Since IBM most likely wouldn't own the copyrights on that code, they wouldn't have standing to raise the issue, and so probably didn't even care to check. AT&T vs BSD was AT&T vs U of C copyrights.
That's a great point, but showing migration of code in the opposite direction sure would have been damning in front of a jury even if IBM couldn't have hoped for damages. Then again it's obvious at this point there was no need....
Xenix would have, it was originally another V7 fork just like BSD as I recall, and it evolved following the SysV line -- quite parallel to BSD. The last time I used it it was pretty much SVR3, no BSD in sight.
OpenServer and UnixWare, on the other hand... those are pure SVR4 and SVR4 owed a hell of a lot to BSD.
That's true, but in the push to get UNIX into the commercial space the SysV interfaces were released as an open specification. This was actually covered during the trial.
The fact of the matter was that the Linux folk didn't copy code, something that would have been obvious to any observer following it's development. The idea that there were vast amounts of stolen code was ludicrous if you knew anything at all about the internal structure of the two operating systems.
There was always the possibility of code that got injected during the large commercial code donations by e.g. IBM or SGI, and in fact the only piece of code that showed actual derivation came from SGI... But it turned out to be both a very small amount of code and buggy to boot. As soon as people got a look at it they excised it in favor of working, original, code.
I personally expected it to go more the way of the AT&T veresus BSD case, where it turned out that AT&T had stolen tons of code from BSD, not the other way around. The Linux emulation layer in SCO UNIX seemed a particularly likely candidate. Either that turned out not to be the case or IBM simply didn't push the issue (perhaps because SCO was having so much trouble proving anything in their claims) though.
SCO's strategy always seemed to me to be a shakedown, scare companies into license agreements. Why they went after one of the deepsest pockets first is beyond me, IBM was very likely to fight given their investment, but it was clear early on that management was not very competent.
You raise some good points, but your "can they read two books you bought for your e-book" is off base. Sure, if you only have one e-book reader; if you have one per person it becomes much more flexible. For the last few years that was an expensive proposition (although in my experience the things paid for themselves in a few months) but prices are falling fast (and have you priced bookshelves recently?)
My daughter has my old Kindle and my wife uses the Kindle reader on her phone. We can all share the same library, meaning for instance that my daughter and I can (and do) read the same book at the same time with only one purchase.
One of the big wins for us, though, is space: We have thousands of paper books already, way too many to put on shelves. The expansion slewed a lot with the influx of e-readers.
2.1GHz huh? That's not a 1998 processor. The fastest Intel processor available in 1998 -- late 1998 -- was a 450MHz Pentium II Xeon. Neither Vista nor Win7 will install on anything even close to that.
It wasn't until 2001 that Intel crossed the 2GHz line, and 2002 when there was a 2.1GHz processor in their lineup. That, I think, sets the tone for analyzing the rest of your system specs.
That 1998-era 50GB drive? Umm, no. Drives in 1998 time were generally in the single-digit gig range (much too small to even install Win7). Here is the announcement of a series of new machines from Dell that year:
So that pretty much sets the upper limit of what would have been available. 50G drives were around in 2002-3, which is probably not coincidentally the same time frame as your 2.1GHz processor.
Now, the G1 mentioned in the article above was a pretty good Dell system in 1998, the kind of thing you bought to run NT4. Its maximum RAM? 256M, one quarter of what you say you installed.
I'm too lazy to go figure out at what point it was possible to buy a Dell desktop system that was expandable to 1G, but I am willing to bet it's somewhere around 2002, just like all of the other specs of your system.
So I would have to conclude that you actually installed Win7 on a 2002 or 2003 era machine, and it will run very poorly with only 1G RAM; my personal experiments showed that the systems' responsiveness was downright awful below 2G (32-bit).
I think you misunderstand, I was talking about moving to a completely different machine. It's drop-dead simple to do.
It's true that an iMac or mini are not very upgradeable internally, but that's more the form factor than anything else, and you can substitute newer bigger drives internally if you like. I have generally hung FireWire drives off them instead, but YMMV.
I've personally done at least twelve full version upgrades of MacOS, including one TiBook that had full version upgrades five times. I had one problem across all of them: That TiBook had a nine-letter password set back when it was new with 10.1, and became impossible to log into when upgraded to Leopard (10.5) because it had only one account. There was an upgrade bug where passwords of more than 8 characters that had been set with 10.1 would not carry through.
It took me about 45 minutes to work out how to fix that (the obvious approach using the boot disk got me an admin account, but I still had to reset the password on the old one, and that was mildly annoying). That is around seven hours less time than the minimum I have ever spent on a Windows upgrade, and considerably less time than I had to spend trying to figure out how to get Vista Home to talk to my NAS boxen (MS changed the minimum security requirements for network shares in Vista Home for some inexplicable reason).
I am more than a little dubious about the claim of a 1998-era PC running W7. That would likely max out at 512M unless it was exotic for the time (meaning server-class hardware), and W7 wouldn't install on something that small, and the CPU and graphics would not be anywhere near W7 minimums either. I got complaints installing it on what were pretty well configured 2005-era machines and they ran poorly even doing basic things until I put at least 2.5G RAM in them.
In contrast I had a 1998 era G3 clamshell Mac running Tiger (the last version that would install from a CD), and I had Leopard running on a 2001 TiBook and 12" G4 Powerbook. The funny thing to me as I advanced from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 and finally 10.5 was that each upgrade actually ran better on the same hardwar than its predecessor *despite* having greater capabilities.
I have to compare that to Windows. XPSP2 doubled RAM requirements and Vista quadrupled XPSP2. Win7 didn't get much worse than Vista, but it is of course not much more than a service pack to Vista. I've never seen a version of Windows that ran better on the same hardware than the one before since WinNT 3.1->3.5.
Snow Leopard makes a big break in that they dropped support for non-Intel, which means that machines I bought expecting 6-year lifespans are only going to get 5 before I hand them off to someone else. In the world of Windows PCs I'm lucky to get much more than 2 years before I roll the machine down into the Linux server farm and get something that runs the latest Windows reasonably well.
YMMV, but in terms of longevity Apple has done very, very well in my experience. And in terms of ease of migration to new hardware, which is what I was talking about previously, they are second to none.
At my day job we're still developing on XP, I think mostly because that's what the customers mostly use. But we want to move to W7 because it's difficult to do development on machines limited to 3.2G... and more and more customers are using it.
Regarding the pain of upgrading, I thought that until I got a Mac. Migration to new hardware, upgrades, and disaster recovery are all really easy. You wouldn't believe how pissed I was at Microsoft the first time I migrated to a new machine. Plug the old one into the new one, push a button, and 20 minutes later the new one had the complete environment of the old one - data, apps, settings, even drivers. It takes me days to get a new Windows box up and running.
Personally I want people on W7 because it is vastly more secure than XP. Maybe I will have to spend less time fixing the damn things.
Oh please. This is Windows, where someone thought it was a great idea to put up annoying bubbles telling you that you have unused icons on your desktop, while simultaneously remaining completely quiet about the drive that is erroring away towards certain death.
In my personal experience, that is.
Frankly I think the only reliable restore point is a back-up image.
So you agree, obviously. I mean, who the hell would pay for MP/E or HP-UX?
Re:Location services to work on a WiFi-only iPad
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iPad Review
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Seeing as I was standing in front of my house I didn't have a dying need to know where I was; rather, I was curious as to why the iTouch even had a "find me" button in the first place.
It had one because it works, at least some of the time. Frankly it spooked me as I was absolutely certain that there was no GPS capability in a first-gen iTouch. So how did it know?
It took me a couple of hours to work out how it did it, after which it was pretty easy to find the service Apple uses via Google.
I think it's kind of funny how little Apple advertises this capability, but it certainly does work and inside of densely populated areas it often works better than GPS.
Location services to work on a WiFi-only iPad
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iPad Review
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"My iPad has no 3G, therefore it has no GPS. But applications were constantly asking me for permission to use my location. This seems like an oversight: if you don't have a location sensor, don't ask! Even the built-in Map app asked me for information that it could not possibly have."
At first blush this seems like a reasonable comment, but it actually isn't. Depending on where you are, your WiFi-only iPad may well be able to find itself using the Skyhook service that Apple uses, which uses a database of WiFi base station IDs and their coordinates. I was shocked the first time I pushed the "where am I" button on my iTouch... and it found me to within a few feet.
I put it to you that there is a significant delay between new malware showing up in the wild and the antivirus people even noticing, much less getting a signature update out there. Days, certainly; possibly weeks. The malware guys certainly seem to react to new signatures with new variants in a matter of hours. It's almost as if they run the standard packages and as soon as they pick up a new hit they generate a new variant. (That's what I'd do.)
But even if this impression is wrong, and detection and updates are nigh-instantaneous, you're suggesting that the standard antivirus packages do not update themselves often enough by default to close the window enough to be effective... which just goes back to my theory that these packages are approximately zero percent effective.
I know these scanners used to work, back in the day, but I haven't seen one inkling to suggest that these packages are at all effective these days given how easy it is for the malware authors to distribute new software whenever they feel the need.
We're not going to solve this with scanning utilities, it's a waste of resources. We need to approach it with cryptographic signature and trust lists starting in the BIOS and going all the way up to user applications. We need to stop the use of privileged accounts for day-to-day work, and treat applications as hostile. Applications that touch the net should especially be treated as hostile and run with especially reduced privilege sets.
Some of this is going to be difficult to do in the near term, but at the very least the operating system ought to verify its own intactness; it's ridiculous how easy it is to replace a few modules and subvert the system at the lowest levels on the next reboot.
The costs of trusting software have long ago gone beyond reasonable, it's time to start building the infrastructure to ensure that it's possible to detect illicit modification, particularly of system code, and to make it at least remotely possible to identify the source of malware -- and therefore culpability -- by denying unsigned code from running at all, and only allowing signed code to execute if it is signed by someone with which we have a trust relationship.
If this sounds like a closed system ala the iPhone, that's right -- the iPhone does it right, technically. But there's no need for this system to be under the control of a single vendor as with the iPhone. The existing certificate system already does that; you can decide who you want to trust. What is no longer tenable is not having any kind of trust system at all beyond sheer guesswork. Too many people don't know what to trust, and just say "ok" to everything. It is no surprise that this leads to 12 million strong botnets, is it?
If I had a nickel for every computer I had to clean malware off that was already running a major brand-name antivirus package....
Seriously, the antivirus packages are so full of holes it isn't funny; as far as I can tell these packages are nearly zero percent effective against modern threats. Virtually every unsophisticated Windows user I have ever seen has a PC loaded with malware despite antivirus. It's just too easy to work around the signature-based detection systems, or to trick users into doing something stupid ("Your system has a virus! Click here to fix"), and the malware authors are very good at getting around the prophylactics. The packages that actually do work well -- like Malwarebytes and Spybot -- are not in broad use, and of course they complain a lot about even legitimate operations.
The only way I have found to solve this is to get these people off of Windows entirely. I had hoped that Vista would help, but as far as I can tell the new protections did next to nothing to stop the malware authors, perhaps because so many people go and turn off UAC entirely. The jury is still out on Win7.
You're right in that there were some software systems built that could more or less reverse the fuzzing (down to ~150 feet, anyway), but the advent of differential GPS pretty much eliminated the usefulness of Selective Availability. Between that and the obvious commercial benefits of accurate GPS it was a pretty obvious decision.
These days there are other alternatives. I mentioned E911 but there is also Skyhook's positioning based on WiFi location (used by the iPhone, which is why it has superb accuracy in cities).
Hah, I wasn't very clear. I meant that the military can't just send a signal to the satellite to degrade or disable the signal.
You could jam, but jamming requires you to have interesting hardware in place at the right place and time. If there's some terrorist group sending drones, they could be anywhere and the odds of you have the right equipment in place are near nil. Either disabling E911 location services or jamming the cellular network over a large area would be practically and politically difficult.
With an Arduino it's already super easy to build a drone with GPS guiding. But even if GPS is jammed it's not much harder to implement inertial positioning
Assuming you're thinking of a terrorist activity on US soil, if you have a cellphone in your drone you can use the phone's GPS, which doesn't necessarily use the GPS satellites at all -- some cell providers use tower triangulation that couldn't be quickly or easily jammed (it's not just a signal to a satellite cluster controlled by the military). That's not great accuracy, but it'd be good enough for long-distance guidance (e.g. following major highways) and other techniques could be used when you're close (e.g. video transmission through the cellphone link to a remote operator).
It's obviously easy to build a drone, assuming some sophistication, but the more payload it can take the more it costs and the easier it is to spot and destroy. It is lucky, then, that most terrorism-inclined people are neither sophisticated nor well financed.
I keep thinking of my in-laws, who took their (fully legal) PC that had become malware-ridden to a local "fix my PC" place and got it back with a pirated version of Windows. They obviously still have their original license, but WAT would shut them down and I'm sure the call to MS would be annoying for all involved.
As an aside, it drove me nuts that the repair place did this; the license key was pasted on the damn box, they could have done it fully legally with any install disc. My guess is that they just created a "works everywhere" image from a pirated copy. When it comes right down to it, after all, almost nobody gets a PC that doesn't have Windows already on it. Hell, it's so annoyingly difficult to buy a PC *without* Windows that I usually have a spare license or two laying around from my Linux boxen.
Regarding VPN support, it almost certainly does support VPNs to some degree; after all, the iPhone does.
Regarding media services other than Apple's, it's likely it will support them to at least the same degree as the iPhone. Pandora comes to mind, but as with iPods you can load all kinds of media from disparate sources. You think they're going to shut the Kindle and Stanza readers out? I seriously doubt that.
I know the "closed ecosystem" mantra, but it's "closed" in the sense that Apple gets to say "no" to certain things it doesn't like. Practically speaking there aren't a lot of those, despite the cries otherwise, as should be obvious just browsing through the app store. Generally rejection involves narrow wedges of the application space, and getting narrower rather than broader with time (e.g. there are now turn-by-turn GPS applications and VOIP applications that were disallowed originally).
It remains to be seen whether the iPad will do enough to draw a large market share, particularly given its price, but just because Apple isn't responding to every question thrown at it about the product doesn't mean the answers are all negative. It's exceptionally unlikely that Apple will restrict the device more than the iPhone, and the iPhone is doing pretty well in terms of extensibility.
In reading the commentary for this post I see that there are a lot of common misconceptions about e-books, and particularly e-book durability, that continue to be perpetuated. I thought I would inject some real-world, long-term experience on the subject as well as on the progression and viability of the market.
I bought my first e-book in 1998, to read on my Palm 5000, from a little retailer/publisher called Peanut Press. This book was called "Sister, Sister".
Luddites would suggest that I would have long ago lost access to this book. After all, since that time I have switched to a Palm V, then a pair of Handsprings, then a Sony Cleo, then a Palm T|X, then an iPod touch, and today use an iPhone and a Kindle. I lost or destroyed the Palm V, one of the Handsprings, and a Kindle along the line. As it turns out I can still read that book on all of my current e-book capable devices today.
In short, the reading device is ephemeral; possession of the book is orthogonal to the possession of the device. Most e-book critics either do not know this, do not understand it, or deliberately ignore it but it is the case.
To elaborate: Back when I bought my first e-book the Palm could hold about four books in its memory, but my PC could hold a large personal library's worth -- thousands. I could burn a CD with a collection of perhaps 500 books at a shot. Today an extensive personal library will fit on a $5 thumb drive you can buy at the grocery store. As such, having back-ups of your books is both easy and very very cheap. Moreover, unlike the digital music industry, retailers allow you to re-download books you have purchased -- giving you offsite backups in the normal course of things, and protecting your library even from disasters such as floods or fire that would destroy a paper library utterly. Rather than being at a disadvantage e-books, in the best cases, are much more durable due to the ease of copying.
E-books do have a new kind of loss, that of loss of access to the content because the e-book's file format becomes unreadable in one way or another. This will usually happen because the format becomes obsolete or because the format is protected with DRM such that you don't have access to it if, say, you switch devices. This is a real risk, but it's worthwhile to see how this risk has played out over the long term. I've seen it play out several times over at this point.
Early on there were a whole bunch of different e-book formats, and some dedicated devices, and if you picked the wrong one you could be completely out of luck when the industry moved on to something else. I have lost one book entirely as a result of purchasing it in Adobe e-book format, the only format the publisher allowed it to be sold in. This was a horrific format in terms of how restrictive its DRM was, how poor Adobe's reader software was, and in terms of Adobe's ongoing support. Their reader was almost unusable and wrecked formatting, even to the point of breaking in the middle of words at the end of a "page", even though the book loading process required you to spend many minutes waiting for it to be "formatted for your device." After about a year Adobe modified the format in an incompatible way, and required conversion, and the conversion tools were extremely difficult to use. On top of all of that the DRM format was so restrictive that losing the one device that was authorized to read the content caused total loss of the content. Given the poor reading experience it was unsurprising that this format died quickly (and, frankly, Adobe should be ashamed of themselves to have done such a bad job of it).
That represents the worst experience for an e-book. But that is in no way the norm, not then and certainly not today.
Most of today's formats, even the Kindle format (which is, after all, just a minor modification of Mobipocket), allow both DRM restricted and open encoding. There are really only two surviving formats: ePub and Mobipocket, and both are supported on a huge range of devices
So why, despite Apple having the largest online music store, are they also the most expensive?
They strong-arm the labels, but they have a number of big integration advantages that give them the ability to charge more. When almost everyone has an iPod, and iTunes purchases are waaaay easier than anything else....
It's true, if a format never achieves significant use then it can die and you can lose access. Practically speaking this has happened only once to me, across five different DRMed formats (Adobe, Peanut, eReader, Mobipocket, Amazon) over almost twelve years, whereas I have lost more paper books in that timeframe by simply misplacing them.
YMMV, and value propositions are certainly going to differ between readers, but at least I have a whole bunch fewer boxes full of books to move next time I get a new house.
Amazon's books are color too, if you have a color-capable device (such as an iPhone). The real reason why books from Apple are likely to be more expensive (as are those from Sony today) is that Apple is a small retailer relative to Amazon. Amazon has much more negotiating strength. The same things that Apple can and does do in negotiations with record labels Amazon does with publishers.
Apple, which sells no paper copies at all, really cannot strong-arm the publishers. The only lever they have is that they are an alternative to Amazon. But so is B&N. It will really come down to who sells the most readers, and Amazon is way ahead and it is unlikely that a $500 reader is going to compete well in volume versus a $260 Kindle.
This is one of the things that bugs me about the arguments usually raised for paper, too.
People keep arguing that if you loose the e-book reader you lost your whole library, i.e. that e-books are much more ephemeral than paper. That is baloney for several reasons.
First, the ease of copying digital media lends not only to cheap publishing but also to cheap back-up. Even if I didn't have my own back-ups the publishers I've purchased from allow me to re-download. Since I bought my first e-book in 1998, I have used eight different devices to read that content. Devices broke and were replaced but the whole library was retained. In fact, with the exception of just one book I can read all of that content on today's devices (that one book was in Adobe e-book format, which was both the most locked-down and the worst reading experience I have ever had, and it's not surprising it died an early death).
If you've been working with digital media for very long two things become obvious: Popular formats live forever (have any software that can display GIF images, a circa mid 1980s format? Why yes, you're using one right now) and the ease of copying means you never have to throw anything away. I have lost many, many photo prints and negatives over the years but I have a copy of every single digital photo I have ever taken, plus many more I collected before I even had a digital camera. And backups of them all. And backups of the backups. And copies of many on various websites.
You talk about how the paper just doesn't last that long these days, and it's true, but it's easy to damage them too. I have had books (in some cases entire libraries) destroyed by bugs, and humidity, and floods, and coffee, and children. I've had to ditch them in large numbers during moves because they were too heavy and bulky. Paperback books from twenty-plus years ago practically fall apart in my hands. Some of those books have been irreplaceable to date, too hard to find even using services like alibris, because they've been out of print so long.
You know what digital means? Digital means "never goes out of print." And in my mind that is more valuable than any argument against e-books. After all, if it's digital it can be made into print easily; the opposite is demonstrably not true (Google's efforts notwithstanding).
In my mind the only durability argument that holds at all is that in the advent of the total downfall of our civilization paper stands a much better chance than bits. But even paper wouldn't do very well if, say, we have a large-scale nuclear war.
This is very likely the case. Before Amazon got into the market you couldn't get recent releases in e-book format for less than full retail hardcover price. The e-book retailers said that they were contractually obligated to do this, otherwise they couldn't get the title at all. $24 for an e-book when I could get the hardcover at a local library for $18? Bite me! If you want to know why it took so long for e-books to take off, you can look right there at that practice.
It took Amazon's market power to break this practice. Even so, the rumor is that Amazon actually takes a bath on bestseller e-books, using them as loss-leaders for the cheaper stuff that people buy a lot more of. I bet that's not really true, or if it is true the loss is small, but it sure is true that the book publishers are not happy with just how much less expensive e-books are than paper. For a heavy reader the economics are very compelling. The compeition must be eating into their hardcover sales at this point, particularly if Amazon's claim of 60% e-book sales is even close to true. It's for sure that I haven't purchased a single hardcover in more than a year and a half, when I have shelves full of them from previous years.
Amazon is playing hardball with publishers because they are looking to create a durable market, and that only happens if they get enough volume to get the readers really cheap, and you need an incentive somewhere. But it doesn't have to hold much longer: As e-reader prices drop and popularity explodes paper volumes will drop, and as they drop price per copy explodes. We must be close to the point of that feedback loop closing now. In the longer term Amazon wants to be sure they have a market advantage over smaller retailers like Sony or Apple; that is going to be very hard to hold in a couple of years unless they have device lock-in like Apple got.
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Since IBM most likely wouldn't own the copyrights on that code, they wouldn't have standing to raise the issue, and so probably didn't even care to check. AT&T vs BSD was AT&T vs U of C copyrights.
That's a great point, but showing migration of code in the opposite direction sure would have been damning in front of a jury even if IBM couldn't have hoped for damages. Then again it's obvious at this point there was no need....
Xenix would have, it was originally another V7 fork just like BSD as I recall, and it evolved following the SysV line -- quite parallel to BSD. The last time I used it it was pretty much SVR3, no BSD in sight.
OpenServer and UnixWare, on the other hand ... those are pure SVR4 and SVR4 owed a hell of a lot to BSD.
That's true, but in the push to get UNIX into the commercial space the SysV interfaces were released as an open specification. This was actually covered during the trial.
The fact of the matter was that the Linux folk didn't copy code, something that would have been obvious to any observer following it's development. The idea that there were vast amounts of stolen code was ludicrous if you knew anything at all about the internal structure of the two operating systems.
There was always the possibility of code that got injected during the large commercial code donations by e.g. IBM or SGI, and in fact the only piece of code that showed actual derivation came from SGI ... But it turned out to be both a very small amount of code and buggy to boot. As soon as people got a look at it they excised it in favor of working, original, code.
I personally expected it to go more the way of the AT&T veresus BSD case, where it turned out that AT&T had stolen tons of code from BSD, not the other way around. The Linux emulation layer in SCO UNIX seemed a particularly likely candidate. Either that turned out not to be the case or IBM simply didn't push the issue (perhaps because SCO was having so much trouble proving anything in their claims) though.
SCO's strategy always seemed to me to be a shakedown, scare companies into license agreements. Why they went after one of the deepsest pockets first is beyond me, IBM was very likely to fight given their investment, but it was clear early on that management was not very competent.
You raise some good points, but your "can they read two books you bought for your e-book" is off base. Sure, if you only have one e-book reader; if you have one per person it becomes much more flexible. For the last few years that was an expensive proposition (although in my experience the things paid for themselves in a few months) but prices are falling fast (and have you priced bookshelves recently?)
My daughter has my old Kindle and my wife uses the Kindle reader on her phone. We can all share the same library, meaning for instance that my daughter and I can (and do) read the same book at the same time with only one purchase.
One of the big wins for us, though, is space: We have thousands of paper books already, way too many to put on shelves. The expansion slewed a lot with the influx of e-readers.
2.1GHz huh? That's not a 1998 processor. The fastest Intel processor available in 1998 -- late 1998 -- was a 450MHz Pentium II Xeon. Neither Vista nor Win7 will install on anything even close to that.
It wasn't until 2001 that Intel crossed the 2GHz line, and 2002 when there was a 2.1GHz processor in their lineup. That, I think, sets the tone for analyzing the rest of your system specs.
That 1998-era 50GB drive? Umm, no. Drives in 1998 time were generally in the single-digit gig range (much too small to even install Win7). Here is the announcement of a series of new machines from Dell that year:
http://news.cnet.com/Compaq%2C-Dell-ship-new-computers/2100-1001_3-212040.html
We'll get back to that announcement in a minute.
IBM released a 10G drive in July 1998:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/15-years-of-hard-drive-history,1368-2.html
So that pretty much sets the upper limit of what would have been available. 50G drives were around in 2002-3, which is probably not coincidentally the same time frame as your 2.1GHz processor.
Now, the G1 mentioned in the article above was a pretty good Dell system in 1998, the kind of thing you bought to run NT4. Its maximum RAM? 256M, one quarter of what you say you installed.
I'm too lazy to go figure out at what point it was possible to buy a Dell desktop system that was expandable to 1G, but I am willing to bet it's somewhere around 2002, just like all of the other specs of your system.
So I would have to conclude that you actually installed Win7 on a 2002 or 2003 era machine, and it will run very poorly with only 1G RAM; my personal experiments showed that the systems' responsiveness was downright awful below 2G (32-bit).
Cheers!
I think you misunderstand, I was talking about moving to a completely different machine. It's drop-dead simple to do.
It's true that an iMac or mini are not very upgradeable internally, but that's more the form factor than anything else, and you can substitute newer bigger drives internally if you like. I have generally hung FireWire drives off them instead, but YMMV.
I've personally done at least twelve full version upgrades of MacOS, including one TiBook that had full version upgrades five times. I had one problem across all of them: That TiBook had a nine-letter password set back when it was new with 10.1, and became impossible to log into when upgraded to Leopard (10.5) because it had only one account. There was an upgrade bug where passwords of more than 8 characters that had been set with 10.1 would not carry through.
It took me about 45 minutes to work out how to fix that (the obvious approach using the boot disk got me an admin account, but I still had to reset the password on the old one, and that was mildly annoying). That is around seven hours less time than the minimum I have ever spent on a Windows upgrade, and considerably less time than I had to spend trying to figure out how to get Vista Home to talk to my NAS boxen (MS changed the minimum security requirements for network shares in Vista Home for some inexplicable reason).
I am more than a little dubious about the claim of a 1998-era PC running W7. That would likely max out at 512M unless it was exotic for the time (meaning server-class hardware), and W7 wouldn't install on something that small, and the CPU and graphics would not be anywhere near W7 minimums either. I got complaints installing it on what were pretty well configured 2005-era machines and they ran poorly even doing basic things until I put at least 2.5G RAM in them.
In contrast I had a 1998 era G3 clamshell Mac running Tiger (the last version that would install from a CD), and I had Leopard running on a 2001 TiBook and 12" G4 Powerbook. The funny thing to me as I advanced from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 and finally 10.5 was that each upgrade actually ran better on the same hardwar than its predecessor *despite* having greater capabilities.
I have to compare that to Windows. XPSP2 doubled RAM requirements and Vista quadrupled XPSP2. Win7 didn't get much worse than Vista, but it is of course not much more than a service pack to Vista. I've never seen a version of Windows that ran better on the same hardware than the one before since WinNT 3.1->3.5.
Snow Leopard makes a big break in that they dropped support for non-Intel, which means that machines I bought expecting 6-year lifespans are only going to get 5 before I hand them off to someone else. In the world of Windows PCs I'm lucky to get much more than 2 years before I roll the machine down into the Linux server farm and get something that runs the latest Windows reasonably well.
YMMV, but in terms of longevity Apple has done very, very well in my experience. And in terms of ease of migration to new hardware, which is what I was talking about previously, they are second to none.
At my day job we're still developing on XP, I think mostly because that's what the customers mostly use. But we want to move to W7 because it's difficult to do development on machines limited to 3.2G ... and more and more customers are using it.
Regarding the pain of upgrading, I thought that until I got a Mac. Migration to new hardware, upgrades, and disaster recovery are all really easy. You wouldn't believe how pissed I was at Microsoft the first time I migrated to a new machine. Plug the old one into the new one, push a button, and 20 minutes later the new one had the complete environment of the old one - data, apps, settings, even drivers. It takes me days to get a new Windows box up and running.
Personally I want people on W7 because it is vastly more secure than XP. Maybe I will have to spend less time fixing the damn things.
I can't find a manual can opener anymore that lasts more than a few months. They're all made in china, and they all break very quickly.
You aren't even trying:
http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=oxo+openers&tag=googhydr-20&index=garden&hvadid=2961762689&ref=pd_sl_34nkn4xzkc_b
(I don't know where those are made, but they're well built.)
Oh please. This is Windows, where someone thought it was a great idea to put up annoying bubbles telling you that you have unused icons on your desktop, while simultaneously remaining completely quiet about the drive that is erroring away towards certain death.
In my personal experience, that is.
Frankly I think the only reliable restore point is a back-up image.
So you agree, obviously. I mean, who the hell would pay for MP/E or HP-UX?
Seeing as I was standing in front of my house I didn't have a dying need to know where I was; rather, I was curious as to why the iTouch even had a "find me" button in the first place.
It had one because it works, at least some of the time. Frankly it spooked me as I was absolutely certain that there was no GPS capability in a first-gen iTouch. So how did it know?
It took me a couple of hours to work out how it did it, after which it was pretty easy to find the service Apple uses via Google.
I think it's kind of funny how little Apple advertises this capability, but it certainly does work and inside of densely populated areas it often works better than GPS.
"My iPad has no 3G, therefore it has no GPS. But applications were constantly asking me for permission to use my location. This seems like an oversight: if you don't have a location sensor, don't ask! Even the built-in Map app asked me for information that it could not possibly have."
At first blush this seems like a reasonable comment, but it actually isn't. Depending on where you are, your WiFi-only iPad may well be able to find itself using the Skyhook service that Apple uses, which uses a database of WiFi base station IDs and their coordinates. I was shocked the first time I pushed the "where am I" button on my iTouch ... and it found me to within a few feet.
I put it to you that there is a significant delay between new malware showing up in the wild and the antivirus people even noticing, much less getting a signature update out there. Days, certainly; possibly weeks. The malware guys certainly seem to react to new signatures with new variants in a matter of hours. It's almost as if they run the standard packages and as soon as they pick up a new hit they generate a new variant. (That's what I'd do.)
But even if this impression is wrong, and detection and updates are nigh-instantaneous, you're suggesting that the standard antivirus packages do not update themselves often enough by default to close the window enough to be effective ... which just goes back to my theory that these packages are approximately zero percent effective.
I know these scanners used to work, back in the day, but I haven't seen one inkling to suggest that these packages are at all effective these days given how easy it is for the malware authors to distribute new software whenever they feel the need.
We're not going to solve this with scanning utilities, it's a waste of resources. We need to approach it with cryptographic signature and trust lists starting in the BIOS and going all the way up to user applications. We need to stop the use of privileged accounts for day-to-day work, and treat applications as hostile. Applications that touch the net should especially be treated as hostile and run with especially reduced privilege sets.
Some of this is going to be difficult to do in the near term, but at the very least the operating system ought to verify its own intactness; it's ridiculous how easy it is to replace a few modules and subvert the system at the lowest levels on the next reboot.
The costs of trusting software have long ago gone beyond reasonable, it's time to start building the infrastructure to ensure that it's possible to detect illicit modification, particularly of system code, and to make it at least remotely possible to identify the source of malware -- and therefore culpability -- by denying unsigned code from running at all, and only allowing signed code to execute if it is signed by someone with which we have a trust relationship.
If this sounds like a closed system ala the iPhone, that's right -- the iPhone does it right, technically. But there's no need for this system to be under the control of a single vendor as with the iPhone. The existing certificate system already does that; you can decide who you want to trust. What is no longer tenable is not having any kind of trust system at all beyond sheer guesswork. Too many people don't know what to trust, and just say "ok" to everything. It is no surprise that this leads to 12 million strong botnets, is it?
If I had a nickel for every computer I had to clean malware off that was already running a major brand-name antivirus package....
Seriously, the antivirus packages are so full of holes it isn't funny; as far as I can tell these packages are nearly zero percent effective against modern threats. Virtually every unsophisticated Windows user I have ever seen has a PC loaded with malware despite antivirus. It's just too easy to work around the signature-based detection systems, or to trick users into doing something stupid ("Your system has a virus! Click here to fix"), and the malware authors are very good at getting around the prophylactics. The packages that actually do work well -- like Malwarebytes and Spybot -- are not in broad use, and of course they complain a lot about even legitimate operations.
The only way I have found to solve this is to get these people off of Windows entirely. I had hoped that Vista would help, but as far as I can tell the new protections did next to nothing to stop the malware authors, perhaps because so many people go and turn off UAC entirely. The jury is still out on Win7.
You're right in that there were some software systems built that could more or less reverse the fuzzing (down to ~150 feet, anyway), but the advent of differential GPS pretty much eliminated the usefulness of Selective Availability. Between that and the obvious commercial benefits of accurate GPS it was a pretty obvious decision.
These days there are other alternatives. I mentioned E911 but there is also Skyhook's positioning based on WiFi location (used by the iPhone, which is why it has superb accuracy in cities).
Hah, I wasn't very clear. I meant that the military can't just send a signal to the satellite to degrade or disable the signal.
You could jam, but jamming requires you to have interesting hardware in place at the right place and time. If there's some terrorist group sending drones, they could be anywhere and the odds of you have the right equipment in place are near nil. Either disabling E911 location services or jamming the cellular network over a large area would be practically and politically difficult.
With an Arduino it's already super easy to build a drone with GPS guiding. But even if GPS is jammed it's not much harder to implement inertial positioning
Assuming you're thinking of a terrorist activity on US soil, if you have a cellphone in your drone you can use the phone's GPS, which doesn't necessarily use the GPS satellites at all -- some cell providers use tower triangulation that couldn't be quickly or easily jammed (it's not just a signal to a satellite cluster controlled by the military). That's not great accuracy, but it'd be good enough for long-distance guidance (e.g. following major highways) and other techniques could be used when you're close (e.g. video transmission through the cellphone link to a remote operator).
It's obviously easy to build a drone, assuming some sophistication, but the more payload it can take the more it costs and the easier it is to spot and destroy. It is lucky, then, that most terrorism-inclined people are neither sophisticated nor well financed.
I keep thinking of my in-laws, who took their (fully legal) PC that had become malware-ridden to a local "fix my PC" place and got it back with a pirated version of Windows. They obviously still have their original license, but WAT would shut them down and I'm sure the call to MS would be annoying for all involved.
As an aside, it drove me nuts that the repair place did this; the license key was pasted on the damn box, they could have done it fully legally with any install disc. My guess is that they just created a "works everywhere" image from a pirated copy. When it comes right down to it, after all, almost nobody gets a PC that doesn't have Windows already on it. Hell, it's so annoyingly difficult to buy a PC *without* Windows that I usually have a spare license or two laying around from my Linux boxen.
Regarding VPN support, it almost certainly does support VPNs to some degree; after all, the iPhone does.
Regarding media services other than Apple's, it's likely it will support them to at least the same degree as the iPhone. Pandora comes to mind, but as with iPods you can load all kinds of media from disparate sources. You think they're going to shut the Kindle and Stanza readers out? I seriously doubt that.
I know the "closed ecosystem" mantra, but it's "closed" in the sense that Apple gets to say "no" to certain things it doesn't like. Practically speaking there aren't a lot of those, despite the cries otherwise, as should be obvious just browsing through the app store. Generally rejection involves narrow wedges of the application space, and getting narrower rather than broader with time (e.g. there are now turn-by-turn GPS applications and VOIP applications that were disallowed originally).
It remains to be seen whether the iPad will do enough to draw a large market share, particularly given its price, but just because Apple isn't responding to every question thrown at it about the product doesn't mean the answers are all negative. It's exceptionally unlikely that Apple will restrict the device more than the iPhone, and the iPhone is doing pretty well in terms of extensibility.
In reading the commentary for this post I see that there are a lot of common misconceptions about e-books, and particularly e-book durability, that continue to be perpetuated. I thought I would inject some real-world, long-term experience on the subject as well as on the progression and viability of the market.
I bought my first e-book in 1998, to read on my Palm 5000, from a little retailer/publisher called Peanut Press. This book was called "Sister, Sister".
Luddites would suggest that I would have long ago lost access to this book. After all, since that time I have switched to a Palm V, then a pair of Handsprings, then a Sony Cleo, then a Palm T|X, then an iPod touch, and today use an iPhone and a Kindle. I lost or destroyed the Palm V, one of the Handsprings, and a Kindle along the line. As it turns out I can still read that book on all of my current e-book capable devices today.
In short, the reading device is ephemeral; possession of the book is orthogonal to the possession of the device. Most e-book critics either do not know this, do not understand it, or deliberately ignore it but it is the case.
To elaborate: Back when I bought my first e-book the Palm could hold about four books in its memory, but my PC could hold a large personal library's worth -- thousands. I could burn a CD with a collection of perhaps 500 books at a shot. Today an extensive personal library will fit on a $5 thumb drive you can buy at the grocery store. As such, having back-ups of your books is both easy and very very cheap. Moreover, unlike the digital music industry, retailers allow you to re-download books you have purchased -- giving you offsite backups in the normal course of things, and protecting your library even from disasters such as floods or fire that would destroy a paper library utterly. Rather than being at a disadvantage e-books, in the best cases, are much more durable due to the ease of copying.
E-books do have a new kind of loss, that of loss of access to the content because the e-book's file format becomes unreadable in one way or another. This will usually happen because the format becomes obsolete or because the format is protected with DRM such that you don't have access to it if, say, you switch devices. This is a real risk, but it's worthwhile to see how this risk has played out over the long term. I've seen it play out several times over at this point.
Early on there were a whole bunch of different e-book formats, and some dedicated devices, and if you picked the wrong one you could be completely out of luck when the industry moved on to something else. I have lost one book entirely as a result of purchasing it in Adobe e-book format, the only format the publisher allowed it to be sold in. This was a horrific format in terms of how restrictive its DRM was, how poor Adobe's reader software was, and in terms of Adobe's ongoing support. Their reader was almost unusable and wrecked formatting, even to the point of breaking in the middle of words at the end of a "page", even though the book loading process required you to spend many minutes waiting for it to be "formatted for your device." After about a year Adobe modified the format in an incompatible way, and required conversion, and the conversion tools were extremely difficult to use. On top of all of that the DRM format was so restrictive that losing the one device that was authorized to read the content caused total loss of the content. Given the poor reading experience it was unsurprising that this format died quickly (and, frankly, Adobe should be ashamed of themselves to have done such a bad job of it).
That represents the worst experience for an e-book. But that is in no way the norm, not then and certainly not today.
Most of today's formats, even the Kindle format (which is, after all, just a minor modification of Mobipocket), allow both DRM restricted and open encoding. There are really only two surviving formats: ePub and Mobipocket, and both are supported on a huge range of devices
They strong-arm the labels, but they have a number of big integration advantages that give them the ability to charge more. When almost everyone has an iPod, and iTunes purchases are waaaay easier than anything else....
YMMV, and value propositions are certainly going to differ between readers, but at least I have a whole bunch fewer boxes full of books to move next time I get a new house.
Apple, which sells no paper copies at all, really cannot strong-arm the publishers. The only lever they have is that they are an alternative to Amazon. But so is B&N. It will really come down to who sells the most readers, and Amazon is way ahead and it is unlikely that a $500 reader is going to compete well in volume versus a $260 Kindle.
People keep arguing that if you loose the e-book reader you lost your whole library, i.e. that e-books are much more ephemeral than paper. That is baloney for several reasons.
First, the ease of copying digital media lends not only to cheap publishing but also to cheap back-up. Even if I didn't have my own back-ups the publishers I've purchased from allow me to re-download. Since I bought my first e-book in 1998, I have used eight different devices to read that content. Devices broke and were replaced but the whole library was retained. In fact, with the exception of just one book I can read all of that content on today's devices (that one book was in Adobe e-book format, which was both the most locked-down and the worst reading experience I have ever had, and it's not surprising it died an early death).
If you've been working with digital media for very long two things become obvious: Popular formats live forever (have any software that can display GIF images, a circa mid 1980s format? Why yes, you're using one right now) and the ease of copying means you never have to throw anything away. I have lost many, many photo prints and negatives over the years but I have a copy of every single digital photo I have ever taken, plus many more I collected before I even had a digital camera. And backups of them all. And backups of the backups. And copies of many on various websites.
You talk about how the paper just doesn't last that long these days, and it's true, but it's easy to damage them too. I have had books (in some cases entire libraries) destroyed by bugs, and humidity, and floods, and coffee, and children. I've had to ditch them in large numbers during moves because they were too heavy and bulky. Paperback books from twenty-plus years ago practically fall apart in my hands. Some of those books have been irreplaceable to date, too hard to find even using services like alibris, because they've been out of print so long.
You know what digital means? Digital means "never goes out of print." And in my mind that is more valuable than any argument against e-books. After all, if it's digital it can be made into print easily; the opposite is demonstrably not true (Google's efforts notwithstanding).
In my mind the only durability argument that holds at all is that in the advent of the total downfall of our civilization paper stands a much better chance than bits. But even paper wouldn't do very well if, say, we have a large-scale nuclear war.
It took Amazon's market power to break this practice. Even so, the rumor is that Amazon actually takes a bath on bestseller e-books, using them as loss-leaders for the cheaper stuff that people buy a lot more of. I bet that's not really true, or if it is true the loss is small, but it sure is true that the book publishers are not happy with just how much less expensive e-books are than paper. For a heavy reader the economics are very compelling. The compeition must be eating into their hardcover sales at this point, particularly if Amazon's claim of 60% e-book sales is even close to true. It's for sure that I haven't purchased a single hardcover in more than a year and a half, when I have shelves full of them from previous years.
Amazon is playing hardball with publishers because they are looking to create a durable market, and that only happens if they get enough volume to get the readers really cheap, and you need an incentive somewhere. But it doesn't have to hold much longer: As e-reader prices drop and popularity explodes paper volumes will drop, and as they drop price per copy explodes. We must be close to the point of that feedback loop closing now. In the longer term Amazon wants to be sure they have a market advantage over smaller retailers like Sony or Apple; that is going to be very hard to hold in a couple of years unless they have device lock-in like Apple got.