I think Corel was always looking for that "next big break" instead of accepting the idea that they could do well for themselves as a niche market player with a few useful, time-tested products.
Very well said.
I'd just like to reiterate again that I think that to their credit, many of these ideas Corel had held real promise. Their execution in terms of software technology was generally pretty good as well -- they weren't just cranking out junk code -- it held a certain quality of good design (from what I could see as an external observer). I just don't think their business execution was quite there. They didn't have a cohesive message for one. Microsoft was (and still is) about the Microsoft code stack. Symantec is about utilities. Adobe and Macromedia were about graphics and multimedia. Corel seemed to be trying to be too many things to too many people, without being able to somehow tie it all together (or if they did, they didn't do a good job of articulating that cohesion to the computing public at large). And for whatever reasons, they didn't seem to really be getting as much press as other major ccomputing companies. I think their marketing and PR were a bit off -- but maybe that's just my impression.
As to choices in graphic tools, there has been a lot of consolodation in this last year. Still, depending on what sort of graphics work you need to do there is still Maya, some of Apple's Pro tools, and some of Google's recent entries like Google SketchUp and Picasa, not to mention some of the excellent OSS programs like Gimp and Inkscape. Admittedly not all of these are ready for prime-time use in professional settings, and some of them are intended for special uses (most of Apple's Pro apps are more intended for film graphics than generting 2D printed output, for example), but it could mean that we are simply seeing a shift away from the old players, and that a lot of hungry companies are just waiting to bite at Adobe's heels (something that is somewhat easy to do at the moment, at least until Adobe finally gets its act in gear and releases some native Intel versions of their programs on OS X -- they're coverage of this important market is abysmal right now).
Actually, there's a bit of irony that Corel should end up being the 3rd owner of Wordperfect. Despite all the claims that MS fooled WordPerfect Corp into targeting OS/2 instead of Windows and took advantage of secret API's, Corel was able to create a great graphics program that ran on Windows working with the same limitations. So a company that had the vision to see the importance of Windows and a willingness to do the work necessary to make an application for it could succeed. Corel inhereted WordPerfect precisely because the orignal owners dropped the ball.
Well, in all fairness a word processor and a graphics package connect with the OS in vastly different ways. CorelDraw primarily needed a blank window it could blit to with its own custom drawing routines. WordPerfect needed to interface with the font drawing subsystems built into the OS.
That's not to say that I disagree with what you're saying -- MS certainly had an advantage, however it doesn't really excuse how poor the early versions of WordPerfect for Windows were for many users.
Wordperfect was the leading word processor and it was available on many platforms. The idea that they somehow had to choose between OS/2 and Windows is nonsense. They simply didn't want to do the Windows version so they did too little, too late.
I agree with the "too little, too late" part, but have to disagree with the choice part. I admittedly don't know how many developers WP Corp had at the time, but it is reasonable that they needed every developer to concentrate on such a big undertaking of moving their popular DOS based wordprocessor and creating native OS/2 and Windows versions. That is to say, it may have been a choice they had to make to do them serially instead of in parallel due to a lack of resources on their end to develop both at the same time. As well, GUI programming (nevermind both Windows and OS/2 programming) would have been new to many of their developers, so there would have been a big learning curve -- new memory management techniques, new font subsystems, GUI APIs, OS APIs, print subsystems to interface with, etc. This was new stuff to a lot of developers of the day, and a lot of companies were struggling to move from the text console era to the GUI era (outside the Mac and Unix worlds, at least, which by the late 80's and early 90's weren't where the big money for desktop apps were).
I also don't doubt there was a certain attitude of them being the then market leader, and the feeling they could do no wrong, and could just rest on their laurels and rake in the upgrade dollars. That doesn't seem to breed long-term success in this industry.
WordPerfect's first version for Windows was really bad. I heard that Microsoft gave them wrong information and that messed them up because they developed for NT and not 3.1. They also had the problem that their function keys were different than those of other Windows apps. For instance 'Help' was F3.
The key bindings issue is easy to explain -- they wanted to retain what their DOS users already knew. Part of the idea of WordPerfect for Windows (and WordPerfect for OS/2) was that little to no retraining would be necessary to move from the DOS version up to one of the GUI versions -- all of the keystrokes and keyboard templates users already had would continue to work. This was important, because there were some big professional areas that used WordPerfect heavily, including the legal profession. Secretaries were heavily trained in WordPerfect, and it was the only wordprocessor many of them knew. If WordPerfect Corp. (and later Novell) simply re-wrote it to do things "The Windows Way", Microsoft in a sense would already have them beat.
Not that Microsoft had to try very hard. Let's face it -- at the time of the WordPerfect transition, not a lot of companies had experience with GUI development. I don't know what happened inside WP/Novell, but the GUIs for the first WordPerfect for Windows and OS/2 were pretty bad from what I remember. And they were buggy as well. Many of those people who were so heavily invested in WordPerfect that they wouldn't switch to anything else continued to use the DOS version. I knew people who were still using WP 4.2 all the way into the mid-to-late 90's, because it had all of their templates, and was what they knew. However, by then they were a minority -- most other people had switched to MS Office, and suddenly it was the package that the average secretary was well versed in, and expected to be installed on their computers for them.
And as you say, Microsoft used underhanded methods as well. They have been known to use secret, undocumented Windows APIs to get a leg-up on the competition and provide better overall integration into the Windows experience. And I'm sure there were many corporations who enjoyed both cost discounts for bulk-liscensing Office at the same time as Windows for all their systems, while at the same time having a single source of support (and a single contact to bitch at when things don't work right) for both packages. Plus, of course, there is the situation where WordPerfect (and later Novell) didn't develop a spreadsheet program or basic database system, ala Excel and Access -- if you needed such functionality, you had to source it from elsewhere.
In essence, looking back WordPerfect got caught up in a perfect storm, and itself has become the OS/2 of word processing packages.
Corel's problem was that it lost pretty much all focus somewhere around the mid 1990's. Their strength was with CorelDraw, but by the mid 1990's they were trying to sell a mini Linux computer called the NetWinder (I remember playing with one of the developer units -- they were actually pretty slick little machines, which IMO weren't matched until Apple released the Mac mini), bought out WordPerfect, tried their hand at a pure Java Office Suite, and tried their hand at their own Linux distro. In effect, they had no sense of cohesion -- they seemed to be trying their hand at any crazy project that came around.
Linux wasn't the problem. Linux just happened to be one of the many things they played with during this time. At the same time, they let their original core business stagnate, allowing other competitors in the graphic software business to catch up and surpass them while they wasted resources on all of these other projects.
Part of the "problem" to my mind was Corel's original intent: to be Michael Cowpland own personal research labs ("Corel" == "Cowpland Research Lab"). From a technology standpoint I have to applaud them for the things they tried to do -- the Java Office suite wasn't as bad as many people made it out to be (the beta generally ran well on my OS/2 box at the time), and could have been a vehicle which could have (and I suspect did) push improvements in Java's areas of deficiency at the time. The NetWinder was a really slick and ultra-portable Linux computer that ran on an ARM processor (we had one of the development units at an ISP I worked at in the mid 90's that we were thinking of selling as co-located servers; sound familiar?). Their Linux distro was decent and capable. But in the end they spread themselves too far, and couldn't really find (or build) markets for these products. Their core business got chewed up by the likes of Adobe, Microsoft already had a lock on the Office and OS segments, and in the end only hobbiests were interested in an ARM-based Linux computer that had limited natively compiled software available for it (you often had to build the software you wanted to run that wasn't included with the system yourself, at least in the early days -- great for hobbiests and techies, but not exactly a recipe for mass-market appeal. However, I am still of the opinion that the NetWinders failure was really that the concept was ahead of its time). And a Java-based Office suite didn't interest much of anyone from a commercial perspective (although many of the parties involved in the push towards thin clients were very interested in the outcome of code of this sort, and I personally think that it's only a matter of time, although in the end AJAX may be a better solution than Java (ref: Google Spreadsheets)).
Linux just happened to be one of Corel's targets. I don't think Linux itself had anything to do with Corel's problems -- it just happened to be one of the things that distracted them from their core business, and never did in any way that earned them any real market distinctions. Corel's problem was a lack of focus and spreading themselves way too thin while virtually ignoring what made their mark on the industry in the first place, allowing their competition to surpass them.
Whew -- and here I was worried that I was missing some big inside joke:). Thanks for coming clean on it and fixing it up.
And I think you've hit on it wrt the non-denial response from Microsoft.
I suppose if one really thinks about it it's just another form of the same weapon Microsoft has been cudgeling users with for ages: FUD. After all, it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has promised features that it never intended to ship -- the funny thing being that they usually use this to stall users from buying a competitors product, and not to scare them into buying the current version of their product.
It was bad business then, and it's bad business now. Maybe karma will finally give them the smack-down they've been deserving for a long, long time now.
Yaz
(Yes, I'm an OS/2 refugee. We know more about MS-FUD tactics and their effects than anybody else).
Does the submitter have a special stutter that only activates itself when they try to type the word "people"?
Okay, on topic, and beyond what was already in the story text -- what mechanism do people propose Microsoft will use to "turn off" all of those Windows XP systems? Do people think they have some secret code they can send all over the world via multicast, that will tunnel through every firewall in the world to disable copies of Windows XP that they think might not be legit (or which don't have WGA installed)? Does XP "phone home" to see if it should be run every time it is booted up? What about XP machines that aren't even on a network? How will Microsoft disable XP on those systems?
Now I don't put it past Microsoft to want to do something like this, or their desire to force WGA on to every Windows user out there. However, I do question their ability to actually shut down Windows machines that aren't running WGA. I can see them denying them patches and updates. But actually shutting down XP machines? That would require either that:
XP already has code to "phone home" built into it, and can either disable itself based on the response, or run whatever code is sent to it without the users permission, or
Microsoft will bundle such functionality into an otherwise innocuous appearing "security update".
And even in these two cases, either a simple firewall that blocks access the microsoft.com domains or simply not downloading the update in question would seem to solve the problem rather quickly.
Personally, I'm glad I run OS X and Linux machines and don't have to worry about such threats, but I really don't see how MS can effect such a threat. I am surprised that MS isn't trying to fight the bad press they're getting on this, however perhaps they think that the threat alone will be enough to get people who are using unlicensed copies of Windows to fork out the money for a properly registered copy, as I don't see any good technical way in which they can carry out this threat that even a semi-savvy user could easily work around (or avoid altogether).
Why does a text article require flashplayer 8 to view it? It's a waste of bandwidth, waste of CPU and cutting down on this site's potential market.
Because it's not text, it's video. And if that weren't bad enough, every 5 seconds or so it decides to pause the video to buffer some more. I don't know if it's my Internet connection tonight (which has been slow and flakey at times for no apparant reason), or if the site is being/.'ed, but either way the video player has some serious issues with its buffering time heuristic.
In the end, it just isn't worth it. Trust me, you're not missing a thing.
On the other hand, they can both easily store surround sound. An Audio CD could as well, of course, but then it's not really a red book (is that the one?) Audio CD anymore.
That isn't strictly true, although it does depend no what you consider "surround sound". While currently unused, Red Book does permit four channel audio formats. As well, Dolby Pro Logic can be encoded into the standard two channel Red Book format without violating the specification.
So if you're referring to discrete 5.1 surround, you are correct -- however, there are different types of surround sound, at least two of which can be encoded on to Red Book CDs.
HD-DVD (or BlueRay) over DVD might not be as particular a jump. It does have higher resolution, of course, but it doesn't specify anything with regards to possible higher framerates or even better encoding
Actually, both standards can handle H.264 video, which is a signficantly better encoding standard than MPEG-2. Depending on what profile is used for the encoding, it is possible to specify much higher colour fidelity.
This isn't to say I disagree with your overall argument, however. I'm not so sure that the quality differences are going to be sufficiently significant to the average viewer (which would include myself) to matter. As I've stated in other articules on this subject, I'm personally more interested in these formats (BlueRay in particular) for data storage than for video.
His music is basically hacked from the original artist with the words changed.
Have you ever actually bought a Weird Al CD/cassette/LP? I'll admit to having a few from many years ago, and even in his early days only a few songs on each album were comedic remakes of existing songs. I have here "Weird Al in 3D" from 1984 (his second album), and out of 11 songs in total, only 5 are in fact full parodies of existing songs, and one is one of his popular polkas made up from bits of a number of songs. That leaves 5 songs which are pure Weird Al originals.
The same is true of all his other albums -- often with the ratio skewed more towards the originals. In general, however, it is only the parodies which are the ones most people talk about or hear on the radio, or maybe see the music video for (as I don't think he makes videos for too many of his non-parody songs).
Put a giant magnetic/EMP field through all the entrances to the buildings. Anything capable of storing data will be wiped and/or fried before it makes it in.
Really? How do magnets destroy data stored on CDs, DVDs, and other optical media?
You needn't expect any network outages above and beyond the standard switch, AP, and WLAN card failure rate.
Well, that is unless you get a lot of noise inside the 2.4Ghz band, either inadvertantly or on purpose from a malicious entity. 2.4Ghz cordless phones are notorious for using way too much of the spectrum, and polluting it with all sorts of traffic that interferes with WiFi 802.11b/g signals. Plus there is always to possibility of an attacker simply injecting all sorts of high-powered noise in the 2.4Ghz band, across all channels, jamming your WiFi, and bringing your whole network down.
On my home WiFi LAN, running WPA2, I get nightly outages when someone in one of the apartments around me uses their crummy old 2.4Ghz cordless phone (which is my all of my important machines are still using a wired connection). The hardware hasn't failed, but the network still goes down until they are finished with their conversation and hang up. If you're in a building with multiple businesses (like an office tower), you can't control what wireless devices the person in the next office is using, and unless you're willing to invest in repainting with a paint that in essence creates a Faraday cage, there is little you can do about the resulting network outages these devices will cause (other than, of course, running cable to each system).
Additionally, because of the overlapping nature of the 802.11 channels, and the leaving-much-to-be-desired spectral filters in most 802.11 stations, when any one user is transferring a large file and maxes out their channel x, expect all the users on channel x-1, x, and x+1 to experience sluggish performance. Given at least 7 hosts per channel, and at least 2-3 channels affected per burst, any burst large traffic will impact no fewer than 21 users on the network.
It should also be mentioned here that 802.11b client connections will also automatically slow things down for all users. You can, of course, simply disallow 802.11b connections, but there are still a lot of portable and handheld devices which use this standard due to the lower power requirements. If you have such devices within your enterprise and expect to be able to use them, 802.11b will be necessary -- and each time one of those devices connects, the network is going to slow down for all users connected to that access point.
WiFi has a lot of excellent uses, but IMO it shouldn't be used as a solution to avoid cabling desk-bound systems within a corporate setting. Machines which aren't mobile will get better performance from a wired connection, and can't be jammed via someone with a home-made 2.4Ghz noise generator or cordless telephone.
Yaz.
Re:How to make sure your data is not readable
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Online Revenge
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· Score: 1
Writing random data several times is a better method, but is most be done over the entire
hard drive and in sevral passes over the entire hard drive,
since modern harddrives have a cache mecahnism(as well as one in the OS), so If
some one writes over the first sector of a hard drive 20 times, chances are the hard drive
actually got something physiclly written to it only once.
Any properly written secure erase application will be sure to set the cache write-through flag so that this does happen. AFAIK, all modern hard drives and OS's support a flag to bypass all hardware and software disk caches for just this sort of reason.
I dimly remember such claims when the first CDs came out, including Darryl Sommers jumping all over one whilst remarking how such acting wouldn't effect the ability to play it at all. Oh, those were the days - when the public believed such marketing hype.
Well, CDs and DVDs actually have a few fault tolerant properties to them, not all of which are related to the physical material. CDs have a certain amount of data redundancy and error coding available on them, which can help for music. Besides which, if your ear misses 1/44100th of a second of audio, are you really going to notice? DVDs and computer data, on the other hand, are highly susceptible to single bit errors, so we notice them more readily than we do on audio-only CDs.
Otherwise, I agree. My two young nieces lived with me for a few years, and I know how kids can munge up discs (which is why we had a "you're not allowed to touch the discs" policy -- discs were stored where little girl fingers couldn't get to them, and they had to ask an adult if they wanted to watch a movie). It is with young children that the claims of this new coating material will be put to the test, and I too remain somewhat skeptical until I've seen their durability in real-life usage.
The judgement I'm making is between a piece of free software that works as well and does more than a non free one that costs lots of money and significantly restricts the rights and ability of the end user. iTunes, for what it costs, should be held to a much higher standard of performance.
iTunes is free. You can go and download it now from http://www.apple.com/itunes, without spending a single penny to Apple. iTunes works with MP3s, protected and unprotected AAC audio, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, and Audible Audiobook audio formats (and several video formats as well). Only one of which has the option of having DRM applied to it. Don't like DRM? Neither do I! iTunes doesn't force any DRM upon you -- if you don't want to own Protected AACs, don't buy them. Get your music from the same unprotected sources you're getting them for Amarok.
You continue to make claims that Amarok "does more" that a piece of software you've never used, which you judge purely from hearing about it from people who can't even figure out how to use a single mouse click to sort music.
You, sir, are an idiot. I personally don't care one whit if you prefer Amarok over iTunes -- that's fine with me. But don't pretend to know what you're talking about when you haven't even used one of the two software packages in question.
Shall we tally your current score? You have claimed that:
iTunes can't sort by artist or album title (FALSE)
iTunes "costs a lot of money" (FALSE)
iTunes "significantly restricts the rights and ability of the end user" (FALSE)
You've never used iTunes (TRUE)
Well, you got one point, but it too just makes you look like an idiot who is spouting FUD. Care to continue along this vein?
CDs and DVDs aren't robust enough in the real world to be used as a reliable backup mechanism, nor will HD or BlueRay. After a couple of uses they are scratched and covered in fingerprints no matter how careful you are.
BlueRay discs at least use a new coating called Durabis which the manufacturer (TDK) claims will stand up to a screwdriver. I'm a bit skeptical, but the claims are that the material consists of both significantly improved scratch resistence and protection from stains and oils.
As such, judging the new media based on existing media may not be valid. We'll have to wait and see. It is worth noting that Durabis can be used on CDs and DVDs as well -- hopefully we'll eventually see some (and at reasonable prices) so that a longetivity comparison can be done between them.
No, I can tell when my physics and engineering graduate student peers are being morons, but thanks for asking.
Care to know where I am right now? I'm sitting in an office at a major University acting as a consultant to both graduate and undergraduate students who are in the faculties of computer science and software engineering, and I get a steady stream of such dumb questions. And these are from people in programs who should know better (and I'm sorry to have to say this, but I dated a physics grad student for a time, and I have to say that outside the arena of partical physics and math where she was an absolute wizard, she wasn't exactly the brightest bunny in the bunch). Hell, just today I taught a S.Eng student about tab completion in Linux bash shell!
Sorry, but software doesn't read minds. And while I'm a huge proponent of HCI, in the end it is impossible to create a single buttons that says "Do what I want", and expect it to do anything and everything you want to do. At some point, there has to be a certain amount of user education and experimentation. iTunes encourages experimentation by its design, but there are people out there who don't even think to try. It doesn't help for the completely clueless that iTunes can be deciptively simple at times -- I've had more than one actual iTunes user ask me about sorting their Library by artist or album who expected they would have to go through three menus and seven preference panels to set this up, when all you have to do is click on the heading you want to sort by.
Amarok does, out of the box.
I've tried both, and sorry, you're simply wrong. You're making a judgement value on a piece of software you've admittedly never used, based on you having spoke with clueless people who don't even know that you can sort a list by the criteria you want in only a single mouse click. That just doesn't fly around here.
No I have not used iTunes. My information comes from an annoyed user who wanted to collapse the tree. Other users have told me about other problems.
So, in which case, is it not possible that these nebulous "other problems" are not due to iTunes itself, but due to a fault with the user?
If such is the case, you should state that before you start claiming iTunes faults as facts. So far as you're aware, iTunes could be faultless, and you've just been hearing the complaints of clueless users who don't know the simplest of GUI control basics, or how to use the built-in Help subsystem.
That's right, nothing. (Okay, somewone will post another reason to upgrade in a second or two, just to prove me wrong. Bastards.:-) ).
Sorry in advance, but...
I think the sphere where one or the other (or both) will really take off is in computing devices. True, there are still a lot of people out there who don't even have DVD burners (nevermind dual layer DVD burners), but I can see the need for very large offline storage capacity by computer users ensuring that one or both of these standards does indeed take off. Who wouldn't want a single disc that can store up to 200GB of data (which, according to WikiPedia is the current maximum achieved thus far -- whether or not such discs will be available to the general public anytime soon at a reasonable price is anyones guess)?
We'll quickly get to a point where a variety of device types will be manufactured and released that use either standard -- computer optical drives, game consoles, video players -- and it only takes one of these to really take off for the others to follow (as there is a certain cost savings and end-user convienence in the long run to have all of these devices using compatible storage technologies). Indeed, assuming production of the 405nm blue-violet lasers really ramps up, we may get to a point where the red lasers needed for DVDs and CDs is actually more expensive to manufacture, at which point people needing to replace older equipment will simply go with the newer standard (particularly if the units in question are backward compatible, or in situations where backwards compatibility is unnecessary).
I personally don't care about BlueRay or HD-DVD for video at this point -- I have a very nice Standard-Def TV, and don't really have the spare cash laying around to replace it with an HD unit. I likewise don't currently care about them for gaming -- my PS2 still works just fine, and has a ton of really good games I haven't finished exploring as it is (as I rarely have time to sit down and play much of anything as it is). However, being able to dump 25GB (or more) of data to a single optical disc on my computer does appeal to me quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to the day when Apple starts including BlueRay drives in their MacBooks (hopefully that day will come before the next time I need to upgrade my system:) ).
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
Uh, try clicking on the "Artist" column heading (or "Album" if you prefer).
That said, unless you attach an external battery pack, it's unsuitable for camping out in the wilderness.
That may not be completely true. You can in fact buy portable, foldable solar panels for recharging portable devices like the iPod, which are suitable for backpacking -- you can drape the foldable panels down the back of your pack, plug everything in, and let your iPod charge.
However, having just returned from a several day hike along the Juan de Fuca trail, I agree with you -- leave everything but the emergency electronics at home, and just enjoy nature. My iPod stayed home.
I think this concern is outdated. Now that Microsoft have.NET they are hardly likely to put much effort into Java.
I continue to disagree. Microsoft would simply co-opt the OSS Java code into the.NET framework.
They may be concentrating on.NET, but that doesn't mean they don't have an interest in driving people away from Java and into the.NET fold. Such a move could achieve both -- merge OSS Java into.NET, push MS-only developers into using it and pushing it at everyone else, and suddenly mainline Java is forced to accept Microsoft modifications. Before long, OSS Java is simply a shim into.NET, and Java becomes meaningless.
The code isn't going to fork itself. If Sun is doing a reasonable job maintaining the source code, they don't have much to fear from a fork.
That presumes that there isn't an 800lbs. gorilla sitting in the next room just plotting to catch you unaware and clobber you.
In the current OSS world, there is a sort of agreed upon level of friendliness between projects. Projects may compete, but they also cooperate, and everyone is more focussed on creating the best project they can, and not just trying to kill off the other guy.
Microsoft, however, is a business -- and their business has always been to kill off (or buy out) their competition. Playing fair doesn't figure into the equation. They control the platform that 90+% of users are running on their desks, and they control a LOT of developers, both inside and outside Microsoft (and we've all met the type -- the developer who is so sold on using all Microsoft technologies, they'll use a poor solution and write 200 lines of code to do what you could do in 6 lines of code in another, non-MS environment, just because their solution is based on Microsoft technologies).
So how is this for a scenario: Microsoft comes out with a new release of Visual J++.NET based on Open Source Java, but changes the bytecode generated subtly to make it incompatible with other JVMs (or, perhaps worse, decides to add a few of their own keywords to the language, and ties them directly into Windows-specific APIs). They don't call it Java -- they call it "Visual J++.NET", however the pro-Microsoft developer probably already associates "J++" with (what they think of as) "Java", and decides to use it for all of their Java development.
Suddenly the Java world is flooded with code that only works on MS VMs. Microsoft winds up controlling a huge percentage of the Java developers of the world, and can start dictating the Java APIs and features developers use (as they can just start sticking whatever they want into their implementation, and as they have a huge army of 3rd party developers who will start using these features, the rest of the Java world has a choice: either implement the new MS features into the VMs on other platforms, or try to maintain Java purity and lock themselves out of a lot of applications developed on Windows, and create confusion for end-users by requiring them to have two competing VMs installed on their systems).
MS could also start bundling their modified VM with each and every Windows machine. When a desktop user encounters a "pure" Java application that they can't run, they'll either demand from developers versions of these applications which are specifically designed for the MS VM, or simply won't use these applications. This will be especially bad for things like applets and Java WebStart.
I can see all sorts of ways this could be bad for Java (and Sun). Unfortunately, Sun can't maintain the status quo either: they're losing ground in the Windows world (and it could be argued they never had a lot to begin with: while I'm sure there are a lot of Java developers on Windows, outside of some server-side stuff there really isn't a lot to like about actually running Java applications on Windows), and need the Open Source Linux world no their side in a big way. Sun would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that there are so many developers out there sold so completely on the "One Microsoft Way" when it comes to development tools and environments -- Microsoft has a stranglehold on a lot of devs out there, and those devs don't care about MS's dirty tactics so long as they have a huge captive audience to sell solutions to.
Slashdot Mirror
Have MS file for bankrupcy, and see it through?
Or is that the answer to "How do we cause the biggest party on /. ever?".
I'll have to think that over...
Yaz.
Very well said.
I'd just like to reiterate again that I think that to their credit, many of these ideas Corel had held real promise. Their execution in terms of software technology was generally pretty good as well -- they weren't just cranking out junk code -- it held a certain quality of good design (from what I could see as an external observer). I just don't think their business execution was quite there. They didn't have a cohesive message for one. Microsoft was (and still is) about the Microsoft code stack. Symantec is about utilities. Adobe and Macromedia were about graphics and multimedia. Corel seemed to be trying to be too many things to too many people, without being able to somehow tie it all together (or if they did, they didn't do a good job of articulating that cohesion to the computing public at large). And for whatever reasons, they didn't seem to really be getting as much press as other major ccomputing companies. I think their marketing and PR were a bit off -- but maybe that's just my impression.
As to choices in graphic tools, there has been a lot of consolodation in this last year. Still, depending on what sort of graphics work you need to do there is still Maya, some of Apple's Pro tools, and some of Google's recent entries like Google SketchUp and Picasa, not to mention some of the excellent OSS programs like Gimp and Inkscape. Admittedly not all of these are ready for prime-time use in professional settings, and some of them are intended for special uses (most of Apple's Pro apps are more intended for film graphics than generting 2D printed output, for example), but it could mean that we are simply seeing a shift away from the old players, and that a lot of hungry companies are just waiting to bite at Adobe's heels (something that is somewhat easy to do at the moment, at least until Adobe finally gets its act in gear and releases some native Intel versions of their programs on OS X -- they're coverage of this important market is abysmal right now).
Yaz.
Well, in all fairness a word processor and a graphics package connect with the OS in vastly different ways. CorelDraw primarily needed a blank window it could blit to with its own custom drawing routines. WordPerfect needed to interface with the font drawing subsystems built into the OS.
That's not to say that I disagree with what you're saying -- MS certainly had an advantage, however it doesn't really excuse how poor the early versions of WordPerfect for Windows were for many users.
I agree with the "too little, too late" part, but have to disagree with the choice part. I admittedly don't know how many developers WP Corp had at the time, but it is reasonable that they needed every developer to concentrate on such a big undertaking of moving their popular DOS based wordprocessor and creating native OS/2 and Windows versions. That is to say, it may have been a choice they had to make to do them serially instead of in parallel due to a lack of resources on their end to develop both at the same time. As well, GUI programming (nevermind both Windows and OS/2 programming) would have been new to many of their developers, so there would have been a big learning curve -- new memory management techniques, new font subsystems, GUI APIs, OS APIs, print subsystems to interface with, etc. This was new stuff to a lot of developers of the day, and a lot of companies were struggling to move from the text console era to the GUI era (outside the Mac and Unix worlds, at least, which by the late 80's and early 90's weren't where the big money for desktop apps were).
I also don't doubt there was a certain attitude of them being the then market leader, and the feeling they could do no wrong, and could just rest on their laurels and rake in the upgrade dollars. That doesn't seem to breed long-term success in this industry.
Yaz.
The key bindings issue is easy to explain -- they wanted to retain what their DOS users already knew. Part of the idea of WordPerfect for Windows (and WordPerfect for OS/2) was that little to no retraining would be necessary to move from the DOS version up to one of the GUI versions -- all of the keystrokes and keyboard templates users already had would continue to work. This was important, because there were some big professional areas that used WordPerfect heavily, including the legal profession. Secretaries were heavily trained in WordPerfect, and it was the only wordprocessor many of them knew. If WordPerfect Corp. (and later Novell) simply re-wrote it to do things "The Windows Way", Microsoft in a sense would already have them beat.
Not that Microsoft had to try very hard. Let's face it -- at the time of the WordPerfect transition, not a lot of companies had experience with GUI development. I don't know what happened inside WP/Novell, but the GUIs for the first WordPerfect for Windows and OS/2 were pretty bad from what I remember. And they were buggy as well. Many of those people who were so heavily invested in WordPerfect that they wouldn't switch to anything else continued to use the DOS version. I knew people who were still using WP 4.2 all the way into the mid-to-late 90's, because it had all of their templates, and was what they knew. However, by then they were a minority -- most other people had switched to MS Office, and suddenly it was the package that the average secretary was well versed in, and expected to be installed on their computers for them.
And as you say, Microsoft used underhanded methods as well. They have been known to use secret, undocumented Windows APIs to get a leg-up on the competition and provide better overall integration into the Windows experience. And I'm sure there were many corporations who enjoyed both cost discounts for bulk-liscensing Office at the same time as Windows for all their systems, while at the same time having a single source of support (and a single contact to bitch at when things don't work right) for both packages. Plus, of course, there is the situation where WordPerfect (and later Novell) didn't develop a spreadsheet program or basic database system, ala Excel and Access -- if you needed such functionality, you had to source it from elsewhere.
In essence, looking back WordPerfect got caught up in a perfect storm, and itself has become the OS/2 of word processing packages.
Yaz.
Corel's problem was that it lost pretty much all focus somewhere around the mid 1990's. Their strength was with CorelDraw, but by the mid 1990's they were trying to sell a mini Linux computer called the NetWinder (I remember playing with one of the developer units -- they were actually pretty slick little machines, which IMO weren't matched until Apple released the Mac mini), bought out WordPerfect, tried their hand at a pure Java Office Suite, and tried their hand at their own Linux distro. In effect, they had no sense of cohesion -- they seemed to be trying their hand at any crazy project that came around.
Linux wasn't the problem. Linux just happened to be one of the many things they played with during this time. At the same time, they let their original core business stagnate, allowing other competitors in the graphic software business to catch up and surpass them while they wasted resources on all of these other projects.
Part of the "problem" to my mind was Corel's original intent: to be Michael Cowpland own personal research labs ("Corel" == "Cowpland Research Lab"). From a technology standpoint I have to applaud them for the things they tried to do -- the Java Office suite wasn't as bad as many people made it out to be (the beta generally ran well on my OS/2 box at the time), and could have been a vehicle which could have (and I suspect did) push improvements in Java's areas of deficiency at the time. The NetWinder was a really slick and ultra-portable Linux computer that ran on an ARM processor (we had one of the development units at an ISP I worked at in the mid 90's that we were thinking of selling as co-located servers; sound familiar?). Their Linux distro was decent and capable. But in the end they spread themselves too far, and couldn't really find (or build) markets for these products. Their core business got chewed up by the likes of Adobe, Microsoft already had a lock on the Office and OS segments, and in the end only hobbiests were interested in an ARM-based Linux computer that had limited natively compiled software available for it (you often had to build the software you wanted to run that wasn't included with the system yourself, at least in the early days -- great for hobbiests and techies, but not exactly a recipe for mass-market appeal. However, I am still of the opinion that the NetWinders failure was really that the concept was ahead of its time). And a Java-based Office suite didn't interest much of anyone from a commercial perspective (although many of the parties involved in the push towards thin clients were very interested in the outcome of code of this sort, and I personally think that it's only a matter of time, although in the end AJAX may be a better solution than Java (ref: Google Spreadsheets)).
Linux just happened to be one of Corel's targets. I don't think Linux itself had anything to do with Corel's problems -- it just happened to be one of the things that distracted them from their core business, and never did in any way that earned them any real market distinctions. Corel's problem was a lack of focus and spreading themselves way too thin while virtually ignoring what made their mark on the industry in the first place, allowing their competition to surpass them.
Yaz.
Whew -- and here I was worried that I was missing some big inside joke :). Thanks for coming clean on it and fixing it up.
I suppose if one really thinks about it it's just another form of the same weapon Microsoft has been cudgeling users with for ages: FUD. After all, it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft has promised features that it never intended to ship -- the funny thing being that they usually use this to stall users from buying a competitors product, and not to scare them into buying the current version of their product.
It was bad business then, and it's bad business now. Maybe karma will finally give them the smack-down they've been deserving for a long, long time now.
Yaz
(Yes, I'm an OS/2 refugee. We know more about MS-FUD tactics and their effects than anybody else).
Does the submitter have a special stutter that only activates itself when they try to type the word "people"?
Okay, on topic, and beyond what was already in the story text -- what mechanism do people propose Microsoft will use to "turn off" all of those Windows XP systems? Do people think they have some secret code they can send all over the world via multicast, that will tunnel through every firewall in the world to disable copies of Windows XP that they think might not be legit (or which don't have WGA installed)? Does XP "phone home" to see if it should be run every time it is booted up? What about XP machines that aren't even on a network? How will Microsoft disable XP on those systems?
Now I don't put it past Microsoft to want to do something like this, or their desire to force WGA on to every Windows user out there. However, I do question their ability to actually shut down Windows machines that aren't running WGA. I can see them denying them patches and updates. But actually shutting down XP machines? That would require either that:
And even in these two cases, either a simple firewall that blocks access the microsoft.com domains or simply not downloading the update in question would seem to solve the problem rather quickly.
Personally, I'm glad I run OS X and Linux machines and don't have to worry about such threats, but I really don't see how MS can effect such a threat. I am surprised that MS isn't trying to fight the bad press they're getting on this, however perhaps they think that the threat alone will be enough to get people who are using unlicensed copies of Windows to fork out the money for a properly registered copy, as I don't see any good technical way in which they can carry out this threat that even a semi-savvy user could easily work around (or avoid altogether).
Yaz.
Because it's not text, it's video. And if that weren't bad enough, every 5 seconds or so it decides to pause the video to buffer some more. I don't know if it's my Internet connection tonight (which has been slow and flakey at times for no apparant reason), or if the site is being /.'ed, but either way the video player has some serious issues with its buffering time heuristic.
In the end, it just isn't worth it. Trust me, you're not missing a thing.
Yaz.
That isn't strictly true, although it does depend no what you consider "surround sound". While currently unused, Red Book does permit four channel audio formats. As well, Dolby Pro Logic can be encoded into the standard two channel Red Book format without violating the specification.
So if you're referring to discrete 5.1 surround, you are correct -- however, there are different types of surround sound, at least two of which can be encoded on to Red Book CDs.
Actually, both standards can handle H.264 video, which is a signficantly better encoding standard than MPEG-2. Depending on what profile is used for the encoding, it is possible to specify much higher colour fidelity.
This isn't to say I disagree with your overall argument, however. I'm not so sure that the quality differences are going to be sufficiently significant to the average viewer (which would include myself) to matter. As I've stated in other articules on this subject, I'm personally more interested in these formats (BlueRay in particular) for data storage than for video.
Yaz.
Actually, I just checked, and .Mac currently maxes out at 4GB of storage.
It's possible this still isn't enough for your needs, but in case it is, I thought a correction was in order.
Yaz.
Have you ever actually bought a Weird Al CD/cassette/LP? I'll admit to having a few from many years ago, and even in his early days only a few songs on each album were comedic remakes of existing songs. I have here "Weird Al in 3D" from 1984 (his second album), and out of 11 songs in total, only 5 are in fact full parodies of existing songs, and one is one of his popular polkas made up from bits of a number of songs. That leaves 5 songs which are pure Weird Al originals.
The same is true of all his other albums -- often with the ratio skewed more towards the originals. In general, however, it is only the parodies which are the ones most people talk about or hear on the radio, or maybe see the music video for (as I don't think he makes videos for too many of his non-parody songs).
Yaz.
Really? How do magnets destroy data stored on CDs, DVDs, and other optical media?
Yaz.
Well, that is unless you get a lot of noise inside the 2.4Ghz band, either inadvertantly or on purpose from a malicious entity. 2.4Ghz cordless phones are notorious for using way too much of the spectrum, and polluting it with all sorts of traffic that interferes with WiFi 802.11b/g signals. Plus there is always to possibility of an attacker simply injecting all sorts of high-powered noise in the 2.4Ghz band, across all channels, jamming your WiFi, and bringing your whole network down.
On my home WiFi LAN, running WPA2, I get nightly outages when someone in one of the apartments around me uses their crummy old 2.4Ghz cordless phone (which is my all of my important machines are still using a wired connection). The hardware hasn't failed, but the network still goes down until they are finished with their conversation and hang up. If you're in a building with multiple businesses (like an office tower), you can't control what wireless devices the person in the next office is using, and unless you're willing to invest in repainting with a paint that in essence creates a Faraday cage, there is little you can do about the resulting network outages these devices will cause (other than, of course, running cable to each system).
It should also be mentioned here that 802.11b client connections will also automatically slow things down for all users. You can, of course, simply disallow 802.11b connections, but there are still a lot of portable and handheld devices which use this standard due to the lower power requirements. If you have such devices within your enterprise and expect to be able to use them, 802.11b will be necessary -- and each time one of those devices connects, the network is going to slow down for all users connected to that access point.
WiFi has a lot of excellent uses, but IMO it shouldn't be used as a solution to avoid cabling desk-bound systems within a corporate setting. Machines which aren't mobile will get better performance from a wired connection, and can't be jammed via someone with a home-made 2.4Ghz noise generator or cordless telephone.
Yaz.
Any properly written secure erase application will be sure to set the cache write-through flag so that this does happen. AFAIK, all modern hard drives and OS's support a flag to bypass all hardware and software disk caches for just this sort of reason.
Yaz.
I think you misread what I said:
...which was intended to imply that "reasonable price" was an important part of the equation. Sorry if this wasn't clear.
Yaz.
Well, CDs and DVDs actually have a few fault tolerant properties to them, not all of which are related to the physical material. CDs have a certain amount of data redundancy and error coding available on them, which can help for music. Besides which, if your ear misses 1/44100th of a second of audio, are you really going to notice? DVDs and computer data, on the other hand, are highly susceptible to single bit errors, so we notice them more readily than we do on audio-only CDs.
Otherwise, I agree. My two young nieces lived with me for a few years, and I know how kids can munge up discs (which is why we had a "you're not allowed to touch the discs" policy -- discs were stored where little girl fingers couldn't get to them, and they had to ask an adult if they wanted to watch a movie). It is with young children that the claims of this new coating material will be put to the test, and I too remain somewhat skeptical until I've seen their durability in real-life usage.
Yaz.
iTunes is free. You can go and download it now from http://www.apple.com/itunes, without spending a single penny to Apple. iTunes works with MP3s, protected and unprotected AAC audio, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, and Audible Audiobook audio formats (and several video formats as well). Only one of which has the option of having DRM applied to it. Don't like DRM? Neither do I! iTunes doesn't force any DRM upon you -- if you don't want to own Protected AACs, don't buy them. Get your music from the same unprotected sources you're getting them for Amarok.
You continue to make claims that Amarok "does more" that a piece of software you've never used, which you judge purely from hearing about it from people who can't even figure out how to use a single mouse click to sort music.
You, sir, are an idiot. I personally don't care one whit if you prefer Amarok over iTunes -- that's fine with me. But don't pretend to know what you're talking about when you haven't even used one of the two software packages in question.
Shall we tally your current score? You have claimed that:
Well, you got one point, but it too just makes you look like an idiot who is spouting FUD. Care to continue along this vein?
Yaz.
BlueRay discs at least use a new coating called Durabis which the manufacturer (TDK) claims will stand up to a screwdriver. I'm a bit skeptical, but the claims are that the material consists of both significantly improved scratch resistence and protection from stains and oils.
As such, judging the new media based on existing media may not be valid. We'll have to wait and see. It is worth noting that Durabis can be used on CDs and DVDs as well -- hopefully we'll eventually see some (and at reasonable prices) so that a longetivity comparison can be done between them.
Yaz.
Care to know where I am right now? I'm sitting in an office at a major University acting as a consultant to both graduate and undergraduate students who are in the faculties of computer science and software engineering, and I get a steady stream of such dumb questions. And these are from people in programs who should know better (and I'm sorry to have to say this, but I dated a physics grad student for a time, and I have to say that outside the arena of partical physics and math where she was an absolute wizard, she wasn't exactly the brightest bunny in the bunch). Hell, just today I taught a S.Eng student about tab completion in Linux bash shell!
Sorry, but software doesn't read minds. And while I'm a huge proponent of HCI, in the end it is impossible to create a single buttons that says "Do what I want", and expect it to do anything and everything you want to do. At some point, there has to be a certain amount of user education and experimentation. iTunes encourages experimentation by its design, but there are people out there who don't even think to try. It doesn't help for the completely clueless that iTunes can be deciptively simple at times -- I've had more than one actual iTunes user ask me about sorting their Library by artist or album who expected they would have to go through three menus and seven preference panels to set this up, when all you have to do is click on the heading you want to sort by.
I've tried both, and sorry, you're simply wrong. You're making a judgement value on a piece of software you've admittedly never used, based on you having spoke with clueless people who don't even know that you can sort a list by the criteria you want in only a single mouse click. That just doesn't fly around here.
Yaz.
So, in which case, is it not possible that these nebulous "other problems" are not due to iTunes itself, but due to a fault with the user?
If such is the case, you should state that before you start claiming iTunes faults as facts. So far as you're aware, iTunes could be faultless, and you've just been hearing the complaints of clueless users who don't know the simplest of GUI control basics, or how to use the built-in Help subsystem.
Yaz.
Sorry in advance, but...
I think the sphere where one or the other (or both) will really take off is in computing devices. True, there are still a lot of people out there who don't even have DVD burners (nevermind dual layer DVD burners), but I can see the need for very large offline storage capacity by computer users ensuring that one or both of these standards does indeed take off. Who wouldn't want a single disc that can store up to 200GB of data (which, according to WikiPedia is the current maximum achieved thus far -- whether or not such discs will be available to the general public anytime soon at a reasonable price is anyones guess)?
We'll quickly get to a point where a variety of device types will be manufactured and released that use either standard -- computer optical drives, game consoles, video players -- and it only takes one of these to really take off for the others to follow (as there is a certain cost savings and end-user convienence in the long run to have all of these devices using compatible storage technologies). Indeed, assuming production of the 405nm blue-violet lasers really ramps up, we may get to a point where the red lasers needed for DVDs and CDs is actually more expensive to manufacture, at which point people needing to replace older equipment will simply go with the newer standard (particularly if the units in question are backward compatible, or in situations where backwards compatibility is unnecessary).
I personally don't care about BlueRay or HD-DVD for video at this point -- I have a very nice Standard-Def TV, and don't really have the spare cash laying around to replace it with an HD unit. I likewise don't currently care about them for gaming -- my PS2 still works just fine, and has a ton of really good games I haven't finished exploring as it is (as I rarely have time to sit down and play much of anything as it is). However, being able to dump 25GB (or more) of data to a single optical disc on my computer does appeal to me quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to the day when Apple starts including BlueRay drives in their MacBooks (hopefully that day will come before the next time I need to upgrade my system :) ).
Yaz.
Yaz.
Uh, try clicking on the "Artist" column heading (or "Album" if you prefer).
You have actually used iTunes, right?
Yaz.
That may not be completely true. You can in fact buy portable, foldable solar panels for recharging portable devices like the iPod, which are suitable for backpacking -- you can drape the foldable panels down the back of your pack, plug everything in, and let your iPod charge.
However, having just returned from a several day hike along the Juan de Fuca trail, I agree with you -- leave everything but the emergency electronics at home, and just enjoy nature. My iPod stayed home.
Yaz.
I continue to disagree. Microsoft would simply co-opt the OSS Java code into the .NET framework.
They may be concentrating on .NET, but that doesn't mean they don't have an interest in driving people away from Java and into the .NET fold. Such a move could achieve both -- merge OSS Java into .NET, push MS-only developers into using it and pushing it at everyone else, and suddenly mainline Java is forced to accept Microsoft modifications. Before long, OSS Java is simply a shim into .NET, and Java becomes meaningless.
Yaz.
That presumes that there isn't an 800lbs. gorilla sitting in the next room just plotting to catch you unaware and clobber you.
In the current OSS world, there is a sort of agreed upon level of friendliness between projects. Projects may compete, but they also cooperate, and everyone is more focussed on creating the best project they can, and not just trying to kill off the other guy.
Microsoft, however, is a business -- and their business has always been to kill off (or buy out) their competition. Playing fair doesn't figure into the equation. They control the platform that 90+% of users are running on their desks, and they control a LOT of developers, both inside and outside Microsoft (and we've all met the type -- the developer who is so sold on using all Microsoft technologies, they'll use a poor solution and write 200 lines of code to do what you could do in 6 lines of code in another, non-MS environment, just because their solution is based on Microsoft technologies).
So how is this for a scenario: Microsoft comes out with a new release of Visual J++.NET based on Open Source Java, but changes the bytecode generated subtly to make it incompatible with other JVMs (or, perhaps worse, decides to add a few of their own keywords to the language, and ties them directly into Windows-specific APIs). They don't call it Java -- they call it "Visual J++.NET", however the pro-Microsoft developer probably already associates "J++" with (what they think of as) "Java", and decides to use it for all of their Java development.
Suddenly the Java world is flooded with code that only works on MS VMs. Microsoft winds up controlling a huge percentage of the Java developers of the world, and can start dictating the Java APIs and features developers use (as they can just start sticking whatever they want into their implementation, and as they have a huge army of 3rd party developers who will start using these features, the rest of the Java world has a choice: either implement the new MS features into the VMs on other platforms, or try to maintain Java purity and lock themselves out of a lot of applications developed on Windows, and create confusion for end-users by requiring them to have two competing VMs installed on their systems).
MS could also start bundling their modified VM with each and every Windows machine. When a desktop user encounters a "pure" Java application that they can't run, they'll either demand from developers versions of these applications which are specifically designed for the MS VM, or simply won't use these applications. This will be especially bad for things like applets and Java WebStart.
I can see all sorts of ways this could be bad for Java (and Sun). Unfortunately, Sun can't maintain the status quo either: they're losing ground in the Windows world (and it could be argued they never had a lot to begin with: while I'm sure there are a lot of Java developers on Windows, outside of some server-side stuff there really isn't a lot to like about actually running Java applications on Windows), and need the Open Source Linux world no their side in a big way. Sun would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that there are so many developers out there sold so completely on the "One Microsoft Way" when it comes to development tools and environments -- Microsoft has a stranglehold on a lot of devs out there, and those devs don't care about MS's dirty tactics so long as they have a huge captive audience to sell solutions to.
Yaz.