The OS should be broken up into fairly independent services and the protocol of each service known, shown, and loggable.
Trouble is, that model's incompatible with Microsoft's business, and it's customers' requirements for DRM.
They need the OS to be black boxed and inscrutable to prevent people hacking things like WGA and product activation. They also need obfuscated protocols and formats to stop people like WINE from reverse engineering their APIs.
The clearer and easier to understand MS makes it's system, the worse it is for their business model. That's why there's no way they'll do as you suggest, despite being ordered to by the DOJ and the EU.
Subsequently, people like me (and, I suspect, the GP poster) who need/want complex features but work in harsh environments are forced to choose between carrying a separate PDA (in a hard case) or putting up with frequent breakage from flimsy full-featured phones.
I used to have my iMate Jam in one of these http://www.otterbox.com/products/pda_cases/ in some pretty harsh environments. Adds to the bulk a bit, but it's the best solution I've found so far.
Just because you really love Apple's products, doesn't mean you're the most unbiased source of an opinion about smartphones.
I don't own any Apple products, but I've been using touchscreen devices since I bought a Palm Pilot 1000 back in '96. I've owned several smartphones with various OSs on them and have a Windows based touchscreen smartphone now.
I'll cheerfully say every smartphone I've owned has been an annoying piece of crap, mitigated only by being better than having to carry both a PDA and a phone. I'll reserve judgement on the iPhone's annoyance level until I've used one, but I can confidently assert that smeary marks on a touchscreen pales into insignificance compared to many other moronic design decisions foisted on buyers.
Even if I never own an iPhone, I'm very pleased to see Apple competing in the market. Hopefully they'll raise the bar for all smartphones.
until the music industry quits harassing their customers and treating the performers as slaves they're not getting a dime from me.
Yeah, I voted with my feet (and wallet) a few years ago.
I go see local bands, and if they have CDs on sale at the door, I'll buy there. That's the extent of my music spending now, and I used to buy half a dozen CDs a month.
no gorilla can pick up over twice it's bodyweight.
Wild primates are strong animals. The current best estimates for gorilla strength would suggest they can lift between 10 and 25 times as much as a human of equivalent weight.
In 1924, a female chimp in Bronx zoo weighing 135lb was able to lift 1,000lb.
So shipping a browser with the OS is anticompetitive and not shipping that browser with the os is anticompetitive?
No, but using your monopoly power to suffocate another company's product in a different market is.
Microsoft sees themselves as being under attack from companies trying move userland away from the OS as a key platform, Google with their AJAX apps, Sun with Java, Adobe with Flash, and so on. If any or all of these succeed, Microsoft's control, and therefore their ability to make those 85% profit margins, diminishes.
In Vista search, Silverlight and.Net, they're responding to each of these threats by diluting mindshare, direct competition, their classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" etc, etc. These products don't make Microsoft any money directly, but they protect the OS platform Microsoft derives so much of it's income from. Many of these tactics are largely (legally) acceptable in normal circumstances. It is illegal however, for Microsoft to use it's desktop monopoly to drive adoption at the expense of their competitors.
They're sailing very close to the wind with many of those products.
But in the real world, I have a company to run. We use Windows machines mainly for video editing and 3D work, and when I have a task that requires more than a few hours of rendering, I have to plan my jobs around the expectation that a computer running Windows will fail. I'd prefer not to, but my crash logs tell a different story.
Spin it the way you like here, anyone who's seen what it takes to support more than a few Windows desktops will take the astroturf with a grain of salt. Let's face it, if I believed you and ran my business that way in the real world, I'd be committing slow suicide.
That's why things like this guy trying and liking SuSE are so important. If we get a bit of competition in the OS market, we might end up with truly stable computers instead of endless spin.
I have no idea how people manage to make Windows 2000+ "unstable".
Using it.
Anyone with any real-life experience with Windows has suffered plenty of problems with 2K/XP's bad behaviour. There's an illusion of stability because by default, XP'll reboot instead of bluescreen, but that's just spin control.
So don't use the bad distros, and do support the good ones.
It's called "competition" and while it's been absent from the OS space for a long time, it's what drives innovation in capitalist economies.
Look, this dumb meme gets trotted out at just about every discussion of Linux. It's dumb because:
Linux is free. That means anyone can make their own distro. Even if you were right (which you're not), there's bugger-all you can do about it.
Having plenty of competing distros encourages distributors to keep improving their versions.
Because of the copyleft provisions of the GPL, improvements in one distro can be adopted by all other distros. That means if one distributor fails (like Corel did), their efforts are not lost to the community
Having specialised versions of Linux filling dozens of different niches means it's that much harder for an aggressive and predatory competitor to "fucking kill" all of them.
It's great that SuSe is able to fill the corporate desktop niche, but I'd still prefer to use Sabayon for gaming, Puppy on my pen drive, SME on a small server, Debian on a big one, Ophcrack for rescuing Windows users who've forgotten passwords, etc, etc, etc.
There's plenty more reasons this meme is dumb and dangerous. Try thinking of a few yourself, preferably before posting next time.
So can people, and I'd be willing to help out our American allies there. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.
MS bashing is fun, but do realize, that the line between added application and OS feature, is really not that clear cut.
It is clear cut in this case.
MS didn't provide this feature in their OS.
Admittedly, they should have done so decades ago, but they didn't need to because they have a monopoly, and developing features for customers costs money. Instead, third parties, including Google, invested time and effort to provide the feature to Microsoft vict\\\\ customers, and by doing so added value to the Windows platform.
Microsoft then belatedly implemented their own version of the feature, and therefore became competitors to the desktop search providers. In addition, they made sure their own search tool also connected to their MSN search if the customer performed an internet search using the same tool.
In other words, they leveraged their ownership of the Windows operating system to install their own search tool in a way that made it unlikely their prior benefactors could continue to provide competing desktop search tools, and recoup their investments. They also leveraged their monopoly of desktop operating systems to undermine their competitors Internet search businesses by linking the Vista desktop search to their own MSN Internet search.
The lesson for potential partners/competitors of Microsoft? Don't add value to Windows.
and no i am not a microsoft fanboy
All Microsoft fanboys say that. It's damn near a signature for them.
Even in the 70 patents on the first page of that listing, it's easy to find patents Linux might infringe upon. Check this one out;
United States Patent 6466238 Computer operating system that defines default document folder for application programs
Conventional computer systems include numerous application programs which by default store files, or documents, in folders containing the application program that creates them. For example, wordprocessing documents are stored by default in the folder with the wordprocessing application program, and so forth. Thus, users who choose not to organize their documents according to subject matter or other criteria end up having their documents dispersed across numerous application-program folders, sometimes making them difficult to find. Accordingly, the inventors devised a computer operating system that defines a common default document folder for application programs. Moreover, to promote use of the default document folder, one embodiment of the operating system includes a graphical user interface which provides links, that is, one-button access to the common default folder, at file access points, such as in file-open and file-save dialog boxes accessed by the application programs. Yep, they patented "My Documents"...
If anyone had any doubt about Microsoft deliberately obtaining patents in order to harass competitors, garbage like this should dispel them. You don't spend $5,000 to get a patent like that in order to defend yourself. Its only value is as a FUD tool.
Slashdot Mirror
Trouble is, that model's incompatible with Microsoft's business, and it's customers' requirements for DRM.
They need the OS to be black boxed and inscrutable to prevent people hacking things like WGA and product activation. They also need obfuscated protocols and formats to stop people like WINE from reverse engineering their APIs.
The clearer and easier to understand MS makes it's system, the worse it is for their business model. That's why there's no way they'll do as you suggest, despite being ordered to by the DOJ and the EU.
I used to have my iMate Jam in one of these http://www.otterbox.com/products/pda_cases/ in some pretty harsh environments. Adds to the bulk a bit, but it's the best solution I've found so far.
Dissect a bloated carcass.
No, sorry. That was the whale guys, wasn't it?
I don't own any Apple products, but I've been using touchscreen devices since I bought a Palm Pilot 1000 back in '96. I've owned several smartphones with various OSs on them and have a Windows based touchscreen smartphone now.
I'll cheerfully say every smartphone I've owned has been an annoying piece of crap, mitigated only by being better than having to carry both a PDA and a phone. I'll reserve judgement on the iPhone's annoyance level until I've used one, but I can confidently assert that smeary marks on a touchscreen pales into insignificance compared to many other moronic design decisions foisted on buyers.
Even if I never own an iPhone, I'm very pleased to see Apple competing in the market. Hopefully they'll raise the bar for all smartphones.
I have one of those phones. What I'd really like to know tho..AArggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Lots of us use touch screen interfaces every day without shedding tears. Why would this be different?
Is it ok if we imagine a Beowulf cluster of them first?
There's plenty of drugs that'll do that for you. You can Google "ototoxic drugs" or have a look at the list here:e ffects.htm
http://www.asha.org/public/hearing/disorders/med_
Yeah, I voted with my feet (and wallet) a few years ago.
I go see local bands, and if they have CDs on sale at the door, I'll buy there. That's the extent of my music spending now, and I used to buy half a dozen CDs a month.
Wild primates are strong animals. The current best estimates for gorilla strength would suggest they can lift between 10 and 25 times as much as a human of equivalent weight.
In 1924, a female chimp in Bronx zoo weighing 135lb was able to lift 1,000lb.
Don't underestimate your president!
No, but using your monopoly power to suffocate another company's product in a different market is.
Microsoft sees themselves as being under attack from companies trying move userland away from the OS as a key platform, Google with their AJAX apps, Sun with Java, Adobe with Flash, and so on. If any or all of these succeed, Microsoft's control, and therefore their ability to make those 85% profit margins, diminishes.
In Vista search, Silverlight and .Net, they're responding to each of these threats by diluting mindshare, direct competition, their classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" etc, etc. These products don't make Microsoft any money directly, but they protect the OS platform Microsoft derives so much of it's income from. Many of these tactics are largely (legally) acceptable in normal circumstances. It is illegal however, for Microsoft to use it's desktop monopoly to drive adoption at the expense of their competitors.
They're sailing very close to the wind with many of those products.
Strictly speaking, Linux developers copied Microsoft's copy of a product acquired by Adobe from FutureSplash via Macromedia.
They've been using AT&T's electricity for that. http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php
I'm guessing it's analysis and decryption they'd be doing on their own dime.
One computer could be a cooling problem. We have 16 of them. This is a business, not a home computer used for email and web browsing.
But in the real world, I have a company to run. We use Windows machines mainly for video editing and 3D work, and when I have a task that requires more than a few hours of rendering, I have to plan my jobs around the expectation that a computer running Windows will fail. I'd prefer not to, but my crash logs tell a different story.
Spin it the way you like here, anyone who's seen what it takes to support more than a few Windows desktops will take the astroturf with a grain of salt. Let's face it, if I believed you and ran my business that way in the real world, I'd be committing slow suicide.
That's why things like this guy trying and liking SuSE are so important. If we get a bit of competition in the OS market, we might end up with truly stable computers instead of endless spin.
Using it.
Anyone with any real-life experience with Windows has suffered plenty of problems with 2K/XP's bad behaviour. There's an illusion of stability because by default, XP'll reboot instead of bluescreen, but that's just spin control.
So don't use the bad distros, and do support the good ones.
It's called "competition" and while it's been absent from the OS space for a long time, it's what drives innovation in capitalist economies.
Look, this dumb meme gets trotted out at just about every discussion of Linux. It's dumb because:
- Linux is free. That means anyone can make their own distro. Even if you were right (which you're not), there's bugger-all you can do about it.
- Having plenty of competing distros encourages distributors to keep improving their versions.
- Because of the copyleft provisions of the GPL, improvements in one distro can be adopted by all other distros. That means if one distributor fails (like Corel did), their efforts are not lost to the community
- Having specialised versions of Linux filling dozens of different niches means it's that much harder for an aggressive and predatory competitor to "fucking kill" all of them.
It's great that SuSe is able to fill the corporate desktop niche, but I'd still prefer to use Sabayon for gaming, Puppy on my pen drive, SME on a small server, Debian on a big one, Ophcrack for rescuing Windows users who've forgotten passwords, etc, etc, etc.There's plenty more reasons this meme is dumb and dangerous. Try thinking of a few yourself, preferably before posting next time.
So can people, and I'd be willing to help out our American allies there. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.
I don't like terns. They've got long nasty beaks! And they wet their nests.
Exactly.
And doing that will let any other third party considering adding value to the Windows platform know exactly where they stand.
Any investments you make on Windows will be wasted if Microsoft decides they want to "fucking kill" your company.
It is clear cut in this case.
MS didn't provide this feature in their OS.
Admittedly, they should have done so decades ago, but they didn't need to because they have a monopoly, and developing features for customers costs money. Instead, third parties, including Google, invested time and effort to provide the feature to Microsoft vict\\\\ customers, and by doing so added value to the Windows platform.
Microsoft then belatedly implemented their own version of the feature, and therefore became competitors to the desktop search providers. In addition, they made sure their own search tool also connected to their MSN search if the customer performed an internet search using the same tool.
In other words, they leveraged their ownership of the Windows operating system to install their own search tool in a way that made it unlikely their prior benefactors could continue to provide competing desktop search tools, and recoup their investments. They also leveraged their monopoly of desktop operating systems to undermine their competitors Internet search businesses by linking the Vista desktop search to their own MSN Internet search.
The lesson for potential partners/competitors of Microsoft? Don't add value to Windows.
and no i am not a microsoft fanboy
All Microsoft fanboys say that. It's damn near a signature for them.
It's a Sony!
Companies who've locked themselves in to a proprietary email system can't change when a new (and potentially better) product is available.
Cuter than this http://photofile.ru/simple/frame/fishki_net/276342 2/53926786/? No way.
(NSFW, but not nasty)
Try nearly 24,000 http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/search-results.h tml?search=microsoft&imageField2.x=0&imageField2.y =0.
Even in the 70 patents on the first page of that listing, it's easy to find patents Linux might infringe upon. Check this one out;
United States Patent 6466238Computer operating system that defines default document folder for application programs
Conventional computer systems include numerous application programs which by default store files, or documents, in folders containing the application program that creates them. For example, wordprocessing documents are stored by default in the folder with the wordprocessing application program, and so forth. Thus, users who choose not to organize their documents according to subject matter or other criteria end up having their documents dispersed across numerous application-program folders, sometimes making them difficult to find. Accordingly, the inventors devised a computer operating system that defines a common default document folder for application programs. Moreover, to promote use of the default document folder, one embodiment of the operating system includes a graphical user interface which provides links, that is, one-button access to the common default folder, at file access points, such as in file-open and file-save dialog boxes accessed by the application programs. Yep, they patented "My Documents"...
If anyone had any doubt about Microsoft deliberately obtaining patents in order to harass competitors, garbage like this should dispel them. You don't spend $5,000 to get a patent like that in order to defend yourself. Its only value is as a FUD tool.