The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer.
Err...yes, for some things a $1200 computer is insufficient. For other things, it's a very good deal. As a matter of fact, given the continuous and rapid increase in bang/buck, there's a reasonable argument that deviating too strongly from the increasing value curve (i.e. spending a relatively large amount of money on a computer when the value rapidly depreciates) is a bad idea.
Furthermore, simply because Apple does not cater to low-cost computer buyers (nothing wrong with that -- you don't hear me going after Porche or Rolex) does *not* imply that one cannot purchase a high-end x86 machine. There are very, very many systems builders that will be happy as a claim to throw as much money as you want to into a computer. Want three times as much power as you need, with redundant power supplies? Quad processors? A UPS? Hardware SCSI RAID, Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 ports, a GeForce 4, 2 gigs of RAM? Perhaps large plasma gas or projection display? Enormous speakers? Joysticks that are clones of their fighter-jet originals? Whatever demands you have can pretty much always be met.
Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
You know, "inexpensive" does not necessarily imply "shoddy".
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
[shrug] So your parents made a choice that you feel was suboptimal for your situation. That may certainly be true, but it has little bearing on whether the product you want is ideal for everyone else.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform.
You *do* mean Windows, not "the PC", where I'm assuming that "PC" refers to "x86-based machine", right?
OpenOffice will help level the playing field. And Microsoft will have to compete more on price, features, and service more than it did, and give up some reliance on "compatibility".
I don't think that you can simply claim that OS X is the end-all and be all of desktop environments, disregarding Linux, BSD, and yes, even Windows. Apple's always had some good ideas and some completely stupid ideas (stupidity ratio increasing in recent years with many of their UIs (think Quicktime) and Jobs' insistence that people were *still* sufficiently unfamiliar with two-button mice to be allowed to purchase machines equipped with them).
I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation.
I hope so. OTOH, let's break this down:
OpenOffice is a major jump, and the beginning of a war on features more than comptibility. However, the onus will be on the OpenOffice folks to prevent Microsoft from successfully creating format compatibility issues, which they are *sure* to start doing.
Mono is a nice idea, but a long, long way away from where Microsoft is. Microsoft purchased some very good languages and compilers people, started design well before everyone else, and has been putting resources into.NET development for much longer than everyone else has been. MS has the jump here, and it will be tough to catch up in both performance and compatibility.
Java is interesting (and certainly useful against Microsoft in some areas), but has long since turned out to not be what it once was billed as -- a write once run anywhere solution for all applications, including desktop computing. There is a very obvious lack of horizontal-market Java applications, stemming from issues with the Java standard itself, including a lack of templated container classes, and poor performance and memory footprint. Remember that Corel spent a *huge* amount of money porting their suite to Java, and at the end (and I'm *sure* that after that kind of resource expenditure, this was not done without much agonizing consideration) the entire thing was scrapped.
As for Mozilla -- Mozilla is very nice. It was pushed into a production a bit early, but still a major strike against Microsoft. However, it is *not* the impossible-to-quash piece of software that some other projects are turning out to be. AOL/TW is undergoing a lot of upheaval, and funding and support for Mozilla may not be around forever. Apple has already distanced themselves from the Mozilla project and gone the way of KHTML (the cynic in me wants to think that this necessity was a result of Apple wasting so much memory and so many cycles on the basic UI that they needed to cut corners in the area of their browser).
What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs.
Ridiculous. A lack of Palladium support makes zero difference to the end user in an environment where it exists at all. It can be disabled by the end user. You feel that content will *require* Palladium to be used, and that content distribution companies will be comfortable leaving Palladium-disabled users out of things, perhaps? The same goes for the Mac. If such costs are deemed acceptable by content distribution companies (and Palladium *is* such a crucial issue), then the DRM-less Mac runs precisely the same risk -- of being ignored by said content distribution companies.
Frankly, I don't think Palladium will ever take off -- that's essentially a placebo to allow Microsoft better political positioning in the lucrative content distribution and management field with a horde of increasingly desperate content distributors. It only takes a single break in a Palladium-enabled system for *all* content distributed up until them to be redistributed in a DRMless manner. x86 architecture hardware has never been designed around being particularly secure. We will, of course, see, but my bets are that Palladium is going to be primarily useful from a political standpoint, not a technological one.
Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple?
Well, resource requirements generally increase so much over new releases of Microsoft software that one is required to purchase new hardware anyway. Such is life. A major difference is that Apple charges much more for their hardware than x86 manufacturers.
Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
Do tell? Perhaps you'd like to explain the presence of the "Copy Protection" flag that Apple introduced *long* before MS was trying to do DRM. It was unpopular, and fell into disuse -- much as I feel Palladium will (and this is in a world where the company trying to impose DRM controls both the hardware and software platforms).
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!"
Did you *really* explain this to them -- that by disabling Palladium, you have (at least from a DRM standpoint) nothing more and nothing less than a Mac? No?
Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have...I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti
Uh, huh. I don't see even the evil-mogul-looking Valenti trying to prevent *anyone* from listening to MP3s that they have. As a matter of fact, Phillips (frequently cited as a "good guy" in the DRM wars) did actually pursue this patch.
no less than 192kbps VBR.
Bit of a nitpick, but this makes no sense.
model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
I'm sorry? The "classical liberal" system that you're talking about certainly does *not* give you ownership of said IP. Try running off 10,000 copies and selling them on the street tomorrow and see how far you get before getting handcuffed. That's nothing new at all.
It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft.
Yes, yes. Microsoft is full of hype and deliberately misleading when it comes to DRM. This is nothing at all new. Microsoft does this with *all* of their new products, and has for years. Most software companies do--heck, most *companies* do, though not as much.
And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
I think you've got a few misconceptions. You can certainly use a non-Palladium-aware device in a system and use Palladium -- you just won't be able to use Palladium features with it. [shrug] Same was true for old PCI video cards (couldn't do AGP texturing), old sound cards (couldn't do digital output), old mice (no scrollwheel -- couldn't use scrollwheel features), yadda, yadda, yadda. This applies to every PC component I can think of.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter.
Well...yeah. No kidding. They actually have a modern OS, after six years of false starts. They couldn't *possibly* be worse off than they were.
I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop
I'm not a tremendous fan of KDE. I do like a few things about OS X, but I really don't see the overwhelming advantages you're claiming. OS X's primary interesting feature is a significant amount of eye candy. While once I was deeply impressed with the HCI strictures Apple laid on their platform, more recent ones (one-button-mice only, Quicktime's interface, etc) are less impressive.
RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater.
Mmm...Apple's bundle packaging system is kind of interesting, though retrofitting it onto UNIX would be ugly. I personally wouldn't give up RPM, which offers a wider array of analysis and ease of automating tasks, but I can see how many less technically adept users would prefer the simpler UI to their package system Apple exposes. You are certainly right that I'm not a tremendous fan of Red Carpet, but that's a Ximian thing, not a Red Hat thing -- I believe you're thinking of up2date, which sucks very, very much. However, apt for rpm is available (try Freshrpms), and the even better yum is also available. And yum really *is* stupendously good.
Java on Linux compared to OSX?
I tend to feel that Apple's rather behind Linux in this field, actually. The best performing of all JRE/JDK implementations that I know of (*including* native code compilers, surprisingly) is IBM's JRE/JDK. This is not available for OS X, though it is freely downloadable for Linux. Cocoa is nice, though, I will give you that.
Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS.
[shrug] I know a bunch of UNIX geeks, and none of them are particularly interested in switching to OS X. As a matter of fact, I know very few technically oriented people on OS X (though I certainly expect plenty exist, they aren't present where I live).
There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another.
Oh, for Chrissake. A *Windows* user can do that. That's not much of a metric.
The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Uh, huh. Aside from the "what about the actually *mainstream* WMs you left out like metacity and kwin (forget the current KDE WM)" argument, what then is your criteria for a "real desktop platform"? A "genie minimize"?
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop.
OpenBeOS is an interesting project. I kind of wish I had been able to play with BeOS at some point. It's also much, much farther away from being competitive than Linux native desktop environments.
Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop
Okay, now that is just ridiculous. From an application standpoint, and ignoring the fact that OS X generally runs on slower software, no, there is no hard restrictions. However, OS X has the heaviest GUI overhead of the three, in cycles and memory. If you're trying to sell OS X, resource usage is not a stance I'd try taking.
and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above.
Uh, huh. Ignoring the question of exactly *what* the relationship is between "architectural superiority" and "end user appeal", why do you like BeOS so much?
It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Well, it stands to be interesting, atthethethe least.
The opensource movement hopefully will stop the proprietary invasion that started with Microsoft in the 90's. That has hurt Apple more then anything.
Um...at the time, and to a large extent even today, Apple is more "proprietary" than Microsoft, in their absolute control of their platform in both hardware and software.
That was, in fact, what killed my love for Macs -- back when Apple killed off Power Computing and friends, I decided that I really didn't want to hang around any more.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer)
Dur...*what*?
That's ridiculous. You can use either platform for *ages*. There is, as far as I can tell, very little difference.
I've seen the ugly Windows problems that just occur out of nowhere, and dealt with the people who can't do more than turn their PCs on and type Word documents because the machine intimidates them.
You know, I see the same thing with OS X.
What you're talking about *are* issues, but they're issues that affect everyone, not just x86 users.
Who woulda thunk? Apple's ridiculous high-margin business model will be taught in universities some day.
You know, Apple is pretty darn far from perfect, but you're arguing that the entire concept of luxury goods is "ridiculous"? Armani, Porche and Rolex executives would probably chuckle a bit at that...
Re:It now seems appropriate to mention....
on
The Linux Uprising
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Microsoft is moving too slowly to make something that can compete on cost.
Mmm....while I agree with most of your points ("Heil Linus!"), I think this is taking it too far. For a minor feature, yes, MS will likely take longer to implement things. Security patches, say. And this is certainly an issue for them.
*However*, for larger scale movements, I cannot agree. If Microsoft deems something important, it can toss hundreds (a la DirectX) of full-time developers working on implementing it. For concentrated attempts on areas of software, Microsoft has an advantage. I guarantee that if Microsoft was on the other side of the fence, they could get, say, NTFS support in quickly (because they can throw a huge number of full-time developers on reverse-engineering the thing).
Finally, for *very* widescale movements, the open source world has an advantage. The majority of pieces of software in a Linux distro see improvement with each release. Lots of small improvements, but it's a really compelling reason to upgrade -- buy a new distro, and *everything* gets better. I mean, for Chrissake, Microsoft is *still using the Solitaire binary from Windows 3.1!* In the Linux world, there would have been more solitaire variants added, 32 bit color added, the event loop during the "card bounce" winning sequence fixed so that moving the mouse doesn't speed the animation up, and so that the animation is timer-based instead of CPU-based.
Keep in mind that the rate at which Linux can move is not necessarily tightly coupled to the rate at which Linux-as-available-to-businesses can move. Take a look at Red Hat Advanced Workstation and Server, Red Hat's corporate offerings. These things emphasize maintainability and stability. They move much more slowly than Linus's kernel, or the galeon team's web browser. MS runs things through a pretty sizeable QA test before they release, and RH does the same for their coporate products (well, and their normal ones, but particularly their corporate releases). So, to reach the consumer, said software has to pass through the often lengthy QA process. For example, the current XFree CVS snapshot has antialiased, colored, translucent, animated cursors. Almost all Red Hat customers are running 4.2.x, which does not have these features. They'll have to wait until RH comes out with a new release to get any new features. (Incidently, double-buffering on the cursor and saveunders for the cursor aren't implemented, which makes the cursor look a lot less good than MS's cursor, which also brings up the point that you cannot release some "new features" to the public yet in the Linux world because they aren't polished enough yet)
"Wintel" -- When Microsoft releases a new OS -- lots of Intel chips are sold in the MS push. The most common way people get a new microsoft operating system is via new hardware.
Yes. True.
Intel needs Microsoft to drive the hardware sales.
Okay, now *that* is silly, unless that you're going to claim that this is entirely via virtue of massively inefficient code on the part of Microsoft or something.
Intel needs [operating system vendors] and [application vendors] to drive the hardware sales. It really doesn't matter who is doing the selling. As a matter of fact, Linux makes it much easier to migrate to Intel's higher end server chips, which throws Intel into paroxysms of joy.
Microsoft needs intel to get chips specs and support on optimizing their operating system for the next generations of intel chips
Sort of. I really doubt that Intel is going to withhold instruction set information from anyone. Zero benefit to them. Still, to some degree, *Microsoft* depends on *Intel*. Not the other way.
But the fact that intel has decided to completely support Linux as a first class operating system also bothers Microsoft.
What do you mean by "completely support"? Intel doesn't provide support for *any* operating system that I know of. If you go home, call up Intel and say "I'm having trouble installing Windows", they're going to tell you to piss off. Operating systems support CPUs, *not* the other way around.
Jist -- articles full of inaccuracies. I mean, it's not like these are amazing from the business standpoint, either.
Second, Intel Corp., the dominant maker of processors for PCs, loosened its tight links with Microsoft and started making chips for Linux. This made it possible for corporations to get all the computing power they wanted at a fraction of the price
Huh?
Jist -- articles full of inaccuracies. I mean, it's not like these are amazing from the business standpoint, either.
Second, Intel Corp., the dominant maker of processors for PCs, loosened its tight links with Microsoft and started making chips for Linux. This made it possible for corporations to get all the computing power they wanted at a fraction of the price
Huh?
Before using open-source software, tech companies must sign a license in which they promise to give away innovations they build on top of it
Yeah, that isn't misleading about whether a company that *uses* Linux could get slammed for not handing out their database...
True, since the volunteer programmers often lack specialized knowledge, complex business applications are probably beyond their range.
[snort] [snicker] Enough corporate back-patting going on already? Yeah, all those people writing kernels and compilers are completely out of the loop when it comes to transactions, yessiree.
But basic open-source databases and e-mail are already available.
Yeah. *Basic* email servers. After all, open source is *such* a second class player in the email server market.
Not that Linux can afford to coast. For starters, its next iteration, version 2.5, shepherded by Torvalds himself, will have to be able to handle more complex computing tasks, such as harnessing more processors working in parallel and better handling of large, memory-intensive tasks. Thus, the disparate volunteers -- mostly unpaid -- who build open-source software will need to vastly improve their coordination to keep Linux' quality reputation intact.
Incidently, this may be the first time someone's tried using the DMCA to enforce *file format* incompatibility. MS has done it before with copyrights (claiming that the C header files in wine used to implement Win32 were "derivative" of their own header files), with trade secrets (claiming that the "open" spec for their Kerberos modifications were protected as a "trade secret" and that no one else could implement it). It's been done before with patents (people claiming that an executable packer uses a patented algorithm). The special cases the DMCA puts into law are the only fork of IP that hasn't yet been used to try to ensure incompatibility.
Oh, and I dunno what MS's lawyers were threatening Nullsoft with if they didn't disable their "save to WAV" feature whenever users play a WMA file in WinAmp, but that theoretically could have been patent claims, so this may be a grand slam for MS in terms of misapplying IP law to screw the consumer if they try to go with a competitor's product -- they alone will have covered the entire gamut.
Because this will undoubtedly be cracked within a month, tops. There's a good chance it's already been cracked based on the betas -- and Slashdot posting it *ensures* that every techie that didn't already know about it does.
Heck, *I* woulda cracked it if I had a copy sitting around and had any interest in Office, just for the egg-on-your-face factor affecting Microsoft when they try selling their "strong" security to companies.
You cannot do secure DRM in the current computing environment. *Maybe* with Palladium in place. Definitely not now.
The only benefit I can see this giving Microsoft is a legal excuse to make their file formats *incompatible* with everyone else, and anyone else implementing support for their file formats being liable under the DMCA.
Office is Microsoft's bread and butter, and incompatibility is the worker that brings it home each day.
The fact that multiple apps *can* have a file open for write access isn't necessarily a bad thing. If, say, you want to combine multiple output streams from programs, you can toss 'em all into one file (even opening a file immediately before actually writing to it and then closing it on an OS with forced-write-lock behavior cannot allow this). There are some things the "forcibly write locked" and some things the "multiple apps can write to a file" model are each good for.
For example, you're claiming that apps should establish locks on network-resident files. That's fine and dandy, until some app goes to the great computer in the sky with a file locked.
On UNIX, traditionally users are savvy enough to wipe out lock files. In the case of netscape navigator, the app simply handed the user a command to run to remove the lock. Hence, write-locking files (especially remote ones) can cause nastiness for users as well.
Finally, I hate to say it, but if you're trying to set up a collaboration system (as it sounds like you are), some sort of dedicated checkout system is probably better. For text files on UNIX, this usually means cvs, but other platforms have their own favored revision control/collaboration systems.
In general, I dislike *intensely* the emphasis that many desktop operating systems place on forcible locking. Windows is by far the worst culprit -- write-opened files cannot be opened for write, cannot be moved, and cannot even be renamed. Classic MacOS is a bit better -- you can move around write-opened files -- but I really think that UNIX's approach is pretty good. You have the ability to use *both* types of locking, and the default is the one that lets the user do the most -- so dead apps don't tie up files.
our Internet access is completely shut off if we exceed 300,000,000 uploaded or downloaded bytes in one seven-day period.
This just pisses students off, can penalize people who accidentally use too much bandwidth, and just plain isn't a good idea. Much better to throttle the connection of the user's been using excessive bandwidth.
I gotta say that a non-halfassed encryption mechanism is going to have a fingerprint that can only be percieved as "random". To do otherwise would mean that the encryption system is really, really weak.
They really don't care *what* is being shared so much as bandwidth costs. For U of W, this isn't so much a legal question as a policy question to keep their network costs from spiraling out of sight.
And many P2P users simply don't care in the least about their bandwidth usage -- they suck up as much as they can get. No effort to obtain a file from another computer on the local network (granted, most P2P software doesn't even support this). They simply expect mass amounts of bandwidth, and for other students' tutitions to subsidize their downloading.
I'd like to see per-user data transfer per week quotas, where users get capped to 2kBps or so for the rest of the week if they exhaust their quota.
If it's about bandwith, why don't they throttle the p2p ports like any self-respecting, upright university.
If you read the article, you'll notice that they do.
I'd say that a better question is -- why the *hell* don't colleges have per-user quotas? Like, you can transfer at an uncapped rate for large_quantity_of_data/week, at which point you get capped to 2kbps. You can still do work, but P2P users will soon learn not to waste bandwidth, and to obtain files from machines on the *local* network as much as possible. That alleviates the cost issues and keeps everyone happy.
For months, the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song...
I'd been *wondering* when someone was going to finally do something about his lousy music! U of W's spearheading a regular cultural revolution!:-)
It's kind of ironic that your sig mentions Palladium -- It was what I thought of when Connectix came up. If MS wants to have a virtualization system that can run Palladium-enabled OSes in VMs, they need the virtualization system to support Palladium.
And now for the rant. MS is a good business. I have to admit that. They generally make good business moves. Their skirting the edge of disaster with the DOJ seemed risky -- but they pulled it off, much like Hitler up until Poland. MS takes very few risks, in general. They wait, find an impressive company, and buy them out. Good business move, lousy for the consumer.
This has driven me absolutely mad in the past.
Mongomusic used to be the only dot-com to successfully match my favorite artists and songs with similar ones. Microsoft bought it, and not a hint of their technology has been heard of since.
Bungie used to make tons of great games for the Mac. Their storyline was probably the best of any game I've played (as recently as a year or so ago, there was still active discussion among people trying to work out subtleties of the plot). Microsoft bought them. They made Halo...which came out for the X-Box only, despite promises.
Connectix is probably the only systems programming company that I can say flat out that I am deeply impressed with. They've a flair for low-cost, but very technically impressive products. They've rewritten and topped the memory management subsystem in the MacOS (and Win 9x line) with RamDoubler, rewritten and topped Apple's own 680x0 interpreter with SpeedDoubler, produced the QuickCam (a groundbreaking piece of hardware if there ever was one). They've produced an x86 emulator for the PPC with a very impressive M to N instruction ratio (Virtual PC), and now have a competitor to VMware, itself a technically impressive product. And what's going to happen to this kickass company -- one of the few places I'd work at at the drop of a hat? It ends up in the belly of the beast.
Slashdot Mirror
ignoring the fact that OS X generally runs on slower software,
That should be "slower hardware".
The average joe will never understand why he isn't getting a good deal when he spends less than $1000-$1500 on a computer.
.NET development for much longer than everyone else has been. MS has the jump here, and it will be tough to catch up in both performance and compatibility.
Err...yes, for some things a $1200 computer is insufficient. For other things, it's a very good deal. As a matter of fact, given the continuous and rapid increase in bang/buck, there's a reasonable argument that deviating too strongly from the increasing value curve (i.e. spending a relatively large amount of money on a computer when the value rapidly depreciates) is a bad idea.
Furthermore, simply because Apple does not cater to low-cost computer buyers (nothing wrong with that -- you don't hear me going after Porche or Rolex) does *not* imply that one cannot purchase a high-end x86 machine. There are very, very many systems builders that will be happy as a claim to throw as much money as you want to into a computer. Want three times as much power as you need, with redundant power supplies? Quad processors? A UPS? Hardware SCSI RAID, Firewire, 8 USB 2.0 ports, a GeForce 4, 2 gigs of RAM? Perhaps large plasma gas or projection display? Enormous speakers? Joysticks that are clones of their fighter-jet originals? Whatever demands you have can pretty much always be met.
Remember, computer usage is an alternate dimension unto itself where all of the basic economic rules like "you get what you pay for" don't apply. If you want quality hardware, tough luck getting it for less than a few grand off the shelf.
You know, "inexpensive" does not necessarily imply "shoddy".
My parents paid $2000 for a new Dell PC because they were terrified that a new PowerMac or PowerBook would not have been compatable with my unversity's software requirements. Ironically, my PowerBook G3 which runs at 333mhz is a better development box for my school work than my PC. I know many geeks that want a Macintosh so badly they can't stand it.
[shrug] So your parents made a choice that you feel was suboptimal for your situation. That may certainly be true, but it has little bearing on whether the product you want is ideal for everyone else.
Projects like OpenOffice will make the PC irrelevent as a platform.
You *do* mean Windows, not "the PC", where I'm assuming that "PC" refers to "x86-based machine", right?
OpenOffice will help level the playing field. And Microsoft will have to compete more on price, features, and service more than it did, and give up some reliance on "compatibility".
I don't think that you can simply claim that OS X is the end-all and be all of desktop environments, disregarding Linux, BSD, and yes, even Windows. Apple's always had some good ideas and some completely stupid ideas (stupidity ratio increasing in recent years with many of their UIs (think Quicktime) and Jobs' insistence that people were *still* sufficiently unfamiliar with two-button mice to be allowed to purchase machines equipped with them).
I predict that OpenOffice, Mono, Java and Mozilla will go a long way toward getting people off the Microsoft plantation.
I hope so. OTOH, let's break this down:
OpenOffice is a major jump, and the beginning of a war on features more than comptibility. However, the onus will be on the OpenOffice folks to prevent Microsoft from successfully creating format compatibility issues, which they are *sure* to start doing.
Mono is a nice idea, but a long, long way away from where Microsoft is. Microsoft purchased some very good languages and compilers people, started design well before everyone else, and has been putting resources into
Java is interesting (and certainly useful against Microsoft in some areas), but has long since turned out to not be what it once was billed as -- a write once run anywhere solution for all applications, including desktop computing. There is a very obvious lack of horizontal-market Java applications, stemming from issues with the Java standard itself, including a lack of templated container classes, and poor performance and memory footprint. Remember that Corel spent a *huge* amount of money porting their suite to Java, and at the end (and I'm *sure* that after that kind of resource expenditure, this was not done without much agonizing consideration) the entire thing was scrapped.
As for Mozilla -- Mozilla is very nice. It was pushed into a production a bit early, but still a major strike against Microsoft. However, it is *not* the impossible-to-quash piece of software that some other projects are turning out to be. AOL/TW is undergoing a lot of upheaval, and funding and support for Mozilla may not be around forever. Apple has already distanced themselves from the Mozilla project and gone the way of KHTML (the cynic in me wants to think that this necessity was a result of Apple wasting so much memory and so many cycles on the basic UI that they needed to cut corners in the area of their browser).
What I think will be the watershed moment for Apple's reemergence will be the first major roll-out of Palladium PCs.
Ridiculous. A lack of Palladium support makes zero difference to the end user in an environment where it exists at all. It can be disabled by the end user. You feel that content will *require* Palladium to be used, and that content distribution companies will be comfortable leaving Palladium-disabled users out of things, perhaps? The same goes for the Mac. If such costs are deemed acceptable by content distribution companies (and Palladium *is* such a crucial issue), then the DRM-less Mac runs precisely the same risk -- of being ignored by said content distribution companies.
Frankly, I don't think Palladium will ever take off -- that's essentially a placebo to allow Microsoft better political positioning in the lucrative content distribution and management field with a horde of increasingly desperate content distributors. It only takes a single break in a Palladium-enabled system for *all* content distributed up until them to be redistributed in a DRMless manner. x86 architecture hardware has never been designed around being particularly secure. We will, of course, see, but my bets are that Palladium is going to be primarily useful from a political standpoint, not a technological one.
Microsoft is trying to force users to upgrade both the OS and the hardware, how is that __any__ different from what they say is the biggest problem with buying Apple?
Well, resource requirements generally increase so much over new releases of Microsoft software that one is required to purchase new hardware anyway. Such is life. A major difference is that Apple charges much more for their hardware than x86 manufacturers.
Apple doesn't fistfuck its users with concepts like Palladium which are blatantly anti-individual property rights.
Do tell? Perhaps you'd like to explain the presence of the "Copy Protection" flag that Apple introduced *long* before MS was trying to do DRM. It was unpopular, and fell into disuse -- much as I feel Palladium will (and this is in a world where the company trying to impose DRM controls both the hardware and software platforms).
My parents are perfect examples of users who "don't care" about technology. I described to them what Palladium is really about and asked them if they'd buy a PC like that to which they replied "Hell no!"
Did you *really* explain this to them -- that by disabling Palladium, you have (at least from a DRM standpoint) nothing more and nothing less than a Mac? No?
Those users believe, and rightly so, that it is their God-given right to listen to MP3s that they have...I'll be damned if I'll give Valenti
Uh, huh. I don't see even the evil-mogul-looking Valenti trying to prevent *anyone* from listening to MP3s that they have. As a matter of fact, Phillips (frequently cited as a "good guy" in the DRM wars) did actually pursue this patch.
no less than 192kbps VBR.
Bit of a nitpick, but this makes no sense.
model of IP ownership is better than the (Classical) Liberal system we currently enjoy where you have a de facto ownership of the IP in your possession.
I'm sorry? The "classical liberal" system that you're talking about certainly does *not* give you ownership of said IP. Try running off 10,000 copies and selling them on the street tomorrow and see how far you get before getting handcuffed. That's nothing new at all.
It won't keep aunt sally from getting Outlook worms because crackers are invariably more resourceful than their adversaries at Microsoft.
Yes, yes. Microsoft is full of hype and deliberately misleading when it comes to DRM. This is nothing at all new. Microsoft does this with *all* of their new products, and has for years. Most software companies do--heck, most *companies* do, though not as much.
And in all of this there is still one issue where Microsoft just doesn't get it. Hardware can have problems, look at some of the early Pentiums and some of Intel's PIII chipsets. You can't say "oh I'm sorry" and release a "service pack" for the hardware unless it's something like a ROM that needs patching. Palladium PCs will probably have hardware problems communicating with a wide-variety of peripherals and that will negate the biggest "advantage" PCs have: that you can buy components off the shelf and use them instead of buying from a select few vendors.
I think you've got a few misconceptions. You can certainly use a non-Palladium-aware device in a system and use Palladium -- you just won't be able to use Palladium features with it. [shrug] Same was true for old PCI video cards (couldn't do AGP texturing), old sound cards (couldn't do digital output), old mice (no scrollwheel -- couldn't use scrollwheel features), yadda, yadda, yadda. This applies to every PC component I can think of.
If anything Apple's star is getting brighter.
Well...yeah. No kidding. They actually have a modern OS, after six years of false starts. They couldn't *possibly* be worse off than they were.
I'm writing this from a box running OSX and I've used Linux for 4 years off and on. I recently used KDE 3.1 and RedHat 8.0 which anyone with a basic sense of reality knows are now for all intents and purposes the vanguard of Linux in the mainstream. KDE 3.1 can't hold a candle to OSX on the desktop
I'm not a tremendous fan of KDE. I do like a few things about OS X, but I really don't see the overwhelming advantages you're claiming. OS X's primary interesting feature is a significant amount of eye candy. While once I was deeply impressed with the HCI strictures Apple laid on their platform, more recent ones (one-button-mice only, Quicktime's interface, etc) are less impressive.
RPM and RedCarpet are jokes compared to Apple's updater.
Mmm...Apple's bundle packaging system is kind of interesting, though retrofitting it onto UNIX would be ugly. I personally wouldn't give up RPM, which offers a wider array of analysis and ease of automating tasks, but I can see how many less technically adept users would prefer the simpler UI to their package system Apple exposes. You are certainly right that I'm not a tremendous fan of Red Carpet, but that's a Ximian thing, not a Red Hat thing -- I believe you're thinking of up2date, which sucks very, very much. However, apt for rpm is available (try Freshrpms), and the even better yum is also available. And yum really *is* stupendously good.
Java on Linux compared to OSX?
I tend to feel that Apple's rather behind Linux in this field, actually. The best performing of all JRE/JDK implementations that I know of (*including* native code compilers, surprisingly) is IBM's JRE/JDK. This is not available for OS X, though it is freely downloadable for Linux. Cocoa is nice, though, I will give you that.
Almost every UNIX geek I know locally now uses or plans to use OSX as their main OS.
[shrug] I know a bunch of UNIX geeks, and none of them are particularly interested in switching to OS X. As a matter of fact, I know very few technically oriented people on OS X (though I certainly expect plenty exist, they aren't present where I live).
There is something irresistable about being able to run GCC in one window and WC3 in another.
Oh, for Chrissake. A *Windows* user can do that. That's not much of a metric.
The nerds that think that blackbox, windowmaker and afterstep are real desktops aren't on Apple's radars and they shouldn't be. They're a waste of time for a company that makes a real desktop platform.
Uh, huh. Aside from the "what about the actually *mainstream* WMs you left out like metacity and kwin (forget the current KDE WM)" argument, what then is your criteria for a "real desktop platform"? A "genie minimize"?
Linux desktop developers should quite frankly give up and ask the OpenBeOS team how they can help if they really want a good OSS desktop.
OpenBeOS is an interesting project. I kind of wish I had been able to play with BeOS at some point. It's also much, much farther away from being competitive than Linux native desktop environments.
Linux isn't faster than either OS X or WinXP on the desktop
Okay, now that is just ridiculous. From an application standpoint, and ignoring the fact that OS X generally runs on slower software, no, there is no hard restrictions. However, OS X has the heaviest GUI overhead of the three, in cycles and memory. If you're trying to sell OS X, resource usage is not a stance I'd try taking.
and only BeOS is arguably archetecturally superior to all of the above.
Uh, huh. Ignoring the question of exactly *what* the relationship is between "architectural superiority" and "end user appeal", why do you like BeOS so much?
It's a battle Linux will lose before it even gets to the start line.
Well, it stands to be interesting, atthethethe least.
The opensource movement hopefully will stop the proprietary invasion that started with Microsoft in the 90's. That has hurt Apple more then anything.
Um...at the time, and to a large extent even today, Apple is more "proprietary" than Microsoft, in their absolute control of their platform in both hardware and software.
That was, in fact, what killed my love for Macs -- back when Apple killed off Power Computing and friends, I decided that I really didn't want to hang around any more.
They don't realize that while the Mac costs twice as much, it also remains a viable computer twice as long (or longer)
Dur...*what*?
That's ridiculous. You can use either platform for *ages*. There is, as far as I can tell, very little difference.
I've seen the ugly Windows problems that just occur out of nowhere, and dealt with the people who can't do more than turn their PCs on and type Word documents because the machine intimidates them.
You know, I see the same thing with OS X.
What you're talking about *are* issues, but they're issues that affect everyone, not just x86 users.
Both camps? I guess you mean Linux and Apple (this is /. after all).
You aware of fanatics in any other camp?
Who woulda thunk? Apple's ridiculous high-margin business model will be taught in universities some day.
You know, Apple is pretty darn far from perfect, but you're arguing that the entire concept of luxury goods is "ridiculous"? Armani, Porche and Rolex executives would probably chuckle a bit at that...
Microsoft is moving too slowly to make something
that can compete on cost.
Mmm....while I agree with most of your points ("Heil Linus!"), I think this is taking it too far. For a minor feature, yes, MS will likely take longer to implement things. Security patches, say. And this is certainly an issue for them.
*However*, for larger scale movements, I cannot agree. If Microsoft deems something important, it can toss hundreds (a la DirectX) of full-time developers working on implementing it. For concentrated attempts on areas of software, Microsoft has an advantage. I guarantee that if Microsoft was on the other side of the fence, they could get, say, NTFS support in quickly (because they can throw a huge number of full-time developers on reverse-engineering the thing).
Finally, for *very* widescale movements, the open source world has an advantage. The majority of pieces of software in a Linux distro see improvement with each release. Lots of small improvements, but it's a really compelling reason to upgrade -- buy a new distro, and *everything* gets better. I mean, for Chrissake, Microsoft is *still using the Solitaire binary from Windows 3.1!* In the Linux world, there would have been more solitaire variants added, 32 bit color added, the event loop during the "card bounce" winning sequence fixed so that moving the mouse doesn't speed the animation up, and so that the animation is timer-based instead of CPU-based.
Keep in mind that the rate at which Linux can move is not necessarily tightly coupled to the rate at which Linux-as-available-to-businesses can move. Take a look at Red Hat Advanced Workstation and Server, Red Hat's corporate offerings. These things emphasize maintainability and stability. They move much more slowly than Linus's kernel, or the galeon team's web browser. MS runs things through a pretty sizeable QA test before they release, and RH does the same for their coporate products (well, and their normal ones, but particularly their corporate releases). So, to reach the consumer, said software has to pass through the often lengthy QA process. For example, the current XFree CVS snapshot has antialiased, colored, translucent, animated cursors. Almost all Red Hat customers are running 4.2.x, which does not have these features. They'll have to wait until RH comes out with a new release to get any new features. (Incidently, double-buffering on the cursor and saveunders for the cursor aren't implemented, which makes the cursor look a lot less good than MS's cursor, which also brings up the point that you cannot release some "new features" to the public yet in the Linux world because they aren't polished enough yet)
It's a lot funnier when you can actually read and poke fun at things people actually say.
It was in the articles -- in the first three, since I remember them, and that was all I read.
I have to disagree with this.
"Wintel" -- When Microsoft releases a new OS -- lots of Intel chips are sold in the MS push. The most common way people get a new microsoft operating system is via new hardware.
Yes. True.
Intel needs Microsoft to drive the hardware sales.
Okay, now *that* is silly, unless that you're going to claim that this is entirely via virtue of massively inefficient code on the part of Microsoft or something.
Intel needs [operating system vendors] and [application vendors] to drive the hardware sales. It really doesn't matter who is doing the selling. As a matter of fact, Linux makes it much easier to migrate to Intel's higher end server chips, which throws Intel into paroxysms of joy.
Microsoft needs intel to get chips specs and support on optimizing their operating system for the next generations of intel chips
Sort of. I really doubt that Intel is going to withhold instruction set information from anyone. Zero benefit to them. Still, to some degree, *Microsoft* depends on *Intel*. Not the other way.
But the fact that intel has decided to completely support Linux as a first class operating system also bothers Microsoft.
What do you mean by "completely support"? Intel doesn't provide support for *any* operating system that I know of. If you go home, call up Intel and say "I'm having trouble installing Windows", they're going to tell you to piss off. Operating systems support CPUs, *not* the other way around.
Jist -- articles full of inaccuracies. I mean, it's not like these are amazing from the business standpoint, either.
Second, Intel Corp., the dominant maker of processors for PCs, loosened its tight links with Microsoft and started making chips for Linux. This made it possible for corporations to get all the computing power they wanted at a fraction of the price
Huh?
Jist -- articles full of inaccuracies. I mean, it's not like these are amazing from the business standpoint, either.
Second, Intel Corp., the dominant maker of processors for PCs, loosened its tight links with Microsoft and started making chips for Linux. This made it possible for corporations to get all the computing power they wanted at a fraction of the price
Huh?
Before using open-source software, tech companies must sign a license in which they promise to give away innovations they build on top of it
Yeah, that isn't misleading about whether a company that *uses* Linux could get slammed for not handing out their database...
True, since the volunteer programmers often lack specialized knowledge, complex business applications are probably beyond their range.
[snort] [snicker] Enough corporate back-patting going on already? Yeah, all those people writing kernels and compilers are completely out of the loop when it comes to transactions, yessiree.
But basic open-source databases and e-mail are already available.
Yeah. *Basic* email servers. After all, open source is *such* a second class player in the email server market.
Not that Linux can afford to coast. For starters, its next iteration, version 2.5, shepherded by Torvalds himself, will have to be able to handle more complex computing tasks, such as harnessing more processors working in parallel and better handling of large, memory-intensive tasks. Thus, the disparate volunteers -- mostly unpaid -- who build open-source software will need to vastly improve their coordination to keep Linux' quality reputation intact.
Umm...okay.
I think you mean
AD&D:Baldur::Book:Movie
Staring at a monitor produces considerable eye strain.
If your eyes are being hurt by looking at your monitor, you have your contrast set too high.
Incidently, this may be the first time someone's tried using the DMCA to enforce *file format* incompatibility. MS has done it before with copyrights (claiming that the C header files in wine used to implement Win32 were "derivative" of their own header files), with trade secrets (claiming that the "open" spec for their Kerberos modifications were protected as a "trade secret" and that no one else could implement it). It's been done before with patents (people claiming that an executable packer uses a patented algorithm). The special cases the DMCA puts into law are the only fork of IP that hasn't yet been used to try to ensure incompatibility.
Oh, and I dunno what MS's lawyers were threatening Nullsoft with if they didn't disable their "save to WAV" feature whenever users play a WMA file in WinAmp, but that theoretically could have been patent claims, so this may be a grand slam for MS in terms of misapplying IP law to screw the consumer if they try to go with a competitor's product -- they alone will have covered the entire gamut.
Because this will undoubtedly be cracked within a month, tops. There's a good chance it's already been cracked based on the betas -- and Slashdot posting it *ensures* that every techie that didn't already know about it does.
Heck, *I* woulda cracked it if I had a copy sitting around and had any interest in Office, just for the egg-on-your-face factor affecting Microsoft when they try selling their "strong" security to companies.
You cannot do secure DRM in the current computing environment. *Maybe* with Palladium in place. Definitely not now.
The only benefit I can see this giving Microsoft is a legal excuse to make their file formats *incompatible* with everyone else, and anyone else implementing support for their file formats being liable under the DMCA.
Office is Microsoft's bread and butter, and incompatibility is the worker that brings it home each day.
The fact that multiple apps *can* have a file open for write access isn't necessarily a bad thing. If, say, you want to combine multiple output streams from programs, you can toss 'em all into one file (even opening a file immediately before actually writing to it and then closing it on an OS with forced-write-lock behavior cannot allow this). There are some things the "forcibly write locked" and some things the "multiple apps can write to a file" model are each good for.
For example, you're claiming that apps should establish locks on network-resident files. That's fine and dandy, until some app goes to the great computer in the sky with a file locked.
On UNIX, traditionally users are savvy enough to wipe out lock files. In the case of netscape navigator, the app simply handed the user a command to run to remove the lock. Hence, write-locking files (especially remote ones) can cause nastiness for users as well.
Finally, I hate to say it, but if you're trying to set up a collaboration system (as it sounds like you are), some sort of dedicated checkout system is probably better. For text files on UNIX, this usually means cvs, but other platforms have their own favored revision control/collaboration systems.
In general, I dislike *intensely* the emphasis that many desktop operating systems place on forcible locking. Windows is by far the worst culprit -- write-opened files cannot be opened for write, cannot be moved, and cannot even be renamed. Classic MacOS is a bit better -- you can move around write-opened files -- but I really think that UNIX's approach is pretty good. You have the ability to use *both* types of locking, and the default is the one that lets the user do the most -- so dead apps don't tie up files.
our Internet access is completely shut off if we exceed 300,000,000 uploaded or downloaded bytes in one seven-day period.
This just pisses students off, can penalize people who accidentally use too much bandwidth, and just plain isn't a good idea. Much better to throttle the connection of the user's been using excessive bandwidth.
I gotta say that a non-halfassed encryption mechanism is going to have a fingerprint that can only be percieved as "random". To do otherwise would mean that the encryption system is really, really weak.
They really don't care *what* is being shared so much as bandwidth costs. For U of W, this isn't so much a legal question as a policy question to keep their network costs from spiraling out of sight.
And many P2P users simply don't care in the least about their bandwidth usage -- they suck up as much as they can get. No effort to obtain a file from another computer on the local network (granted, most P2P software doesn't even support this). They simply expect mass amounts of bandwidth, and for other students' tutitions to subsidize their downloading.
I'd like to see per-user data transfer per week quotas, where users get capped to 2kBps or so for the rest of the week if they exhaust their quota.
If it's about bandwith, why don't they throttle the p2p ports like any self-respecting, upright university.
If you read the article, you'll notice that they do.
I'd say that a better question is -- why the *hell* don't colleges have per-user quotas? Like, you can transfer at an uncapped rate for large_quantity_of_data/week, at which point you get capped to 2kbps. You can still do work, but P2P users will soon learn not to waste bandwidth, and to obtain files from machines on the *local* network as much as possible. That alleviates the cost issues and keeps everyone happy.
For months, the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song...
:-)
I'd been *wondering* when someone was going to finally do something about his lousy music! U of W's spearheading a regular cultural revolution!
One of them also died in a crash of one of their machines. :-)
...this is taking place in the highly ethical and respected telecom field.
This is more dangerous than home built aircraft.
Seriously, if your life insurance company finds out that you're making and sailing homemade submarines, you're going to get dropped like a hot potato.
It's kind of ironic that your sig mentions Palladium -- It was what I thought of when Connectix came up. If MS wants to have a virtualization system that can run Palladium-enabled OSes in VMs, they need the virtualization system to support Palladium.
And now for the rant. MS is a good business. I have to admit that. They generally make good business moves. Their skirting the edge of disaster with the DOJ seemed risky -- but they pulled it off, much like Hitler up until Poland. MS takes very few risks, in general. They wait, find an impressive company, and buy them out. Good business move, lousy for the consumer.
This has driven me absolutely mad in the past.
Mongomusic used to be the only dot-com to successfully match my favorite artists and songs with similar ones. Microsoft bought it, and not a hint of their technology has been heard of since.
Bungie used to make tons of great games for the Mac. Their storyline was probably the best of any game I've played (as recently as a year or so ago, there was still active discussion among people trying to work out subtleties of the plot). Microsoft bought them. They made Halo...which came out for the X-Box only, despite promises.
Connectix is probably the only systems programming company that I can say flat out that I am deeply impressed with. They've a flair for low-cost, but very technically impressive products. They've rewritten and topped the memory management subsystem in the MacOS (and Win 9x line) with RamDoubler, rewritten and topped Apple's own 680x0 interpreter with SpeedDoubler, produced the QuickCam (a groundbreaking piece of hardware if there ever was one). They've produced an x86 emulator for the PPC with a very impressive M to N instruction ratio (Virtual PC), and now have a competitor to VMware, itself a technically impressive product. And what's going to happen to this kickass company -- one of the few places I'd work at at the drop of a hat? It ends up in the belly of the beast.
Sigh.
MS sells titles to make up the hardware loss - they're not going to be selling Linux anytime soon.
We'll see.