This shouldn't be a discussion about whether open source is inherently more stable (which it surely is). What the leak gives everyone is a chance to see into the coding practices of Redmond. That is what is interesting.
No one thought they were stellar; some already knew how bad things are; some figured, naturally, that if you could poke holes in their stuff like we've seen, something must be very, very wrong.
But now people are going to see with their own eyes - and that, I insist, is what is interesting here. So keep your eyes peeled (sorry, PJ).
In other words, had the source code for IE been OSS from day one, then the bug might very well have been found and fixed before the application was widely distributed.
Apples & oranges. That works in the Linux OSS world, but not in the Microsoft world. Microsofties are generically not terribly talented. They're not groomed for their work. They 'wing it' from day one. The entire atmosphere is counter-productive.
You're assuming that other Microsofties would have found the error? You flatter Microsoft.
Given the right circumstances, 'perhaps'. Perhaps, if the machine has no diskette drive and is never connected to the Internet - much in the way NT4 got its Orange Book certification.
But when eWEEK cite tallies that show the total cost of web damages inflicted on Windows computers and networks to be $132.4 billion, how does that divide?
IBM support contracts? Who can charge more? And yet why do corporations sign with Big Blue?
Because they know Big Blue know their shit. Reliability.
Today every wannabe and their grandmother want to be online. MDs set up MS boxes with IIS configured and ready to run, and the next thing they know, all their records are out in the open and they're spreading Nimda all over the place. They don't have a clue.
All the while the Dells and Gateways try to entice you with amazingly low costs.
But the major players will never go that route - and if they do, they'll regret it and get out. For when one's business is important enough, it's not ROI - or, rather, ROI is measured differently, more realistically.
TCO means buying a "reliable" PC that's not made of crappy generic parts
Oxymoronic, because there is no such thing.
But it goes farther than that, for while Apple support is not up to par for the enterprise, PC OEMs would generally fare better with no support at all, it's that bad.
Badge #43579, may I help you?
That just doesn't cut it either. The skinny: give admins Mac networks. Let everyone chill out a bit. The only people who don't want them are the bean counters - who never learned how to properly count beans anyway.
That's because the market perception is that "the battle is over and Windows won."
Uh - beg to differ. It's getting more and more Linux and Apple, and last week's events don't exactly slow this trend down. eWEEK writes 'Linux is everywhere - even on Mars'; several zines have declared 2004 the year of the Linux desktop; IBM, SuSE, Novell, Red Hat - they're all making massive inroads; Apache dominates like never before, with over two thirds of all web servers; if there is a battle, it is definitely not over, and Windows has definitely not won - in fact, Windows is looking more and more like the loser. Don't forget: the net may have whiskers, but the web does not. It's got about ten years of service to Harry Homeowner under its belt, that's all.
Something curious was previewed for the UK Xmas market, 1998 or 1999 I think. It looked like a rabbit's foot and was to cost about 5 sterling. If you were within a certain range of a cell phone, and had this contraption in your pocket, all you had to do was squeeze it, and it would break the cell phone's connection.
They were mentioned in the 'legit' press; I don't think it was a hoax (but who knows). They were supposedly an import from the far east.
I know several people who wanted one of these, but to our knowledge, they never turned up.
Think of the possibilities if you could run Windows at work in a Window - be able to do all the windows specific stuff at need, but have Linux goodness in which to work as well.
I paid more for my Apple Powerbook because I've owned the other stuff already - and I'm tired of cheap plastic doors that snap off, a laptop that weighs about 5lbs. too much and looks like a brick, etc.
And still Apple quality is failing too. We have to reverse the trend to put junk on the market and get away with it.
Ah what a lovely expression. Hope they don't get crushed too bad...
the company which was founded in Redmond, Washington, in 1975
We know where they are today, but years before they were in Seattle, and before that in NM. Weren't they founded in Albuquerque? At any rate, AFAIK that's where they were back then - Altair and all that...
I'd say you need about 384MB to keep OS X running smoothly
Good approximation. I'd say 256 MB for Jaguar, double that for Panther; but what I mean by 'smoothly' is not extending your default 'swapfile0', which is some 10 MB smaller on Panther.
the combinationof cheap and fast hardware more than make up for the deficieny of Windows
Ignoring the shitty spelling and typing, all that needs be said here is that it simply is not true. The two things do not even relate.
If Steve-Apple-IBM-Moto made it cheap for you to swap your machine every couple of years
My cerebrally disenfranchised friend, you are missing the point: whilst Apple boxes are made to last, Wintel boxes are not. Your precious friends on the Wintel side don't have an option to upgrade - they have to!
People say OS X is the first unix desktop-friendly unix(ie, no command-line necessary), and they're dead wrong- SGI had them beat by almost ten years with Irix.
Most of the wins in the linux market are from installations where people have no choice... enterprise and business accounts.
Obviously some people have a choice - and Apple should be here. They have the fanciest, by far the most advanced GUI platform, they have the only decent development platform, and they have hardware that runs rings around x86 junk in terms of reliability and just plain 'class'.
Admins would generally welcome a move to Apple hardware: it's less work for them. No more wailing at the Dell and Gateway walls. Far more dinners at home with the family some time before midnight. Support? Forget it. 'It just works.' It's painfully obvious.
But that's what the techies would like, and the suits upstairs don't give a hoot about the techies, and never will. The suits see short term bottom lines. They're also infamously slow on the uptake.
And this is where Apple should be in and educating.
Simple: because everyone needs market share, even Richard M Stallman, and even Steven P Jobs.
Apple have been at a crossroads with the 'merger' with NeXT - a crossroads much like the one at the time of the emergence of the Macintosh.
Legacy users were perceived as being uninterested in an operating system not 'for the rest of us' but 'for the best of us'. Jobs was booed onstage when he presented the NeXT counterpart to the Finder, for example.
Apple have made it very clear that the market share they have is not due so much to legacy users finally upgrading, but to switchers.
Sorry, but who the hell wants x86 anyway? Is it because you've invested far too much money in 4004-compatible junk? Is it because you perceive your Gateway or Dell as cheaper than Apple's incredibly expensive PowerBooks?
Me, I'd love a Rolls Royce - if only they could size it down so it would fit inside my Honda chassis.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X, varients of Linux so dissimilar they are just barely the same operating system
Oh PUH-leeze.
As long as PASCAL, COBOL, and C++ are extinct too, I don't care.
This shouldn't be a discussion about whether open source is inherently more stable (which it surely is). What the leak gives everyone is a chance to see into the coding practices of Redmond. That is what is interesting.
No one thought they were stellar; some already knew how bad things are; some figured, naturally, that if you could poke holes in their stuff like we've seen, something must be very, very wrong.
But now people are going to see with their own eyes - and that, I insist, is what is interesting here. So keep your eyes peeled (sorry, PJ).
In other words, had the source code for IE been OSS from day one, then the bug might very well have been found and fixed before the application was widely distributed.
Apples & oranges. That works in the Linux OSS world, but not in the Microsoft world. Microsofties are generically not terribly talented. They're not groomed for their work. They 'wing it' from day one. The entire atmosphere is counter-productive.
You're assuming that other Microsofties would have found the error? You flatter Microsoft.
Windows might be cheaper for that guy.
Given the right circumstances, 'perhaps'. Perhaps, if the machine has no diskette drive and is never connected to the Internet - much in the way NT4 got its Orange Book certification.
But when eWEEK cite tallies that show the total cost of web damages inflicted on Windows computers and networks to be $132.4 billion, how does that divide?
Reliability is more important than ROI anyway.
IBM support contracts? Who can charge more? And yet why do corporations sign with Big Blue?
Because they know Big Blue know their shit. Reliability.
Today every wannabe and their grandmother want to be online. MDs set up MS boxes with IIS configured and ready to run, and the next thing they know, all their records are out in the open and they're spreading Nimda all over the place. They don't have a clue.
All the while the Dells and Gateways try to entice you with amazingly low costs.
But the major players will never go that route - and if they do, they'll regret it and get out. For when one's business is important enough, it's not ROI - or, rather, ROI is measured differently, more realistically.
By taking reliability into account.
TCO means buying a "reliable" PC that's not made of crappy generic parts
Oxymoronic, because there is no such thing.
But it goes farther than that, for while Apple support is not up to par for the enterprise, PC OEMs would generally fare better with no support at all, it's that bad.
Badge #43579, may I help you?
That just doesn't cut it either. The skinny: give admins Mac networks. Let everyone chill out a bit. The only people who don't want them are the bean counters - who never learned how to properly count beans anyway.
That's because the market perception is that "the battle is over and Windows won."
Uh - beg to differ. It's getting more and more Linux and Apple, and last week's events don't exactly slow this trend down. eWEEK writes 'Linux is everywhere - even on Mars'; several zines have declared 2004 the year of the Linux desktop; IBM, SuSE, Novell, Red Hat - they're all making massive inroads; Apache dominates like never before, with over two thirds of all web servers; if there is a battle, it is definitely not over, and Windows has definitely not won - in fact, Windows is looking more and more like the loser. Don't forget: the net may have whiskers, but the web does not. It's got about ten years of service to Harry Homeowner under its belt, that's all.
Something curious was previewed for the UK Xmas market, 1998 or 1999 I think. It looked like a rabbit's foot and was to cost about 5 sterling. If you were within a certain range of a cell phone, and had this contraption in your pocket, all you had to do was squeeze it, and it would break the cell phone's connection.
They were mentioned in the 'legit' press; I don't think it was a hoax (but who knows). They were supposedly an import from the far east.
I know several people who wanted one of these, but to our knowledge, they never turned up.
Think of the possibilities if you could run Windows at work in a Window - be able to do all the windows specific stuff at need, but have Linux goodness in which to work as well.
Uh - you never heard of VMWare?
I paid more for my Apple Powerbook because I've owned the other stuff already - and I'm tired of cheap plastic doors that snap off, a laptop that weighs about 5lbs. too much and looks like a brick, etc.
And still Apple quality is failing too. We have to reverse the trend to put junk on the market and get away with it.
Would IBM sell you System/390 w/o MVS?
The Mac has been 32-bit since day one, the 68000 8MHz CPU
Bullshit, Mr Expert. Check again. The 68000 is 32/16.
just how stupid and inefficient can OO programming languages become?
That's a tough one, isn't it? Because we've only got one mainstream OO language out there, and it's not C++.
because of the bug in OS 9 that prevented iTunes from switching tracks while Quake III was active
What a shame Apple missed that important feature.
So otherwise you think OS 9 and OS X are about the same?
the jewels of Microsoft's software empire
Ah what a lovely expression. Hope they don't get crushed too bad...
the company which was founded in Redmond, Washington, in 1975
We know where they are today, but years before they were in Seattle, and before that in NM. Weren't they founded in Albuquerque? At any rate, AFAIK that's where they were back then - Altair and all that...
I'd say you need about 384MB to keep OS X running smoothly
Good approximation. I'd say 256 MB for Jaguar, double that for Panther; but what I mean by 'smoothly' is not extending your default 'swapfile0', which is some 10 MB smaller on Panther.
the combinationof cheap and fast hardware more than make up for the deficieny of Windows
Ignoring the shitty spelling and typing, all that needs be said here is that it simply is not true. The two things do not even relate.
If Steve-Apple-IBM-Moto made it cheap for you to swap your machine every couple of years
My cerebrally disenfranchised friend, you are missing the point: whilst Apple boxes are made to last, Wintel boxes are not. Your precious friends on the Wintel side don't have an option to upgrade - they have to!
People say OS X is the first unix desktop-friendly unix(ie, no command-line necessary), and they're dead wrong- SGI had them beat by almost ten years with Irix.
You're both wrong. Ask Tim B-L.
just look at the Google Zeitgeist for evidence
Where can I buy an Other computer? They have 5% of the market. What OS do they run? Where are they located? I'm really keen on getting one.
Most of the wins in the linux market are from installations where people have no choice... enterprise and business accounts.
Obviously some people have a choice - and Apple should be here. They have the fanciest, by far the most advanced GUI platform, they have the only decent development platform, and they have hardware that runs rings around x86 junk in terms of reliability and just plain 'class'.
Admins would generally welcome a move to Apple hardware: it's less work for them. No more wailing at the Dell and Gateway walls. Far more dinners at home with the family some time before midnight. Support? Forget it. 'It just works.' It's painfully obvious.
But that's what the techies would like, and the suits upstairs don't give a hoot about the techies, and never will. The suits see short term bottom lines. They're also infamously slow on the uptake.
And this is where Apple should be in and educating.
Simple: because everyone needs market share, even Richard M Stallman, and even Steven P Jobs.
Apple have been at a crossroads with the 'merger' with NeXT - a crossroads much like the one at the time of the emergence of the Macintosh.
Legacy users were perceived as being uninterested in an operating system not 'for the rest of us' but 'for the best of us'. Jobs was booed onstage when he presented the NeXT counterpart to the Finder, for example.
Apple have made it very clear that the market share they have is not due so much to legacy users finally upgrading, but to switchers.
Au contraire, baby: it's exclusive just enough if you can't.
Sorry, but who the hell wants x86 anyway? Is it because you've invested far too much money in 4004-compatible junk? Is it because you perceive your Gateway or Dell as cheaper than Apple's incredibly expensive PowerBooks?
Me, I'd love a Rolls Royce - if only they could size it down so it would fit inside my Honda chassis.
I didn't know you could throw a gauntlet, or that anyone 'as' recently thrown one.
As for the article, I'll let the outsiders debate this back and forth - us insiders have work to do, thank you. Bye.
Are you buying?
Never. Will not touch an x86 ever again.
And certainly not from Dell.