing didn't devote much time to thinking out what he was trying to do in the first place...
You're assuming that such an attack won't take down google in the process...
That only helps if you've got processes being launched by an interactive user via the commandline... won't do squat against an app that launches a program on its own.
Man, you do not want to see my machine then ... the Add/Remove control panel shows over 70 items in it...that's the kind of cruft that accumulates over 5 years I guess.
The trick isn't keeping the number of items installed on your machine to a minimum, the trick is "don't install software with crappy installers", "don't wack new files with old ones", and "don't fuck with registry settings when you don't know what they do." It also helps if you don't hit the reset button in the middle of a disk write and stay away from beta level drivers for hardware....
And I also haven't had any problems with MS software installs or patches for Win98. Albiet, there aren't a huge number of them, but they do work.
We recently had an incident here where where the power in the building went out for about a half hour. Walked into the lab to make sure everything was running ok -- greeted by the nice chorus of beeps from the various UPS units. Then we noticed that the db server appeared to have locked up. The lights were on, but nobody was home ... then we noticed something else looked fishy -- the raid array for the db server didn't seem to have any power to it ...
... not a terribly useful arrangement.
Whoever setup the machines in the lab plugged the db server into a UPS, but not the raid array
I apologize for my misspelling of Canada. I have a tendency to miss spelling errors/typos like that for some reason (I also tend to type short words twice near the end of a line for some unknown reason...).
"Computer Science" is not an engineering discipline, and I don't know of any "engineering" societies that consider it to be one. Every University I looked at grouped it under the Liberal Arts / Humanities umbrella instead of the Engineering umbrella.
Part of the problem is that computer programming doesn't fit the format of standard "engineering disciplines" -- there are guidelines and patterns, sure, but there isn't a way to write a program to guarantee that there are no bugs, or that there are no security holes. There isn't a way to setup a system to ensure that nobody can hack it. I consider it to be, at this point in time, a creative process more than a formal process.
That being said, I think the reason why "engineer" crops up in certifications/degrees so much for areas that it shouldn't is due to the job titles and descriptions -- most programming jobs are labeled as "Software Engineer" positions.
No. Office is a 1st party app. Anything Microsoft produces that runs on windows is a first party app.
You can slam MS on a lot of things, but documentation isn't one of them. MSDN documentation is better than anything else I've ever seen; either from a 3rd party or via man pages.
;)
I have yet to be able to pin one problem in my code to incorrect documentation MS provides, or bugs in MS code. And believe me, it's not like I haven't tried.