Although Jackson did it so good, I like the LOTR movies over the books.
Bing! And now to prepare you for the Tolkien Geek Attack that is to inevitably follow:
You monster you, Peter Jackson was spawned by Satan, he left out Glorifindel and made that ho Arwen flood the ford. Gimli was treated like a fucking comic character instead of the great dwarve he was. And NO TOM BOMBADIL, WTF!!! And made Galadriel look like a schlok B-movie horror queen in FoTR. And since when do trolls fight in the daylight, hasn't he even _read_ the Hobbit? and the SCOURING OF THE SHIRE-- leaving that out CHANGES the story completely! Waa!
There, now that I've covered all the points, maybe the real Tolkien purists will be gentle;-)
US copyright laws are ignored in India. He was forced to sell his books there at an almost non-existant profit, because if the didn't agree, they'd print them anyway and not pay him anything!
It's not like someone held a gun to his head. Would it hurt you to reveal who his (US) Publisher was? Most US and European publishers have published Eastern Economy Editions for ages, and these days pretty much everyone -- from O'Reilly, McGraw-Hill and Wiley to IDG and Sybex -- have their Indian subsidiaries which do a good job of selling books at the right price-point for the local market... the catch being that these books can legally be sold in India/neighboring countries only.
> They sure don't seem to care about ours!
Bull. Apart from certain classes of drugs (and even this is changing with the new WTO regime). As a member of the Berne Convention, most copyrights apply to India as much as the US. In practice, it may not be worth it to Disney to prosecute a $20/mo artist who paints a Mickey Mouse on a schoolbag.
I don't have a problem with their _news_. However, when the _personal_ liberal slant of their presenters (unsuprising when you consider they come almost uniformly from the London liberal set) seeps into their news presentation, I do have a problem. Google 'BBC Bias' for several interesting examples.
I'm sure there are people who'd spring to the Beeb's defense with lots of "j00 sUck"-type comments, however, I do know several people who ask why they should continue funding an allegedly public service that unfailingly mixes opinion into its news** to promote a particular ideology.
** Note that perhaps all media is guilty of this these days: from the NYT to Fox News. The difference is, you *choose* to fund NYT/Fox by reading the NYT or watching Fox. OTOH you are _forced_ to fund the Beeb.
How is this a troll? The ~$20/month is a fact, as any UK resident can point out. As for the propaganda, the BBC's idea of 'diversity of opinion' is limited to the liberal London set. And if you believe they don't have their own agenda, you're dreaming.
Could a commercial broadcaster ever take a step like this?
Remember, the BBC can do this because they collect on every household owning a TV in the UK, many of them against their will.
Could a commercial broadcaster force you to pay ~$20 every month whether you watch their content or not, and then show you propaganda masquerading as news?
I'd like to see the Beeb actually compete in the marketplace instead of thrive on handouts.
The standard of living is a LOT higher (and the cost of living cheaper) than it is here in NY (not NYC) for example, and the taxes are definitely lower, especially since these people there are going to see why they paid social security and taxes.
Ha ha ha ha *gasp* ha ha ha. Yes, Europe, low-tax haven.
And SMS is async messaging and is useful in all sorts of situations where the other party can't or talk but can see the phone -- immediately or sometime afterwards.
The point is that European politicians are, IMHO, ready to tax _anything_ at the drop of a hat. And they do so because they know they can get away with it with impunity.
You get to sleep in the bed you made. A lot of us have been saying for some time now that taxes have run amok in Europe and is hindering its economic competitiveness against Asia and America. But too many people justify it because the European welfare state has to get its money from somewhere.
Well I'm an American that went to grad school in the Netherlands and in my personal opinion it seems that much is changing in the Netherlands for the worse. There is a lot of pressure being put on their government by the United States, which just adds to the current tensions.
Let's see, the Dutch parliament passes an asinine law and you manage to get a +5 by blaming _the US_ for it? *shakes head*.
And seriously-- if you think the US is really all that messed up, I hear Scandinavia with its 33%+ income taxes are nice this time of the year. Wonder why Linus doesn't move back there though...
And now that we're all jaded with the cheap-looking effects, I hear the next season of Dr Who will feature 'evolved' Daleks who look indistinguishable from human beings and whose female forms are horny like cats.
It really irritates me when I go to obtain some basic information (like my bank account details or some product info) and the web server insists on shoving a PDF down my throat. HTML would be so much better: Smaller, quicker, open, no special software, device and software independent. Why PDF?
Because, gee, my accountant might be less than amused with my bank statement printed out from Opera with the Commodore64 stylesheet applied? Because HTML's printing capabilities are sh*t? Because font embedding is easy to do in PDF, making it easy to print out docs that look the same as the bank intended?
Using PDF for 'white papers' is idiocy. However, for a lot of documents that are used both in meatspace and online, PDF happens to be an excellent choice. Deal with it.
> Not only that but does this only work with word?
Heh. This is Windows' shell feature since Windows 2000-- I have _no_ idea why this is being touted as a Longhorn feature. Install Adobe Acrobat 7 and view a PDF in Thumbnail view, you'll see what I mean. Or on XP, view bitmaps/movie files.
The way it works is that apps can register a Preview Renderer to the shell. The entire app needn't (and should not be, in fact) loaded.
> But would that not imply needing access to create the database?
Any program that issues the appropriate calls can create a database -- many programs do that to create their own custom databases on the fly. Alternatively you could use the VB6 IDE.
And yes, Core Data is cool (speaking as a Hibernate user). Incidentally, WinFS' goals seem to be similar but more ambitious -- and it ought to ship with ObjectSpaces, Microsoft's.NET ORM solution. Oh well, 'til then nHibernate will do.
Point taken about Automator. Although Office users would point to the Macro Recorder, which (from experience) is used extensively by non-geeks (financial types etc) -- and Win 3.1's late, lamented Macro Recorder.
> (Expose) That is so wrong it's not even funny.
Oh, the taskbar can be irritating. As you said, shrunken icon syndrome (what I do about it is set the taskbar to 3X its normal height, that gives me extra room) but even that doesn't take away the fact that you can use muscle memory to go through it.
I do stand by what I said about the taskbar being more discoverable. Until you show a user the magic key for Expose, there's little chance he'll actually find the feature by himself (I guess that's where the close-knit Mac community helps).
(And oh, grouping the taskbar entries must be one of the worst ideas to come out of Microsoft in a *long* time. Completely destroys the spatial navigability the taskbar affords.)
> Binding to... what exactly?
Anything Windows can talk to. Incidentally, Windows has shipped with support for reading Jet databases (the format Access uses) out-of-the-box for many years, so you could use that. Many VB programmers did. Jet is now deprecated in favor of the SQL-Server 'lite' a.k.a MSDE, and from this year onwards SQL Server Express, but Windows will be able to connect to Jet databases for the forseeable future.
Not off by an order of magnitude per se, but I think you still have this a bit wrong... Core Image is at a lower level and mainly provides a nice library for quickly modifying images.
Core Image: the DirectX comparison may not be entirely valid in an API sense, however for the user the GDI+/DirectX combination gives equivalent features (esp since DirectX and GDI+ will, like Core Image/Core Video, take advantage of your present and future hardware assuming you've got drivers). This is why I said Core Image was comparable to DirectX.
Anyhow, API elegance aside, I fail to see how Core Image provides "an order of magnitude more usefulness to the user". Surely you don't expect Mac users to write their own Core Image code?
And Longhorn still won't have Dashboard, or Automator, or Core Data/Core Image, or Expose, or anything else that makes OS X great.
Still won't, eh?
Automator: VB/VBScript/VBA (look up SendKeys) Windows Scripting Host since Windows 2000 Windows Management Instrumentation since Windows XP
Core Data: Databinding (available in VB6, MFC,.NET)
Core Image: DirectX (but main shell doesn't use it, which is sort of good because it keeps base OS video requirements down, and sort bad because Tiger gets cooler graphics) Avalon (Longhorn)
Expose: definitely a plus for OSX simply because it looks cool, but Windows' taskbar is definitely HCI-wise superior (and renders an Expose-on-Windows unnecessary simply because it is _way_ more discoverable.
There, that's enough counter-groupthink for one day. Bring on the flames.
Microsoft no longer developes for the PC platform; hardware manufacturers develope for the Windows platform....Which is a cute statement, but the fact of the matter is that there is no "Windows" platform -- the platform is x86. Microsoft works with Intel and hardware vendors to produce specs for things like OnNow, UPnP etc but all of this benefit Linux/x86 as well (in fact, Intel is a major Linux booster at hardware conferences).
Because Apple is not a charity. They exist to make money (and make money they do, with overpriced machines and the regular OS X upgrade cycle), and to look at their stock price some investors clearly believe they'll make a lot of it.
If Apple makes OSX run on x86 two things will happen: a) Mac sales will tank b) OSX-dissing will begin big-time on/. as the lamers around here
discover that an OS tested on a small variety of hardware will
not do well with the wide variety of rigs out there
Microsoft's recent way seems to be hiring what they consider "key" people from other, successful companies
Heh. Ironically Google's been doing this to Microsoft -- they've poached quite a few Microsofties recently: Mark Jen, Joe Beda, Adam Bosworth (via BEA), Mark Lucovsky...
Netscape was in the business of selling an app, namely a browser
Netscape was in the business of selling a renderer (browser) for a public standard (HTML). There is IMHO something fundamentally wrong about selling software that interprets public standards-- Public standards are commodities, and it's probably a better job for charities like Mozilla.org, not for a for-profit company. Product companies _by definition_ make money by differentiating themselves from their competitors -- a fact Netscape knew well, hence TABLE and BLINK and Javascript. IE4 beat them at their own game, with a far more advanced DOM and numerous other features. Plus ca change: today Firefox is (slowly) doing the same to IE, although not as dramatically as IE4 did in NN4.
Also, Netscape itself seeded the market with its free browser, up to and including making Netscape 3 Gold available for free academic use. Most home users used 3 Gold anyway. The only people who probably paid for Netscape were corporate IT departments. In a way Netscape shot itself in the foot by creating the perception that browser == free. So when Microsoft introduced *it's* free browser (IE2 with NT4, IIRC) it was 'Yet Another Free Browser' for most people. It was -- for users -- free vs free, not Evil Empire vs Nascent Market. I remember this telling subhead (in PC World, IIRC) from back then: "Can Evian make money when Perrier is Free?"
As for selling web and other servers: Open-Source platforms quickly produced good-enough implementations of what were relatively straightforward RFCs: Apache, cyrus, Postfix. Incidentally MS still survives in the web-serving world by providing their custom development environments: asp/asp.net... Netscape had not much of a developer story beyond NSAPI and even that was comparitively hard to use.
But that's just the start, in principle they could bundle any application with their OS, why not throw in the Office suite, Image manipulation, and whatnot?
Sure, why not (remember what I said about modern OSes aggregating functionality?)
In fact -- XP already comes with _very_ basic picture manipulation capabilities, mostly slideshows. OSX comes with iPhoto and it's likely Longhorn will have something like it.
More tellingly, Microsoft today gives away Microsoft Works 7 with practically every copy of Windows sold with a new PC -- check dell.com if you wish. Why do you think they do that? (And oh-- Office suites are big, but not that big. I'm betting MS knows that Joe Public will find MS Works 7 quite satisfactory. And familiar interfaces count for a _lot_. OO.o will have trouble reaching numbers matching a quarter of pirated Office 2000 installations unless it bites the bullet and works like Office as much as possible.)
If they needed a PC-OS there was no real alternative to Windows to run the majority of applications, and Windows came with IE
I'd use the word 'monopoly' very carefully in a pure-software context, because software in many technical ways is so interchangeable, and yet in many non-technical ways not at all interchangeable. This dual nature of software makes one man's "choice" another man's "monopoly".
From my perspective, choice existed then and does now: Mac and Be then, Mac and Linux now. However, for a large class of users Windows still remains the only alternative because of other reasons: familiarity, availability of (often pirated) software, price (against Macs), driver support). That makes Windows a user-created de-facto monopoly**. I am not an economist but I would contend that in the absence of legislated standards (something that _kills_ progress btw, look no further than the W3C's latest work on XML and SOAP) OSes are _quasi-natural_ monopolies in their respective niches since users and IT departments tend to have a huge follow-the-herd mentality.
** Of course, one could argue that OEM licencing was a huge contributory factor in Windows' domination, and it is true MS had several vicious, unfair OEM deals. But you know what? Unfair deals happen all the time in business. In fact, the PC makers' willingness to put up with MS' contracts was a function of what they perceived as user demand. Windows' familiarity and availability created a sort of feedback loop that amplified the value of having a Windows PC.
And of course, anyone lucky enough to be making a dominant OS is going to rest on their laurels until a competitor comes along. My point is: solving this through antitrust was the wrong approach (and incidentally it solved nothing in the US and I'm not convinced it'll solve anything in Europe), Windows can be beaten fair and square just by being technically superior and using innovative business models: Open Source is a _great_ example.
Maybe it's just the libertarian in me, but I hate seeing spoilt-brat companies that survive on questionable business models (Sun -> sell pricey hardware, Netscape -> sell web servers and browsers, by golly, Real -> sell a decent streaming server completely hobbled by a horrible player) run crying 'antitrust' to BigGovMommy when they're in trouble.
The antitrust-criers have all uniformly demonstrated piss-poor business sense, and whatever happens to Microsoft, I'm glad the market has paid them back for it: Netscape-the-business's ashes have been scattered, Real's in the tank, and Sun got some big stock shocks before it came to its senses and realized that funnily enough business != badmouthing competitors.
IE3 had 30-35% market share? Wow. Care to back that up? -- IIRC Netscape 3 was _everywhere_ at the time.
And oh, about the 60MB IE install: that includes the Windows Shell Update that brought a web-ified shell to Win95 and NT _and_ updated the OS's widgets. The browser alone is 8.46MB against 9.73MB for Navigator 4.
> It's really straining reality to talk of a working market and "people voting with their wallets" here. Had Microsoft sold IE separately from Windows, with it's own pricetag, things would've been different.
But why should Microsoft sell IE separately? People voted with their wallets that a "web browser with an OS" is the way to go. Is there some divine law that mandates a profitable market for web browsers? (There used to be a profitable market for memory managers once, QuarterDeck made good money on it before Win95 killed that market. I don't recollect QuarterDeck crying 'antitrust'.) Who said selling web browsers has to be a business? It can be, of course; but _must be_?
Consumer OSes from DOS 1 to OS/2 OSX and XP show a clear trend of aggregating things that were normally thought of as separate products. OS/2 included a damn complete productivity suite comparable to Apple/MS Works. Linux distros ship with things like CD and DVD Burning software that compete very effectively with commercial offerings. (Of late XP has started doing so too.) Threfore, to claim that Microsoft cannot add stuff to its OS is rubbish.
Of course, as the OS vendor Microsoft has a responsibility to ensure that it doesn't hobble competitive products... for example *requiring* IE to open a link in the Add/Remove Programs dialog is wrong, and this is this behavior the antitrust lawsuit has fixed. If you expected Microsoft would be drawn and quartered for this, though, you don't quite have both feet on the ground.
> Windows had the ability to encode to mp3, so there was a way to do it without licensing.
Yes, and Windows XP still has the ability to do it: it uses the royalty-free Fraunhofer encoder which encodes only upto 56kbps. The fuss about Microsoft dropping _that_ from the XP beta was because they felt including an inferior codec wouldn't help anyone. Feedback said otherwise, and MP3 stayed.
And oh, if encoding in MP3 is _that_ important then Debian and Redhat out-of-the-box must be very poor OSes indeed: they have _no_ MP3 encoding support (because of patent reasons, but to a user that hardly matters).
but the success of IE over Netscape (at that time IE was a joke) shows that Microsoft knew to leverage their OS-monopoly to grab the browser market.
And of course the fact that NN4 was a piece of bloated shit compared to the much faster and feature-laden (Full Screen, autocomplete, DHTML,...) IE4 is an irrelevant little fact. What I'm saying is that monopoly or no, customers will seek out alternatives when the bundle comes with provides inferior features.
As for the formats: AFAIR Microsoft did rip out the mp3-encoder in WinXP-beta.
Yeah. Encoder. A little thing you need to *record* MP3s. Because it was not royalty free. The *decoder* which lets you PLAY mp3s was always there. So since when does an OS addin have to let you record in a per-copy-shipped royalty format? Apple favors AAC just for this reason, why shouldn't Microsoft favor WMA?
As for the "overambitious Brussels bureaucrats": I think they're better than their US-counterpart that gave up a process they had already won because G.W. Bush wanted them to be friendly with his Buddy Bill. But maybe those underamitious bureucrats were just redefining how corrupt 'big government' can get, in true capitalistic tradition.
Sterling example of Slashdot discourse there. Maybe you could rewrite it more coherently, then it might even be worth responding to.
The entire point of Microsoft bundling IE and WMP with windows isn't to give their customers approximately what they want.
How do you know that?
Besides, 'giving customers what they want' is a simplification. If it were the literal truth, we'd be stuck even now with vi and ed, because customers do not always know what they want until they're shown an alternative. Companies put products out in the market and customers vote with their wallet. Things that get lots of 'votes' become things that in hindsight people 'want' -- GUIs and mice come to mind.
Microsoft integrated a browser deeply with the OS. Did people vote for it? The success of Win98 and later OSes says it did. Microsoft bundled a *good* media player with the OS. Again, people voted for it with their wallets.
And oh, for those screaming 'monopoly', Microsoft pushed their own proprietary email and AOL-style net access quite hard with Win95 -- it got almost no uptake. The paying public isn't stupid and it won't use a substandard product even when it comes bundled. OTOH when it's good enough and it comes bundled, it's a whole different story.
<rant> There was no reason why a 50s OS would come with a text editor. There was no reason why a 70s OS would come with a mp3 player. Today there is no reason why an OS *shouldn't* come with one. Windows Media Player plays quite a few formats, including Microsoft's own. Windows doesn't refuse to play other formats: one can install Real/QT quite easily. The current EU action is nothing but needless pissing against the wind by a bunch of overambitious Brussels bureaucrats who in true Brussels tradition are redefining how big 'big government' can get. </rant>
Slashdot Mirror
Although Jackson did it so good, I like the LOTR movies over the books.
;-)
Bing! And now to prepare you for the Tolkien Geek Attack that is to inevitably follow:
You monster you, Peter Jackson was spawned by Satan, he left out Glorifindel and made that ho Arwen flood the ford. Gimli was treated like a fucking comic character instead of the great dwarve he was. And NO TOM BOMBADIL, WTF!!! And made Galadriel look like a schlok B-movie horror queen in FoTR. And since when do trolls fight in the daylight, hasn't he even _read_ the Hobbit? and the SCOURING OF THE SHIRE-- leaving that out CHANGES the story completely! Waa!
There, now that I've covered all the points, maybe the real Tolkien purists will be gentle
US copyright laws are ignored in India. He was forced to sell his books there at an almost non-existant profit, because if the didn't agree, they'd print them anyway and not pay him anything!
... the catch being that these books can legally be sold in India/neighboring countries only.
It's not like someone held a gun to his head. Would it hurt you to reveal who his (US) Publisher was? Most US and European publishers have published Eastern Economy Editions for ages, and these days pretty much everyone -- from O'Reilly, McGraw-Hill and Wiley to IDG and Sybex -- have their Indian subsidiaries which do a good job of selling books at the right price-point for the local market
> They sure don't seem to care about ours!
Bull. Apart from certain classes of drugs (and even this is changing with the new WTO regime). As a member of the Berne Convention, most copyrights apply to India as much as the US. In practice, it may not be worth it to Disney to prosecute a $20/mo artist who paints a Mickey Mouse on a schoolbag.
I don't have a problem with their _news_. However, when the _personal_ liberal slant of their presenters (unsuprising when you consider they come almost uniformly from the London liberal set) seeps into their news presentation, I do have a problem. Google 'BBC Bias' for several interesting examples.
I'm sure there are people who'd spring to the Beeb's defense with lots of "j00 sUck"-type comments, however, I do know several people who ask why they should continue funding an allegedly public service that unfailingly mixes opinion into its news** to promote a particular ideology.
** Note that perhaps all media is guilty of this these days: from the NYT to Fox News. The difference is, you *choose* to fund NYT/Fox by reading the NYT or watching Fox. OTOH you are _forced_ to fund the Beeb.
How is this a troll? The ~$20/month is a fact, as any UK resident can point out. As for the propaganda, the BBC's idea of 'diversity of opinion' is limited to the liberal London set. And if you believe they don't have their own agenda, you're dreaming.
Could a commercial broadcaster ever take a step like this?
Remember, the BBC can do this because they collect on every household owning a TV in the UK, many of them against their will.
Could a commercial broadcaster force you to pay ~$20 every month whether you watch their content or not, and then show you propaganda masquerading as news?
I'd like to see the Beeb actually compete in the marketplace instead of thrive on handouts.
The standard of living is a LOT higher (and the cost of living cheaper) than it is here in NY (not NYC) for example, and the taxes are definitely lower, especially since these people there are going to see why they paid social security and taxes.
Ha ha ha ha *gasp* ha ha ha. Yes, Europe, low-tax haven.
And SMS is async messaging and is useful in all sorts of situations where the other party can't or talk but can see the phone -- immediately or sometime afterwards.
/.
I really don't get the 'too hip to SMS' fad on
The point is that European politicians are, IMHO, ready to tax _anything_ at the drop of a hat. And they do so because they know they can get away with it with impunity.
You get to sleep in the bed you made. A lot of us have been saying for some time now that taxes have run amok in Europe and is hindering its economic competitiveness against Asia and America. But too many people justify it because the European welfare state has to get its money from somewhere.
Well I'm an American that went to grad school in the Netherlands and in my personal opinion it seems that much is changing in the Netherlands for the worse. There is a lot of pressure being put on their government by the United States, which just adds to the current tensions.
Let's see, the Dutch parliament passes an asinine law and you manage to get a +5 by blaming _the US_ for it? *shakes head*.
And seriously-- if you think the US is really all that messed up, I hear Scandinavia with its 33%+ income taxes are nice this time of the year. Wonder why Linus doesn't move back there though...
And now that we're all jaded with the cheap-looking effects, I hear the next season of Dr Who will feature 'evolved' Daleks who look indistinguishable from human beings and whose female forms are horny like cats.
Or maybe I've been too much BSG lately...
It really irritates me when I go to obtain some basic information (like my bank account details or some product info) and the web server insists on shoving a PDF down my throat. HTML would be so much better: Smaller, quicker, open, no special software, device and software independent. Why PDF?
Because, gee, my accountant might be less than amused with my bank statement printed out from Opera with the Commodore64 stylesheet applied? Because HTML's printing capabilities are sh*t? Because font embedding is easy to do in PDF, making it easy to print out docs that look the same as the bank intended?
Using PDF for 'white papers' is idiocy. However, for a lot of documents that are used both in meatspace and online, PDF happens to be an excellent choice. Deal with it.
> Not only that but does this only work with word?
Heh. This is Windows' shell feature since Windows 2000-- I have _no_ idea why this is being touted as a Longhorn feature. Install Adobe Acrobat 7 and view a PDF in Thumbnail view, you'll see what I mean. Or on XP, view bitmaps/movie files.
The way it works is that apps can register a Preview Renderer to the shell. The entire app needn't (and should not be, in fact) loaded.
> But would that not imply needing access to create the database?
.NET ORM solution. Oh well, 'til then nHibernate will do.
Any program that issues the appropriate calls can create a database -- many programs do that to create their own custom databases on the fly. Alternatively you could use the VB6 IDE.
And yes, Core Data is cool (speaking as a Hibernate user). Incidentally, WinFS' goals seem to be similar but more ambitious -- and it ought to ship with ObjectSpaces, Microsoft's
Point taken about Automator. Although Office users would point to the Macro Recorder, which (from experience) is used extensively by non-geeks (financial types etc) -- and Win 3.1's late, lamented Macro Recorder.
> (Expose) That is so wrong it's not even funny.
Oh, the taskbar can be irritating. As you said, shrunken icon syndrome (what I do about it is set the taskbar to 3X its normal height, that gives me extra room) but even that doesn't take away the fact that you can use muscle memory to go through it.
I do stand by what I said about the taskbar being more discoverable. Until you show a user the magic key for Expose, there's little chance he'll actually find the feature by himself (I guess that's where the close-knit Mac community helps).
(And oh, grouping the taskbar entries must be one of the worst ideas to come out of Microsoft in a *long* time. Completely destroys the spatial navigability the taskbar affords.)
> Binding to... what exactly?
Anything Windows can talk to. Incidentally, Windows has shipped with support for reading Jet databases (the format Access uses) out-of-the-box for many years, so you could use that. Many VB programmers did. Jet is now deprecated in favor of the SQL-Server 'lite' a.k.a MSDE, and from this year onwards SQL Server Express, but Windows will be able to connect to Jet databases for the forseeable future.
Not off by an order of magnitude per se, but I think you still have this a bit wrong... Core Image is at a lower level and mainly provides a nice library for quickly modifying images.
Core Image: the DirectX comparison may not be entirely valid in an API sense, however for the user the GDI+/DirectX combination gives equivalent features (esp since DirectX and GDI+ will, like Core Image/Core Video, take advantage of your present and future hardware assuming you've got drivers). This is why I said Core Image was comparable to DirectX.
Anyhow, API elegance aside, I fail to see how Core Image provides "an order of magnitude more usefulness to the user". Surely you don't expect Mac users to write their own Core Image code?
And Longhorn still won't have Dashboard, or Automator, or Core Data/Core Image, or Expose, or anything else that makes OS X great.
.NET)
Still won't, eh?
Automator:
VB/VBScript/VBA (look up SendKeys)
Windows Scripting Host since Windows 2000
Windows Management Instrumentation since Windows XP
Core Data: Databinding (available in VB6, MFC,
Core Image: DirectX (but main shell doesn't use it, which is sort of good because it keeps base OS video requirements down, and sort bad because Tiger gets cooler graphics)
Avalon (Longhorn)
Expose: definitely a plus for OSX simply because it looks cool, but Windows' taskbar is definitely HCI-wise superior (and renders an Expose-on-Windows unnecessary simply because it is _way_ more discoverable.
There, that's enough counter-groupthink for one day. Bring on the flames.
Microsoft no longer developes for the PC platform; hardware manufacturers develope for the Windows platform. ...Which is a cute statement, but the fact of the matter is that there is no "Windows" platform -- the platform is x86. Microsoft works with Intel and hardware vendors to produce specs for things like OnNow, UPnP etc but all of this benefit Linux/x86 as well (in fact, Intel is a major Linux booster at hardware conferences).
Because Apple is not a charity. They exist to make money (and make money they do, with overpriced machines and the regular OS X upgrade cycle), and to look at their stock price some investors clearly believe they'll make a lot of it.
/. as the lamers around here
If Apple makes OSX run on x86 two things will happen:
a) Mac sales will tank
b) OSX-dissing will begin big-time on
discover that an OS tested on a small variety of hardware will
not do well with the wide variety of rigs out there
Microsoft's recent way seems to be hiring what they consider "key" people from other, successful companies
Heh. Ironically Google's been doing this to Microsoft -- they've poached quite a few Microsofties recently: Mark Jen, Joe Beda, Adam Bosworth (via BEA), Mark Lucovsky...
Those are basically click-once managed-code apps that execute in a Sandbox.
Netscape was in the business of selling an app, namely a browser
... Netscape had not much of a developer story beyond NSAPI and even that was comparitively hard to use.
Netscape was in the business of selling a renderer (browser) for a public standard (HTML). There is IMHO something fundamentally wrong about selling software that interprets public standards-- Public standards are commodities, and it's probably a better job for charities like Mozilla.org, not for a for-profit company. Product companies _by definition_ make money by differentiating themselves from their competitors -- a fact Netscape knew well, hence TABLE and BLINK and Javascript. IE4 beat them at their own game, with a far more advanced DOM and numerous other features. Plus ca change: today Firefox is (slowly) doing the same to IE, although not as dramatically as IE4 did in NN4.
Also, Netscape itself seeded the market with its free browser, up to and including making Netscape 3 Gold available for free academic use. Most home users used 3 Gold anyway. The only people who probably paid for Netscape were corporate IT departments. In a way Netscape shot itself in the foot by creating the perception that browser == free. So when Microsoft introduced *it's* free browser (IE2 with NT4, IIRC) it was 'Yet Another Free Browser' for most people. It was -- for users -- free vs free, not Evil Empire vs Nascent Market. I remember this telling subhead (in PC World, IIRC) from back then: "Can Evian make money when Perrier is Free?"
As for selling web and other servers: Open-Source platforms quickly produced good-enough implementations of what were relatively straightforward RFCs: Apache, cyrus, Postfix. Incidentally MS still survives in the web-serving world by providing their custom development environments: asp/asp.net
But that's just the start, in principle they could bundle any application with their OS, why not throw in the Office suite, Image manipulation, and whatnot?
Sure, why not (remember what I said about modern OSes aggregating functionality?)
In fact -- XP already comes with _very_ basic picture manipulation capabilities, mostly slideshows. OSX comes with iPhoto and it's likely Longhorn will have something like it.
More tellingly, Microsoft today gives away Microsoft Works 7 with practically every copy of Windows sold with a new PC -- check dell.com if you wish. Why do you think they do that? (And oh-- Office suites are big, but not that big. I'm betting MS knows that Joe Public will find MS Works 7 quite satisfactory. And familiar interfaces count for a _lot_. OO.o will have trouble reaching numbers matching a quarter of pirated Office 2000 installations unless it bites the bullet and works like Office as much as possible.)
If they needed a PC-OS there was no real alternative to Windows to run the majority of applications, and Windows came with IE
I'd use the word 'monopoly' very carefully in a pure-software context, because software in many technical ways is so interchangeable, and yet in many non-technical ways not at all interchangeable. This dual nature of software makes one man's "choice" another man's "monopoly".
From my perspective, choice existed then and does now: Mac and Be then, Mac and Linux now. However, for a large class of users Windows still remains the only alternative because of other reasons: familiarity, availability of (often pirated) software, price (against Macs), driver support). That makes Windows a user-created de-facto monopoly**. I am not an economist but I would contend that in the absence of legislated standards (something that _kills_ progress btw, look no further than the W3C's latest work on XML and SOAP) OSes are _quasi-natural_ monopolies in their respective niches since users and IT departments tend to have a huge follow-the-herd mentality.
** Of course, one could argue that OEM licencing was a huge contributory factor in Windows' domination, and it is true MS had several vicious, unfair OEM deals. But you know what? Unfair deals happen all the time in business. In fact, the PC makers' willingness to put up with MS' contracts was a function of what they perceived as user demand. Windows' familiarity and availability created a sort of feedback loop that amplified the value of having a Windows PC.
And of course, anyone lucky enough to be making a dominant OS is going to rest on their laurels until a competitor comes along. My point is: solving this through antitrust was the wrong approach (and incidentally it solved nothing in the US and I'm not convinced it'll solve anything in Europe), Windows can be beaten fair and square just by being technically superior and using innovative business models: Open Source is a _great_ example.
Maybe it's just the libertarian in me, but I hate seeing spoilt-brat companies that survive on questionable business models (Sun -> sell pricey hardware, Netscape -> sell web servers and browsers, by golly, Real -> sell a decent streaming server completely hobbled by a horrible player) run crying 'antitrust' to BigGovMommy when they're in trouble.
The antitrust-criers have all uniformly demonstrated piss-poor business sense, and whatever happens to Microsoft, I'm glad the market has paid them back for it: Netscape-the-business's ashes have been scattered, Real's in the tank, and Sun got some big stock shocks before it came to its senses and realized that funnily enough business != badmouthing competitors.
> 30% to 35% Market share before IE4
IE3 had 30-35% market share? Wow. Care to back that up? -- IIRC Netscape 3 was _everywhere_ at the time.
And oh, about the 60MB IE install: that includes the Windows Shell Update that brought a web-ified shell to Win95 and NT _and_ updated the OS's widgets. The browser alone is 8.46MB against 9.73MB for Navigator 4.
> It's really straining reality to talk of a working market and "people voting with their wallets" here. Had Microsoft sold IE separately from Windows, with it's own pricetag, things would've been different.
But why should Microsoft sell IE separately? People voted with their wallets that a "web browser with an OS" is the way to go. Is there some divine law that mandates a profitable market for web browsers? (There used to be a profitable market for memory managers once, QuarterDeck made good money on it before Win95 killed that market. I don't recollect QuarterDeck crying 'antitrust'.) Who said selling web browsers has to be a business? It can be, of course; but _must be_?
Consumer OSes from DOS 1 to OS/2 OSX and XP show a clear trend of aggregating things that were normally thought of as separate products. OS/2 included a damn complete productivity suite comparable to Apple/MS Works. Linux distros ship with things like CD and DVD Burning software that compete very effectively with commercial offerings. (Of late XP has started doing so too.) Threfore, to claim that Microsoft cannot add stuff to its OS is rubbish.
Of course, as the OS vendor Microsoft has a responsibility to ensure that it doesn't hobble competitive products... for example *requiring* IE to open a link in the Add/Remove Programs dialog is wrong, and this is this behavior the antitrust lawsuit has fixed. If you expected Microsoft would be drawn and quartered for this, though, you don't quite have both feet on the ground.
> Windows had the ability to encode to mp3, so there was a way to do it without licensing.
Yes, and Windows XP still has the ability to do it: it uses the royalty-free Fraunhofer encoder which encodes only upto 56kbps. The fuss about Microsoft dropping _that_ from the XP beta was because they felt including an inferior codec wouldn't help anyone. Feedback said otherwise, and MP3 stayed.
And oh, if encoding in MP3 is _that_ important then Debian and Redhat out-of-the-box must be very poor OSes indeed: they have _no_ MP3 encoding support (because of patent reasons, but to a user that hardly matters).
but the success of IE over Netscape (at that time IE was a joke) shows that Microsoft knew to leverage their OS-monopoly to grab the browser market.
...) IE4 is an irrelevant little fact. What I'm saying is that monopoly or no, customers will seek out alternatives when the bundle comes with provides inferior features.
And of course the fact that NN4 was a piece of bloated shit compared to the much faster and feature-laden (Full Screen, autocomplete, DHTML,
As for the formats: AFAIR Microsoft did rip out the mp3-encoder in WinXP-beta.
Yeah. Encoder. A little thing you need to *record* MP3s. Because it was not royalty free. The *decoder* which lets you PLAY mp3s was always there. So since when does an OS addin have to let you record in a per-copy-shipped royalty format? Apple favors AAC just for this reason, why shouldn't Microsoft favor WMA?
As for the "overambitious Brussels bureaucrats": I think they're better than their US-counterpart that gave up a process they had already won because G.W. Bush wanted them to be friendly with his Buddy Bill. But maybe those underamitious bureucrats were just redefining how corrupt 'big government' can get, in true capitalistic tradition.
Sterling example of Slashdot discourse there. Maybe you could rewrite it more coherently, then it might even be worth responding to.
The entire point of Microsoft bundling IE and WMP with windows isn't to give their customers approximately what they want.
How do you know that?
Besides, 'giving customers what they want' is a simplification. If it were the literal truth, we'd be stuck even now with vi and ed, because customers do not always know what they want until they're shown an alternative. Companies put products out in the market and customers vote with their wallet. Things that get lots of 'votes' become things that in hindsight people 'want' -- GUIs and mice come to mind.
Microsoft integrated a browser deeply with the OS. Did people vote for it? The success of Win98 and later OSes says it did. Microsoft bundled a *good* media player with the OS. Again, people voted for it with their wallets.
And oh, for those screaming 'monopoly', Microsoft pushed their own proprietary email and AOL-style net access quite hard with Win95 -- it got almost no uptake. The paying public isn't stupid and it won't use a substandard product even when it comes bundled. OTOH when it's good enough and it comes bundled, it's a whole different story.
<rant>
There was no reason why a 50s OS would come with a text editor. There was no reason why a 70s OS would come with a mp3 player. Today there is no reason why an OS *shouldn't* come with one. Windows Media Player plays quite a few formats, including Microsoft's own. Windows doesn't refuse to play other formats: one can install Real/QT quite easily. The current EU action is nothing but needless pissing against the wind by a bunch of overambitious Brussels bureaucrats who in true Brussels tradition are redefining how big 'big government' can get.
</rant>