a couple of years ago... should it be a compliment to Linux or an insult to your memory that you couldn't think of anything more recent than "a couple of years ago"...
How about last week... One of our competitors that pride themselves on being the best in the industry with Security and using Linux Servers as their flagship of security had about 100 customer's web servers root hacked.
Linux can be secure, but it just isn't as easy as the Open Source world tries to create. The Myth becomes so predominate that people install Linux and just assume that their computers are more secure, and hence never take into account updates, patches, or basic security measures.
People here simply saying that Linux is more secure is doing a DIS-service to the Linux and Open Source movement, as customers that do make the leap feel too comfortable with the 'myth of security' and then let their system get hacked right and left and flee Open Source and Linux after being burned.
Tell the truth, all systems are susceptible, no matter who makes it. All it takes is time and a smart mind to virtually get into anything.
have to disagree with this statement. The fact that IE will ignore mismatched tags -- well, that is very much like a buffer overflow: "let's just take any data that comes down the pipe, and if it happens to lack proper boundings and contains something malicious -- oh well!!" So I consider the fact that IE will ignore such HTML errors a security risk
Either you are truly going out a limb to prove your point, or you have NO clue about buffer overflow and security.
If you think that a page displaying 'incomplete' content (i.e. not even all that was expected) is the same thing as a buffer overflow you are sadly in the wrong business.
IE was made to correct poorly coded HTML pages so that the 'average user' could rely on things displaying, even if not fully as intended.
Netscape on the other hand didn't give a crap about poorly coded web pages or the effects on their users.
Just as software will never be perfect, most web pages will never be perfect. It is nice to have a Browser that fixes things in the background and lets you see the page anyway.
That was kinda my point: dumbass bugs aren't usually intentional
Thanks "Dumbass", but the post wasn't directly just referring to your comments. I'm glad you think your post alone was so important that it needed a response just itself.
PS. The next time you call someone Dumbass, at least try to get the rest of the words in the sentence spelled right.:)
Yes of course, silly Netscape not accounting for the buggy code produced by frontpage...
Of course it was only FrontPage that made Netscape have problems.
I will just discount the hours I have been troubleshooting HTML designers working in everything from Dreamweaver to Notepad.
Netscape was too picky about tags, and for a final tag to be missing and the browser refuse to show any of the information actually breaks the original HTML and HTTP standards.
Based on those standards, it was understood that the Internet and TCP/IP could lose information and at the very least, the information the browser received was displayed.
Netscape didn't see it that way... I wonder why they aren't number one anymore...
Results 1-15 of about 16 containing "linux windows" {Results follow}
It's basically saying "There may be another page to look at, but hey, it's only one item so why bother? Maybe you should search for a nice Microsoft product instead." Only if you click the "next" button do you get:
Results 16-30 of about 8898833 containing "linux windows"
Does Microsoft have more than 16 results for "linux windows?" Absolutely. Do they lie on the first page of the search? The answer to that is yes as well, unless you really believe 8,898,833 pages is "about 16."
And funny, doing a search for "Microsoft office windows" also returns the first page with 1-15 of about 16 containing "Microsoft office windows"
Maybe MSN and Microsoft is also trying to hide the world from Microsoft Office and Windows itself. - Geesh.
It is in how the query engine of MSN works... Instead of keywords, it is expecting questions (like ask jeeves became so popular for).
So if you type in "Microsoft office for windows" (notice the extra natural language word in the search here, and the first page displays: Results 1-15 of about 2210194 containing "Microsoft office for windows"
Just like searching for "windows on linux" returns: Results 1-15 of about 8898110 containing "windows on linux"
With articles on the first page listing sites and subjects like WINE and other things that the conspiracy theorists would have you believe Microsoft is trying to hide from people.
It doesn't shock me that people are dense, it just surprises me that their voice gets used to propagate mass ignorance.
Frex, my favourite dumb-assed bug, the "backspacing over text inside table cells in WYSIWYG mode clobbers adjacent table tags TOO" bug that was in Frontpage from the very beginning
And Microsoft bought the original FrontPage product and code from another company before putting the Microsoft Name on it.
So if this bug was there from the beginning, you need to find that company and flame them, not Microsoft. Microsoft's Office development team may have been stupid for not catching this bug, but that is a whole other argument.
Trust me, it wasn't an 'intentional' bug Microsoft put in just to ruin Netscape. Besides, there are so many simple tags that if they are not perfect they will cause Netscape to fail to display to the page. This was just poor programming on Netscape's part to not be able to overlook malformed/embedded tags. Missing a simple end tag for a table shouldn't cause the browser to just decide not to display anything on the page, period.
God, does everything that MS does need to have some ulterior motive?
Having a 16:9 PJ that is not TRUE HD is as gay as those folks who by one of those 832 x 470 16:0 plasmas at CostCo and think they have an "HD TV". They may have senile dementia (and lousy eysight) BUT THEY DON'T HAVE HDTV.
Technically true, however compressed XGA next to true 1080i is something most people(layman) cannot even discern the difference with their eyes, let alone across a room with a 20ft screen.
"(the inside of the lamp is a vacuum, filled with an inert gas that's excited with a high voltage generator to produce the light)." A vacuum filled with gas is no longer a vacuum!
And most projectors don't have sealed bulbs for cooling reasons... There is no gas even, just air.
dude, this is MICRO$OFT we're talking about here. They won't block the popups on MSN, or any of them that they benefit from. I also predict they will take "donations" to allow popups to get through.
MSN Explorer (Using IE6 engine) already does, and has full control to block all or selected pop-ups.
So, sorry but you are wrong about them being scared to block MSN ads, especially since MSN Internet Service is already allowing this.
(And in Beta MSN Beta 9, it works better than other solutions from Mozilla or Opera, although I personally HATE the MSN Explorer Browser.)
No no, I've had this experience with win2k too, but I blame it on poor installers, not really on Microsoft. Usually the only cure is an O/S reinstall though - A lot of windows users swear this is a good thing to do from time to time, but I'm not so sure. I don't know if things are better with winXP.
Well, XP, things are better, but...
You will find novice techs that recommend an OS reinstall once a year to clean out the system. When in fact, this is one of the stupidest things to recommend from an experienced consultant.
Even with a poor installer, there are almost NO instances where an experience tech or service shop cannot just fix the problem and remove any offending software or spyware.
Additionally, back to XP... XP has this nifty feature called "System Restore" which allows you to change the OS back to a previous working state a day, or several days before. And it works miracles, unlike the first incarnate of "System Restore" in WinME which sucked.
Additionally, XP not only is good about protecting the OS files and registry from bad applications and installers, it also forces the system to create a restore point everytime a driver is changed, just in case it is the wrong or buggy driver, so the system is ALWAYS recoverable from any type of installation.
Microsoft also recognized that one of the biggest problems with the Win9x core OSes is that they allowed too much flexibility in User software installations that did not enforce security.
It wasn't that the OS base code of Win9x was buggy, but the software that users installed often caused system instability. Hence Win2k and WinXP work very hard to remove this threat, and do so without having to notify or worry the user, the software just works(even if written poorly) in XP...
(XP can even detect bad calls in realtime of a running application and correct the call without disrupting the application or allowing it cause harm to other applications or the OS)
Why do I champion MS's OSes in this regard?
Becuase these are feature models that the Open Source world and other OS architects should be considering and benefiting from.
Instead, have Windows installed on your system. Try to load a program. It works. Try to load another. It works. Try to run the previous program. It doesn't work. Remove both programs. System no longer works.
Man, it must really suck to still be using Windows 3.0 or Windows/386.
"Dave, a well-known architect of minicomputer systems, quickly assembled a team of engineers to design Microsoft's new technology (NT) operating system."
The closest thing it had to a code name (other than NT) was NT OS/2
Thanks, have an original signed edition....
The "new technology" was not an acronym for NT - NT was used by ITSELF long before "new technology" was coined. Period.
Just as another post also stated the NT comes from the N-10(N-Ten) plaform that NT was created on.
Hence the N-Ten team(the NT Team) was the OS development team that was creating the new OS architecture. "New Technology" was adopted by the press and others LONG after the term NT was designated as the Windows OS core product name.
And before it was being called NT OS/2, it WAS being called OS/2 3.0 and OS/3 at Microsoft.
And why on earth is everyone really so concerned where NT came from, whether it was New Technology or N-Ten?
Microsoft made it up, they could say it was "Novel Terrific" if they wanted to do so.
I guess marketing re-designated it to mean new technology.
Microsoft's official policy on the NT name is that is comes from nothing. It was the press and original users that tried to figure out where NT came from and gave it the term 'new technology'.
Gates referenced NT as New Technology once in an interview around 1995/96 in response to what the press was calling it, but officially NT been only NT in Microsoft's eyes and NOT an acronym.
The only true MS reference to NT meaning new technology is ONLY in reference to NTFS "New Technology File System", but this is also debated whether this is official Microsoft policy or press interpretation again.
An NT developer has recently stated that NT came from the development platform they were using when making NT as a nickname and it caught on.
NT was never a true project code name, the code name for NT was OS/3 or OS/2 3.0.
Don't blame the marketing department for something the press and the users have adopted in a false belief.
Apple is the odd one out, and Apple does seem, for the most part, to be the one company left that's innovating, or even inventing.
Apple does more than their fair share, but I our test labs see more 'new' concepts from the MS R&D labs than Apple. Whether you like MS or not, they are putting Billions in research.
Since the NT initiative (which was a non-user side of OS engineering and architecture originally 'the guts of a new OS') to the OS/2 interface that IBM put in OS/2 2.0, and on to the Windows 95 UI, Microsoft has done a fair share of 'inventing' in both OS architecture and UI.
A lot of MS's inventing appears in the Office line before it trickles down to the OS. So Apple users get to use some of the new Microsoft stuff about the time PC users do.
Microsoft also has a lot of things up their sleeve in the next couple of years, things that would freak even Apple Users as the 'coolest thing they ever saw'.
But Apple does deserve their kudos for a lot of work, it was just sad they had such a dry spell in the 90s for innovation.
I'm am happy they are back in the game with OSX. It will push MS and the Open Source world to produce better UI experiences or take them to new levels even if Apple closed up shop today. (Which is not going to happen.)
Dell uses R&D to reduce costs on the production and supply chain whereas Apple uses R&D money to research and develop new products.
This is not 100% true anymore for Dell than it is for Apple with the exception of software development.
Dell is NOT a favorite company of mine, but they do spend a great deal of money on innovation in hardware and production quality. The last, something Apple should invest a little more in.
On the other side, Dell doesn't have to spend the R&D on software like Apple does, because there is a large supply of PC applications, fringe applications, not just mainstream products that they can pool from.
Also consider that most of the software R&D for PC manufacturers comes from either the Open Source or Microsoft, which spends a lot more money on software R&D than any other company.
Um, lets see, WindowsXP 64bit Edition for Itanium was shipping in 2001, oh, just a bit behind the official release of WindowsXP for x86.
And considering the Itanium 64bit is a complete different architecture than the x86, if Windows(NT) was now SO dependant on the x86 platform as some people here mistakenly think, then moving to the Itanium would have been a long journey and not just quick port like it was.
The Windows AMD64bit Edition was delayed based on CPU availability (Intel had emulator and samples of the Itanium 64bit CPUs, and even Shipping CPUs long before AMD did.)
AMD 64bit support also got caught in the security restructuring that also delayed Windows 2003. Hence why the AMD 64bit version beta and the Windows 2003 SP1 Beta are in the same development beta process.
(BTW, this info is straight from the MS development team, horse's mouth.)
If Microsoft wanted a PPC version of Windows(NT), it wouldn't be as difficult as many people think. If you somehow think the basic NT design core has changed so much that it is dependant on x86 you are not only mistaken, but grossly overlooking several NT releases that debunk this theory.
When NT was restructured (as the parent post implied), it did not become more dependant on the x86 architecture, the major revision was moving the graphical processes into the kernel scheduling and adding an additional HAL layer for Video, giving Video in NT a more direct access to the hardware instead of handing all calls through the NT kernel.
This happened with NT 4.0, and if this somehow made NT dependant on the x86 platform then it would not have also been released on PPC, ALPHA, and RISC in the 4.0 version as it was.
Additionally, even though PPC and RISC support was dropped for the NT5(Windows 2000) development cycle, ALPHA CPU support was still very a part of the development process up until RC1 of Windows 2000 (around Aug of 1999) when Compaq acquired DEC, and decided to abandon NT support on the Alpha chip - which was NOT MS's decision, Compaq intentionally pulled the plug - they were NOT going to ship NT on the ALPHA CPU, virtually eliminating any market for Windows 2000 on ALPHA.
Additionally, people forget that the core of WindowsCE (Pocket PC) comes from NT design.
Even the name 'NT' comes from the MIPS based machines that it originally ran and was designed on before it ever breathed any life in the x86 world. (NT equaling 'New Technology' is a misconception.)
Do a search with NT and RISC, MIPS, PPC, or ALPHA, and you will find more information on the portability of NT and even the current portability NT (WindowsXP/Windows2003) still has.
Request don't mean shit. Require would mean something. If they didn't want to give anyone the source, they didn't have to.
Since a license is a form of legalese and a binding agreement, then why don't you rethink the license from the perspective of legality?
If a party 'requests' certain assets or items, legally it becomes a condition for compliance within the agreement.
So no matter if they use the word request, or require, it is a legal document, and is therefore subject to standard legal terminology and compliance.
For example, "If my party requests that you pay them $100 to use their car. And you use their car, you have accepted the terms of their agreement by using their car. Therefore, you must then pay my party $100 as requested."
Do you now see that this is a binding agreement and it does not use the word REQUIRE?
God, I hope someone gets this.
Like I said before, this could be argued forever in a non-legal forum, but in basic legal terminology both the BSD and MACH licenses do NOT allow for a party to take the technology and modify it without complying to the agreement which is 'to return (i.e. make open)' all changes they have made to the technology and code.
Now Apple could take a hard line and just turn the code directly back over to the original license owners and not make it open to the public as the MACH license specifically allows; however, A) The original license owners would make the Apple modifications public anyway. B) It presents a better public image to the Open Source and *nix community to create the Darwin and APSL face for Apple.
This then suckers a lot of people in the Open Source world into a false lure that Apple is working with them. Great marketing and PR is just the extra benefit of using a technology they did not have to develop.
Of course there is also the side benefit that comes with the Darwin 'lure', Open Source people then devote time by helping Apple to fix and evolve their code, even though the Apple APSL license DOES NOT allow the people to EVER use it for themselves outside of the Apple arena or commercially.
Which strangely, is also a nice LEGAL way to effectively cap the future of the Apple modifications that are made by outside users that are not contingent upon the Apple BSD and MACH licenses and are now contingent only upon the APSL.
Has anyone actually read all of the APSL?
With that said I don't dislike Apple, in fact I champion a lot of what they have done for the computing world and continue to do so. I just don't agree with the fact that they are a better choice just because of the facade they put on for the Open Source, BSD, and Linux community.
Apple is a company for profit that has the same motives as Microsoft and has done just as many egregious acts as Microsoft; however, Apple has had the luxury of being protected from the public outcry of these practices due to the small market share they hold.
How about, just outside the box, and for themselves even if I do disagree. Is that too much to ask?
People are too quick to take a 'me too' attitude and not take the time to research something; thereby, they make topics and issues a belief system instead of basing their ideals on their own research and conclusions.
My beliefs do not require you to have the same beliefs.
that's not really true at all you know...the BSD license pretty much lets you do what you want with the code, there's no requirement to open derivative works.
The license can be debated for hours, but you are also forgetting the basic MACH license, that REQUESTS that all derivative works be returned - i.e. Open.
If you're gonna support a side, give Mac your money; fsck longhorn. In those two years until its realease, we can advocate for the more intuitive and [partially] free OS that Mac is. And which the Linux desktop will eventually become
Smart, not only support a company that has a proprietary UI on a *nix with no intention of opening it, but also a company that has full control of its own hardware market as well.
Geesh... Even if you hate Microsoft, at least they support tons of hardware and don't force you to buy any brand. (And don't give me a Mice speech, Logitech mice work just a well as Microsoft mice on MS OSes.
Not going to defend Microsoft, but to play Apple as the god's gift ot the Open Source movement is the stupiest thing I have seen posted in a long time.
And please don't post Darwin Links to prove that Apple is all warm and fuzzy with open source.
The ASDL is NOT true open source, it is a disclosure out of public image and necessity due to the ripped off BSD and MACH technologies.
>>Remember Win32 is ONLY a subsystem on NT and is not a part of the NT kernel or core.
that might have been true 10 years ago, but since then a large part of the GUI drawing code has migrated into the kernel.
This is also not true. Does anyone really know anything about the NT architecture in the Open Source World anymore? Why are not more people studying what they perceive as the 'enemy, or 'competition'.
The lower portion of the video layer exists at its own HAL layer, along side the HAL layer of NT. (Which is actually lower than the kernel layer of NT)
IT IS ENTIRELY independent of the Win32 Subsystem. It wouldn't matter if a UNIX with XWiindow interface was sitting on top of NT, it would still access NT and the VIDEO HAL layer, just as NT and its HAL layer is accessed.
Additionally, there is a DIFFERENCE between the GUI drawing layers of Win32, and the graphic drawing layers that are inherent in the driver levels that are in the NT kernel/HAL and the GUI Win32 calls are NOT a part of graphic driver system in NT. Even basic portions of direct hardware access in DirectX are NOT win32 dependant. (It bypasses the Win32 Drawing layers for performance in NT.)
So to just clear this up, the GUI Win32 driver calls do NOT exist in the NT VIDEO HAL, nor the NT Video Kernel portions of NT. The essential part of the Video system having the performance it has under NT is that it exists in the HAL layer that is below the kernel. The NT HAL design is an essential piece of what makes NT portable, as even the NT kernel itself is NOT dependant on any HARDWARE/CPU configuration, only the specific HAL layer for each platform is.
The HAL layer is a small portion of code that does just what the name applies, Hardware Abstraction Layer.
This is all NT architecture 101, I again ask, why do people NOT understand this or have even taken the time understand it? Especially when so many people are trying to create Open Source OSes that will topple the NT and Microsoft Windows infrastructure. You have to at least understand the competition to be able to build something beyond the competition.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as a great percentage of the posters here also seem to not realize that the Win9x line of OSes are not NT based and think that Win2k and WindowsXP are not much different than Win95,Win98, or WinME, when if fact they are completely different OSes and OS models.
I urge everyone here to at least pick up basic knowledge of NT, whether you hate it or not. There are pieces of NT that Microsoft DID DO right, and it would be in the Open Source's best interest to understand them and possibly bring these concepts to the Open Source OS projects. Understanding NT is also essential it truly knowing its flaws as well.
Becasue mark my words, Microsoft will have an NT based Linux Subsystem running on the Windows desktop faster than you can blink your eyes if that is what is needed to take back any major market loss.
Slashdot Mirror
a couple of years ago... should it be a compliment to Linux or an insult to your memory that you couldn't think of anything more recent than "a couple of years ago"...
How about last week... One of our competitors that pride themselves on being the best in the industry with Security and using Linux Servers as their flagship of security had about 100 customer's web servers root hacked.
Linux can be secure, but it just isn't as easy as the Open Source world tries to create. The Myth becomes so predominate that people install Linux and just assume that their computers are more secure, and hence never take into account updates, patches, or basic security measures.
People here simply saying that Linux is more secure is doing a DIS-service to the Linux and Open Source movement, as customers that do make the leap feel too comfortable with the 'myth of security' and then let their system get hacked right and left and flee Open Source and Linux after being burned.
Tell the truth, all systems are susceptible, no matter who makes it. All it takes is time and a smart mind to virtually get into anything.
have to disagree with this statement. The fact that IE will ignore mismatched tags -- well, that is very much like a buffer overflow: "let's just take any data that comes down the pipe, and if it happens to lack proper boundings and contains something malicious -- oh well!!" So I consider the fact that IE will ignore such HTML errors a security risk
Either you are truly going out a limb to prove your point, or you have NO clue about buffer overflow and security.
If you think that a page displaying 'incomplete' content (i.e. not even all that was expected) is the same thing as a buffer overflow you are sadly in the wrong business.
IE was made to correct poorly coded HTML pages so that the 'average user' could rely on things displaying, even if not fully as intended.
Netscape on the other hand didn't give a crap about poorly coded web pages or the effects on their users.
Just as software will never be perfect, most web pages will never be perfect. It is nice to have a Browser that fixes things in the background and lets you see the page anyway.
That was kinda my point: dumbass bugs aren't usually intentional
:)
Thanks "Dumbass", but the post wasn't directly just referring to your comments. I'm glad you think your post alone was so important that it needed a response just itself.
PS. The next time you call someone Dumbass, at least try to get the rest of the words in the sentence spelled right.
Yes of course, silly Netscape not accounting for the buggy code produced by frontpage...
Of course it was only FrontPage that made Netscape have problems.
I will just discount the hours I have been troubleshooting HTML designers working in everything from Dreamweaver to Notepad.
Netscape was too picky about tags, and for a final tag to be missing and the browser refuse to show any of the information actually breaks the original HTML and HTTP standards.
Based on those standards, it was understood that the Internet and TCP/IP could lose information and at the very least, the information the browser received was displayed.
Netscape didn't see it that way... I wonder why they aren't number one anymore...
Results 1-15 of about 16 containing "linux windows"
{Results follow}
It's basically saying "There may be another page to look at, but hey, it's only one item so why bother? Maybe you should search for a nice Microsoft product instead." Only if you click the "next" button do you get:
Results 16-30 of about 8898833 containing "linux windows"
Does Microsoft have more than 16 results for "linux windows?" Absolutely. Do they lie on the first page of the search? The answer to that is yes as well, unless you really believe 8,898,833 pages is "about 16."
And funny, doing a search for "Microsoft office windows" also returns the first page with 1-15 of about 16 containing "Microsoft office windows"
Maybe MSN and Microsoft is also trying to hide the world from Microsoft Office and Windows itself. - Geesh.
It is in how the query engine of MSN works... Instead of keywords, it is expecting questions (like ask jeeves became so popular for).
So if you type in "Microsoft office for windows" (notice the extra natural language word in the search here, and the first page displays: Results 1-15 of about 2210194 containing "Microsoft office for windows"
Just like searching for "windows on linux" returns: Results 1-15 of about 8898110 containing "windows on linux"
With articles on the first page listing sites and subjects like WINE and other things that the conspiracy theorists would have you believe Microsoft is trying to hide from people.
It doesn't shock me that people are dense, it just surprises me that their voice gets used to propagate mass ignorance.
Geesh....
Frex, my favourite dumb-assed bug, the "backspacing over text inside table cells in WYSIWYG mode clobbers adjacent table tags TOO" bug that was in Frontpage from the very beginning
And Microsoft bought the original FrontPage product and code from another company before putting the Microsoft Name on it.
So if this bug was there from the beginning, you need to find that company and flame them, not Microsoft. Microsoft's Office development team may have been stupid for not catching this bug, but that is a whole other argument.
Trust me, it wasn't an 'intentional' bug Microsoft put in just to ruin Netscape. Besides, there are so many simple tags that if they are not perfect they will cause Netscape to fail to display to the page. This was just poor programming on Netscape's part to not be able to overlook malformed/embedded tags. Missing a simple end tag for a table shouldn't cause the browser to just decide not to display anything on the page, period.
God, does everything that MS does need to have some ulterior motive?
Having a 16:9 PJ that is not TRUE HD is as gay as those folks who by one of those 832 x 470 16:0 plasmas at CostCo and think they have an "HD TV". They may have senile dementia (and lousy eysight) BUT THEY DON'T HAVE HDTV.
Technically true, however compressed XGA next to true 1080i is something most people(layman) cannot even discern the difference with their eyes, let alone across a room with a 20ft screen.
"(the inside of the lamp is a vacuum, filled with an inert gas that's excited with a high voltage generator to produce the light)." A vacuum filled with gas is no longer a vacuum!
And most projectors don't have sealed bulbs for cooling reasons... There is no gas even, just air.
Yeah. Unlike you, not every man takes it up his ass
:)
And the more homophobic they are, the more they want it...
Shall I have a blond gay surfer email or meet you? Then maybe you can find love and get out of the closet.
True love is so cute...
dude, this is MICRO$OFT we're talking about here.
They won't block the popups on MSN, or any of them that they benefit from. I also predict they will take "donations" to allow popups to get through.
MSN Explorer (Using IE6 engine) already does, and has full control to block all or selected pop-ups.
So, sorry but you are wrong about them being scared to block MSN ads, especially since MSN Internet Service is already allowing this.
(And in Beta MSN Beta 9, it works better than other solutions from Mozilla or Opera, although I personally HATE the MSN Explorer Browser.)
TheNetAvenger
No no, I've had this experience with win2k too, but I blame it on poor installers, not really on Microsoft. Usually the only cure is an O/S reinstall though - A lot of windows users swear this is a good thing to do from time to time, but I'm not so sure.
I don't know if things are better with winXP.
Well, XP, things are better, but...
You will find novice techs that recommend an OS reinstall once a year to clean out the system. When in fact, this is one of the stupidest things to recommend from an experienced consultant.
Even with a poor installer, there are almost NO instances where an experience tech or service shop cannot just fix the problem and remove any offending software or spyware.
Additionally, back to XP... XP has this nifty feature called "System Restore" which allows you to change the OS back to a previous working state a day, or several days before. And it works miracles, unlike the first incarnate of "System Restore" in WinME which sucked.
Additionally, XP not only is good about protecting the OS files and registry from bad applications and installers, it also forces the system to create a restore point everytime a driver is changed, just in case it is the wrong or buggy driver, so the system is ALWAYS recoverable from any type of installation.
Microsoft also recognized that one of the biggest problems with the Win9x core OSes is that they allowed too much flexibility in User software installations that did not enforce security.
It wasn't that the OS base code of Win9x was buggy, but the software that users installed often caused system instability. Hence Win2k and WinXP work very hard to remove this threat, and do so without having to notify or worry the user, the software just works(even if written poorly) in XP...
(XP can even detect bad calls in realtime of a running application and correct the call without disrupting the application or allowing it cause harm to other applications or the OS)
Why do I champion MS's OSes in this regard?
Becuase these are feature models that the Open Source world and other OS architects should be considering and benefiting from.
Take Care,
TheNetAvenger
Instead, have Windows installed on your system. Try to load a program. It works. Try to load another. It works. Try to run the previous program. It doesn't work. Remove both programs. System no longer works.
Man, it must really suck to still be using Windows 3.0 or Windows/386.
I truly feel for you...
According to Helen Custers, in Inside Windows NT:
"Dave, a well-known architect of minicomputer systems, quickly assembled a team of engineers to design Microsoft's new technology (NT) operating system."
The closest thing it had to a code name (other than NT) was NT OS/2
Thanks, have an original signed edition....
The "new technology" was not an acronym for NT - NT was used by ITSELF long before "new technology" was coined. Period.
Just as another post also stated the NT comes from the N-10(N-Ten) plaform that NT was created on.
Hence the N-Ten team(the NT Team) was the OS development team that was creating the new OS architecture. "New Technology" was adopted by the press and others LONG after the term NT was designated as the Windows OS core product name.
And before it was being called NT OS/2, it WAS being called OS/2 3.0 and OS/3 at Microsoft.
And why on earth is everyone really so concerned where NT came from, whether it was New Technology or N-Ten?
Microsoft made it up, they could say it was "Novel Terrific" if they wanted to do so.
TheNetAvenger
I guess marketing re-designated it to mean new technology.
Microsoft's official policy on the NT name is that is comes from nothing. It was the press and original users that tried to figure out where NT came from and gave it the term 'new technology'.
Gates referenced NT as New Technology once in an interview around 1995/96 in response to what the press was calling it, but officially NT been only NT in Microsoft's eyes and NOT an acronym.
The only true MS reference to NT meaning new technology is ONLY in reference to NTFS "New Technology File System", but this is also debated whether this is official Microsoft policy or press interpretation again.
An NT developer has recently stated that NT came from the development platform they were using when making NT as a nickname and it caught on.
NT was never a true project code name, the code name for NT was OS/3 or OS/2 3.0.
Don't blame the marketing department for something the press and the users have adopted in a false belief.
Apple is the odd one out, and Apple does seem, for the most part, to be the one company left that's innovating, or even inventing.
Apple does more than their fair share, but I our test labs see more 'new' concepts from the MS R&D labs than Apple. Whether you like MS or not, they are putting Billions in research.
Since the NT initiative (which was a non-user side of OS engineering and architecture originally 'the guts of a new OS') to the OS/2 interface that IBM put in OS/2 2.0, and on to the Windows 95 UI, Microsoft has done a fair share of 'inventing' in both OS architecture and UI.
A lot of MS's inventing appears in the Office line before it trickles down to the OS. So Apple users get to use some of the new Microsoft stuff about the time PC users do.
Microsoft also has a lot of things up their sleeve in the next couple of years, things that would freak even Apple Users as the 'coolest thing they ever saw'.
But Apple does deserve their kudos for a lot of work, it was just sad they had such a dry spell in the 90s for innovation.
I'm am happy they are back in the game with OSX. It will push MS and the Open Source world to produce better UI experiences or take them to new levels even if Apple closed up shop today. (Which is not going to happen.)
Dell uses R&D to reduce costs on the production and supply chain whereas Apple uses R&D money to research and develop new products.
This is not 100% true anymore for Dell than it is for Apple with the exception of software development.
Dell is NOT a favorite company of mine, but they do spend a great deal of money on innovation in hardware and production quality. The last, something Apple should invest a little more in.
On the other side, Dell doesn't have to spend the R&D on software like Apple does, because there is a large supply of PC applications, fringe applications, not just mainstream products that they can pool from.
Also consider that most of the software R&D for PC manufacturers comes from either the Open Source or Microsoft, which spends a lot more money on software R&D than any other company.
Ah, if only CE didn't suck donkey balls
:)
I guess you are the clear expert in this regard.
yeah - and how long did these ports take?
Um, lets see, WindowsXP 64bit Edition for Itanium was shipping in 2001, oh, just a bit behind the official release of WindowsXP for x86.
And considering the Itanium 64bit is a complete different architecture than the x86, if Windows(NT) was now SO dependant on the x86 platform as some people here mistakenly think, then moving to the Itanium would have been a long journey and not just quick port like it was.
The Windows AMD64bit Edition was delayed based on CPU availability (Intel had emulator and samples of the Itanium 64bit CPUs, and even Shipping CPUs long before AMD did.)
AMD 64bit support also got caught in the security restructuring that also delayed Windows 2003. Hence why the AMD 64bit version beta and the Windows 2003 SP1 Beta are in the same development beta process.
(BTW, this info is straight from the MS development team, horse's mouth.)
If Microsoft wanted a PPC version of Windows(NT), it wouldn't be as difficult as many people think. If you somehow think the basic NT design core has changed so much that it is dependant on x86 you are not only mistaken, but grossly overlooking several NT releases that debunk this theory.
When NT was restructured (as the parent post implied), it did not become more dependant on the x86 architecture, the major revision was moving the graphical processes into the kernel scheduling and adding an additional HAL layer for Video, giving Video in NT a more direct access to the hardware instead of handing all calls through the NT kernel.
This happened with NT 4.0, and if this somehow made NT dependant on the x86 platform then it would not have also been released on PPC, ALPHA, and RISC in the 4.0 version as it was.
Additionally, even though PPC and RISC support was dropped for the NT5(Windows 2000) development cycle, ALPHA CPU support was still very a part of the development process up until RC1 of Windows 2000 (around Aug of 1999) when Compaq acquired DEC, and decided to abandon NT support on the Alpha chip - which was NOT MS's decision, Compaq intentionally pulled the plug - they were NOT going to ship NT on the ALPHA CPU, virtually eliminating any market for Windows 2000 on ALPHA.
Additionally, people forget that the core of WindowsCE (Pocket PC) comes from NT design.
Even the name 'NT' comes from the MIPS based machines that it originally ran and was designed on before it ever breathed any life in the x86 world. (NT equaling 'New Technology' is a misconception.)
Do a search with NT and RISC, MIPS, PPC, or ALPHA, and you will find more information on the portability of NT and even the current portability NT (WindowsXP/Windows2003) still has.
Request don't mean shit. Require would mean something. If they didn't want to give anyone the source, they didn't have to.
Since a license is a form of legalese and a binding agreement, then why don't you rethink the license from the perspective of legality?
If a party 'requests' certain assets or items, legally it becomes a condition for compliance within the agreement.
So no matter if they use the word request, or require, it is a legal document, and is therefore subject to standard legal terminology and compliance.
For example, "If my party requests that you pay them $100 to use their car. And you use their car, you have accepted the terms of their agreement by using their car. Therefore, you must then pay my party $100 as requested."
Do you now see that this is a binding agreement and it does not use the word REQUIRE?
God, I hope someone gets this.
Like I said before, this could be argued forever in a non-legal forum, but in basic legal terminology both the BSD and MACH licenses do NOT allow for a party to take the technology and modify it without complying to the agreement which is 'to return (i.e. make open)' all changes they have made to the technology and code.
Now Apple could take a hard line and just turn the code directly back over to the original license owners and not make it open to the public as the MACH license specifically allows; however, A) The original license owners would make the Apple modifications public anyway. B) It presents a better public image to the Open Source and *nix community to create the Darwin and APSL face for Apple.
This then suckers a lot of people in the Open Source world into a false lure that Apple is working with them. Great marketing and PR is just the extra benefit of using a technology they did not have to develop.
Of course there is also the side benefit that comes with the Darwin 'lure', Open Source people then devote time by helping Apple to fix and evolve their code, even though the Apple APSL license DOES NOT allow the people to EVER use it for themselves outside of the Apple arena or commercially.
Which strangely, is also a nice LEGAL way to effectively cap the future of the Apple modifications that are made by outside users that are not contingent upon the Apple BSD and MACH licenses and are now contingent only upon the APSL.
Has anyone actually read all of the APSL?
With that said I don't dislike Apple, in fact I champion a lot of what they have done for the computing world and continue to do so. I just don't agree with the fact that they are a better choice just because of the facade they put on for the Open Source, BSD, and Linux community.
Apple is a company for profit that has the same motives as Microsoft and has done just as many egregious acts as Microsoft; however, Apple has had the luxury of being protected from the public outcry of these practices due to the small market share they hold.
TheNetAvenger
Or do you mean "think like me"?
How about, just outside the box, and for themselves even if I do disagree. Is that too much to ask?
People are too quick to take a 'me too' attitude and not take the time to research something; thereby, they make topics and issues a belief system instead of basing their ideals on their own research and conclusions.
My beliefs do not require you to have the same beliefs.
Thank God there are people on here that think for themselves. Kudos...
that's not really true at all you know...the BSD license pretty much lets you do what you want with the code, there's no requirement to open derivative works.
The license can be debated for hours, but you are also forgetting the basic MACH license, that REQUESTS that all derivative works be returned - i.e. Open.
If you're gonna support a side, give Mac your money; fsck longhorn. In those two years until its realease, we can advocate for the more intuitive and [partially] free OS that Mac is. And which the Linux desktop will eventually become
Smart, not only support a company that has a proprietary UI on a *nix with no intention of opening it, but also a company that has full control of its own hardware market as well.
Geesh... Even if you hate Microsoft, at least they support tons of hardware and don't force you to buy any brand. (And don't give me a Mice speech, Logitech mice work just a well as Microsoft mice on MS OSes.
Not going to defend Microsoft, but to play Apple as the god's gift ot the Open Source movement is the stupiest thing I have seen posted in a long time.
And please don't post Darwin Links to prove that Apple is all warm and fuzzy with open source.
The ASDL is NOT true open source, it is a disclosure out of public image and necessity due to the ripped off BSD and MACH technologies.
>>Remember Win32 is ONLY a subsystem on NT and is not a part of the NT kernel or core.
that might have been true 10 years ago, but since then a large part of the GUI drawing code has migrated into the kernel.
This is also not true. Does anyone really know anything about the NT architecture in the Open Source World anymore? Why are not more people studying what they perceive as the 'enemy, or 'competition'.
The lower portion of the video layer exists at its own HAL layer, along side the HAL layer of NT. (Which is actually lower than the kernel layer of NT)
IT IS ENTIRELY independent of the Win32 Subsystem. It wouldn't matter if a UNIX with XWiindow interface was sitting on top of NT, it would still access NT and the VIDEO HAL layer, just as NT and its HAL layer is accessed.
Additionally, there is a DIFFERENCE between the GUI drawing layers of Win32, and the graphic drawing layers that are inherent in the driver levels that are in the NT kernel/HAL and the GUI Win32 calls are NOT a part of graphic driver system in NT. Even basic portions of direct hardware access in DirectX are NOT win32 dependant. (It bypasses the Win32 Drawing layers for performance in NT.)
So to just clear this up, the GUI Win32 driver calls do NOT exist in the NT VIDEO HAL, nor the NT Video Kernel portions of NT. The essential part of the Video system having the performance it has under NT is that it exists in the HAL layer that is below the kernel. The NT HAL design is an essential piece of what makes NT portable, as even the NT kernel itself is NOT dependant on any HARDWARE/CPU configuration, only the specific HAL layer for each platform is.
The HAL layer is a small portion of code that does just what the name applies, Hardware Abstraction Layer.
This is all NT architecture 101, I again ask, why do people NOT understand this or have even taken the time understand it? Especially when so many people are trying to create Open Source OSes that will topple the NT and Microsoft Windows infrastructure. You have to at least understand the competition to be able to build something beyond the competition.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as a great percentage of the posters here also seem to not realize that the Win9x line of OSes are not NT based and think that Win2k and WindowsXP are not much different than Win95,Win98, or WinME, when if fact they are completely different OSes and OS models.
I urge everyone here to at least pick up basic knowledge of NT, whether you hate it or not. There are pieces of NT that Microsoft DID DO right, and it would be in the Open Source's best interest to understand them and possibly bring these concepts to the Open Source OS projects. Understanding NT is also essential it truly knowing its flaws as well.
Becasue mark my words, Microsoft will have an NT based Linux Subsystem running on the Windows desktop faster than you can blink your eyes if that is what is needed to take back any major market loss.
TheNetAvenger
Most of *any* speech recognition is going to be from research done on [cough] *nix machines of the past decade
Yeah, the Billions in research MS spent has nothing to do with speech technology. You are kidding right?
You do realize that MS had speech recognition software back in 1992 (Windows Sound System ring a bell?)
Additionally, IBM has had business level speech recognition hardware and software since the late 80's. Again, not on *nix platforms.
So where are the great *nix speech recognition and synthesis applications?
Hell, it would be nice if most *nix variants could even multiplex sound in real-time.