I don't think it's about skill (MS has no problem finding talented software engineers, and retained much of the folks from Connectix anyway) but about motivation. I'm not sure how much of it is for the same reason that they axed the project to port VPC to Linux (underway when VPC was bought) - Linux on Desktop was treated as a HUGE threat at the time. For the last 5 years Apple has been treated as a fairly benign threat, the niche player that would never get more than 5% marketshare, were dependant on Office for continued survival, and mostly contained. Maybe MS' perception about OS X is changing.
I see very little advantage for Microsoft from VPC on Mac. On PPC they were the only serious player. On Intel, any market vacuum will be quickly swallowed by Parallels and VMWare (and VPC would have to fight for the rather small marketshare from them). I haven't seen the data sheets, but I can't believe that the VPC revenue (and any revenue lost by people deciding just to "pirate" Windows instead of buying a version of VPC bundled with the OS, which is probably very small) was terribly large. A handful of millions per year?
On the other hand, what makes almost zero sense to me is why they axed Media Player for Mac. Regardless of whether there's some half-hearted third-party QT plugin available to play WMVs, it reduces chances that companies are going to be able to take a video, convert it to a Windows Media format, and their users are going to be able to see it without complaining. Windows Media might be strong in the market, but they're not nearly enough of a dominator for this not to weaken them significantly - if I were a content distributor, I'd be much more inclined to go to QT, Real, or Flash Video format as a result.
Ah yes, Anarcho-capitalism, a system under which the world's wealth and power are guaranteed to be accumulated underneath a handful of corporations. No thanks.
No one must believe that a particular ideal is absolute. A proponent of democratic systems need not promote only a system that follows the blind philosophical definition of "Democracy". Extremism is always unrealistic and a guaranteed path to failure.
"I was very impressed the first time I moved a linux disk to another box and booted it. The first boot it freaked out a bit, but on restarting it booted pretty much fine. A few config tweaks and it was happy as larry."
I've taken the same Firewire HD and at different times booted the same install of OS X on a G5 iMac, a Mac Mini, and a 5-year old 533Mhz G4. This is the install that I use on a regular basis, and I have a lot of crap loaded...But it was 100% transparent to me that I was running the OS on a different machine. I suppose that's one advantage of having a relatively limited range of hardware that needs to be supported and a very solid driver base.
I agree though, Linux seems a bit more resilient than Windows in this area (though grub and lilo always seemed to freak out if I even did minor changes, like remove a CD-ROM. Making changes to partitions was much worse. I haven't really "used" Linux heavily in over a year so perhaps this has gotten better).
Yep. They've put out 5 versions of the Windows client since their last OS X release. You'd think they'd at least fix the OS X client so that file transfers worked against their OWN clients...If you try to transfer a file to a user running versions 7, 7.5, or 8 of Yahoo! IM, it's broken - transfers against earlier versions work fine, however.
...And this version fixes some of my least favorite UI problems (both in Windows and OS X), some of which were regressions from the old Keyhole version of the app.
Unfortunately it's still not a Universal app, and still slow as molasses compared to the Windows (and, it appears, the Linux) version. I'm not complaining that much, but would be very nice to see this taken care of.
Yes, this seems to be a "worst of the last decade list", only 3 of the list were made as far back as the distant 80s. Was there a dramatic rise in the number of crappy products in the 90s and 2000s? Or were the authors all just born in the Reagan era and forgot that other things happened before then?
Yes. The US government is big and made up of many, many mostly independent parts. The lunch lady at my old Elementary school is also a government employee, but I'm guessing she also would have been denied security clearance.
Then again, it's not her job to do legal investigations of possible breaches of the law =)
X11 is a fairly chatty, single-threaded protocol and not particularly optimized for low-latency links. Have you ever tried to run X11 apps over a WAN? VPN connection from home? Etc? Especially if your Window Manager is not something extremely bare-bones and your app windows contain more than a few widgets?
It's incredibly painful to use, unfortunately. There are much worse protocols as well, but something like ICA, RDP, or even VNC (with extensions like those included with UltraVNC) are much better suited.
Where did you get this from? If you go to Apple's own marketing site for the Mac Mini (http://www.apple.com/macmini/) you can see that they're quite clearly making their performance claims versus the 1.42Ghz G4. Based on their "specs", the raw computing speedup is at *least* 2x.
I've done a lot of reading on this, and I'm curious since I haven't seen anything like what the parent mentioned.. How is VS supposed to be better than anything that VMWare *currently* offers, let alone what they are likely to release by the time the new VS is supposed to ship?
The thing that's always bugged me about #1 is that no one ever seemed to seperate IE the application and IE the HTML rendering/display engine. Most of what the DoJ was looking for could have been remedied by getting rid of iexplorer.exe and making small modifications to any part of the system that expected it to be there.
It'd be similar to saying that Safari can't be removed from OS X because a number of applications and system utilities rely on Webkit. Of course you can get rid of Safari without getting rid of the libraries - just drag the userland app to the trash.
Personally, I think that saying that there was no way to get rid of IE, the application, without breaking Windows was not true at all. People still don't seem to make that distinction.
I find it interesting that within the past few years, any time release delays occur, it's typically blamed on "increased security". This is a great strategy, as no one wants a product to be released with reduced security. It isn't the software vendor's horrible development process or management to blame for the slippage - the vendor is instead sacrificing their bottom line to release a product that is less likely to leak your credit card details! What valor!
I call hijinks. They probably need more time for the focus groups to review whether window borders should be more translucent or transparent. Security's just a hard reason for anyone to argue with.
While I agree that the UI design is horrendous, I suspect the performance problems are more due to the OS X port of Firefox, or something specific to the Mac platform. I don't see the performance problems using FF on Windows, but it's horrendously slow (consuming 100% CPU as you mentioned) while scrolling or updating the UI in general on the same version of FF on OS X. However, the content served appears to be exactly the same.
Similarly, I see much lower performance when using, say, Google Maps or MS "Virtual Earth" using FF/Mac than when using a similarly-spec'ed system (actually, slower) running Windows.
I haven't found this reported in Bugzilla yet, but I'm sure it's been reported there somewhere (the general performance difference with, say, Google Maps - which in my experience is much better in FF 1.5 than in previous versions)
Perhaps, but for desktop Linux they're pretty big steps.
Application installation, for example, is probably my #1 irritant at the moment. As soon as I can install and uninstall 90% of the programs I use outside of the command-line, and never EVER have to run "make" again, then I'll be a desktop Linux user again.
Part of this is the evil that is shared libraries and dependencies. I'm sorry, but Windows exited DLLhell years ago - you'd think Linux would be light-years beyond it by 2006.
On the installation front, in fact, it'd be better to emulate the "ease" model of OS X, where most apps are distributed as special archives, and I simply drag the app (distributed as a disk image which mounts by double-clicking) into a folder of my choosing (which also means that I don't have to dive into the make file or do a find to figure out that "make install" decided to install the app into/usr/local/bin, or/usr/bin, or/bin, or/KlaptasticApp/Krabulator or whatever the developer's mood led him to...and scatter its contents around my drive).
I'm not sure that many of us consumers would "want" another format war, no. I'd suspect that a large number of us aren't particularly interested in a new format at this point, either. I'm not sure I see a major market driver here for acceptance of EITHER format - HD still isn't ubiquitous enough yet, and even in that (relatively) limited market I'm not sure that there's enough demand for higher fidelity (the only real consumer-marketable advantage I see to the format beyond the data storage expansion) to justify yet ANOTHER format.
I mean, jeeze, looking around my local video rental house, probably about half the shelf space is still allocated to VHS.
Even amongst the techno-savvy (the primary early-adopters of the formats and te consumers who are most likely to drive acceptance of either format), there are folks like me that are worried about the limitations in fair use and usability that content providers are trying to embed inside HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The restrictions are a bit more watered down than what had been proposed for each originally, but like most/.'ers I'm not particularly fond of technology that very intentionally limits my usage, choice, etc.
What "modern" OS still runs a TCP stack as it was created many, many moons ago?
TCP has evolved quite a bit over the last 30 years, and new RFCs and other standards are constantly enhancing and obsoleting older versions of the standard.
You seem to imply that an implementation built today "to-the-spec" would be built against on some 30-year-old draft and design. Today's TCP standards (which include a number of "experimental", "optional", "designed-for-high-latency" etc extensions), however, are quite capable of running on the "networks it runs on today".
Windows has never had the BEST stack, but it's at least been fairly comptetive (and even the original Win95 add-on wasn't based on "30-year old spec"). Win2k, for example, included a relatively good implementation of SACK and NewReno and recovery mechanisms (See RFCs 2581 and 2582 which were posted only in 1999).
I'm not sure what TCP changes Vista has over previous revs, but like every other OS vendor I'm sure Microsoft is trying (and may or not be succeeding =) to improve the performance/scalability of their stack, partly by keeping current "standards", RFCs (like 3782, the 2004 obsoleting of 2582), drafts, etc in mind.
One of the first things I noticed about Netscape 8 when I downloaded it the other day is that it does this by default. It also (by default but can be changed) jumps back to the most recently selected tab when closing an open one, which is something else I've wanted for a while.
Actually, I have to admit, once I spent 10 minutes figuring out how to re-organize the browser (get rid of the multi-tab bar, get my "Personal Toolbar" bookmarks back, turn Netscape Trust Ratings off), I actually like it a lot. Even the "browse in IE" feature is nice - I can classify a sub-range of sites at work that only open in IE, have it switch to IE only in those cases and browse with Firefox in all others. Don't get me wrong, I tend towards the "Mozilla should be standards-compliant, not IE-compliant" side of that particular argument, but at work it's the best possible compromise I've been able to come up with...since there's no chance that IT is going to convert our documentation storage system any time before the end of the decade.
It's got a handful of quirks (and not nearly enough extensions or themes - yet), but after spending some time with it Netscape 8 really DOES have some decent value to it.
Just wondering if it'll be another 6 months after Firefox 1.1 is released for Netscape to pick up the changes =)
If the folder contains.m3u files, iTunes appears to import the files pointed to by the playlist as well, regardless of whether or not that file has already been added. Many people have playlists in each directory, or at least playlists that also include most files in a particular library, so importing everything (including the playlists) seems to duplicate files. I suspect this is tripping a lot of people up.
Slashdot Mirror
Too late.
http://www.macboy.com/cartoons/ballmer/
I don't think it's about skill (MS has no problem finding talented software engineers, and retained much of the folks from Connectix anyway) but about motivation. I'm not sure how much of it is for the same reason that they axed the project to port VPC to Linux (underway when VPC was bought) - Linux on Desktop was treated as a HUGE threat at the time. For the last 5 years Apple has been treated as a fairly benign threat, the niche player that would never get more than 5% marketshare, were dependant on Office for continued survival, and mostly contained. Maybe MS' perception about OS X is changing.
I see very little advantage for Microsoft from VPC on Mac. On PPC they were the only serious player. On Intel, any market vacuum will be quickly swallowed by Parallels and VMWare (and VPC would have to fight for the rather small marketshare from them). I haven't seen the data sheets, but I can't believe that the VPC revenue (and any revenue lost by people deciding just to "pirate" Windows instead of buying a version of VPC bundled with the OS, which is probably very small) was terribly large. A handful of millions per year?
On the other hand, what makes almost zero sense to me is why they axed Media Player for Mac. Regardless of whether there's some half-hearted third-party QT plugin available to play WMVs, it reduces chances that companies are going to be able to take a video, convert it to a Windows Media format, and their users are going to be able to see it without complaining. Windows Media might be strong in the market, but they're not nearly enough of a dominator for this not to weaken them significantly - if I were a content distributor, I'd be much more inclined to go to QT, Real, or Flash Video format as a result.
Yes, it's very clear now. Thanks ;)
Ah yes, Anarcho-capitalism, a system under which the world's wealth and power are guaranteed to be accumulated underneath a handful of corporations. No thanks.
No one must believe that a particular ideal is absolute. A proponent of democratic systems need not promote only a system that follows the blind philosophical definition of "Democracy". Extremism is always unrealistic and a guaranteed path to failure.
"I was very impressed the first time I moved a linux disk to another box and booted it. The first boot it freaked out a bit, but on restarting it booted pretty much fine. A few config tweaks and it was happy as larry."
I've taken the same Firewire HD and at different times booted the same install of OS X on a G5 iMac, a Mac Mini, and a 5-year old 533Mhz G4. This is the install that I use on a regular basis, and I have a lot of crap loaded...But it was 100% transparent to me that I was running the OS on a different machine. I suppose that's one advantage of having a relatively limited range of hardware that needs to be supported and a very solid driver base.
I agree though, Linux seems a bit more resilient than Windows in this area (though grub and lilo always seemed to freak out if I even did minor changes, like remove a CD-ROM. Making changes to partitions was much worse. I haven't really "used" Linux heavily in over a year so perhaps this has gotten better).
Yep. They've put out 5 versions of the Windows client since their last OS X release. You'd think they'd at least fix the OS X client so that file transfers worked against their OWN clients...If you try to transfer a file to a user running versions 7, 7.5, or 8 of Yahoo! IM, it's broken - transfers against earlier versions work fine, however.
You're right - when I did "Get Info" before I thought it just said "Application", no mention of Universal. I apparently wasn't looking hard enough.
So only the performance problems to fix then =)
...And this version fixes some of my least favorite UI problems (both in Windows and OS X), some of which were regressions from the old Keyhole version of the app.
Unfortunately it's still not a Universal app, and still slow as molasses compared to the Windows (and, it appears, the Linux) version. I'm not complaining that much, but would be very nice to see this taken care of.
Yes, this seems to be a "worst of the last decade list", only 3 of the list were made as far back as the distant 80s. Was there a dramatic rise in the number of crappy products in the 90s and 2000s? Or were the authors all just born in the Reagan era and forgot that other things happened before then?
Yes. The US government is big and made up of many, many mostly independent parts. The lunch lady at my old Elementary school is also a government employee, but I'm guessing she also would have been denied security clearance.
Then again, it's not her job to do legal investigations of possible breaches of the law =)
Except that, unlike DNF, someone is actually working on E17 =)
X11 is a fairly chatty, single-threaded protocol and not particularly optimized for low-latency links. Have you ever tried to run X11 apps over a WAN? VPN connection from home? Etc? Especially if your Window Manager is not something extremely bare-bones and your app windows contain more than a few widgets?
It's incredibly painful to use, unfortunately. There are much worse protocols as well, but something like ICA, RDP, or even VNC (with extensions like those included with UltraVNC) are much better suited.
Where did you get this from? If you go to Apple's own marketing site for the Mac Mini (http://www.apple.com/macmini/) you can see that they're quite clearly making their performance claims versus the 1.42Ghz G4. Based on their "specs", the raw computing speedup is at *least* 2x.
I've done a lot of reading on this, and I'm curious since I haven't seen anything like what the parent mentioned.. How is VS supposed to be better than anything that VMWare *currently* offers, let alone what they are likely to release by the time the new VS is supposed to ship?
The thing that's always bugged me about #1 is that no one ever seemed to seperate IE the application and IE the HTML rendering/display engine. Most of what the DoJ was looking for could have been remedied by getting rid of iexplorer.exe and making small modifications to any part of the system that expected it to be there.
It'd be similar to saying that Safari can't be removed from OS X because a number of applications and system utilities rely on Webkit. Of course you can get rid of Safari without getting rid of the libraries - just drag the userland app to the trash.
Personally, I think that saying that there was no way to get rid of IE, the application, without breaking Windows was not true at all. People still don't seem to make that distinction.
I find it interesting that within the past few years, any time release delays occur, it's typically blamed on "increased security". This is a great strategy, as no one wants a product to be released with reduced security. It isn't the software vendor's horrible development process or management to blame for the slippage - the vendor is instead sacrificing their bottom line to release a product that is less likely to leak your credit card details! What valor!
I call hijinks. They probably need more time for the focus groups to review whether window borders should be more translucent or transparent. Security's just a hard reason for anyone to argue with.
While I agree that the UI design is horrendous, I suspect the performance problems are more due to the OS X port of Firefox, or something specific to the Mac platform. I don't see the performance problems using FF on Windows, but it's horrendously slow (consuming 100% CPU as you mentioned) while scrolling or updating the UI in general on the same version of FF on OS X. However, the content served appears to be exactly the same.
Similarly, I see much lower performance when using, say, Google Maps or MS "Virtual Earth" using FF/Mac than when using a similarly-spec'ed system (actually, slower) running Windows.
I haven't found this reported in Bugzilla yet, but I'm sure it's been reported there somewhere (the general performance difference with, say, Google Maps - which in my experience is much better in FF 1.5 than in previous versions)
Perhaps, but for desktop Linux they're pretty big steps.
/usr/local/bin, or /usr/bin, or /bin, or /KlaptasticApp/Krabulator or whatever the developer's mood led him to...and scatter its contents around my drive).
Application installation, for example, is probably my #1 irritant at the moment. As soon as I can install and uninstall 90% of the programs I use outside of the command-line, and never EVER have to run "make" again, then I'll be a desktop Linux user again.
Part of this is the evil that is shared libraries and dependencies. I'm sorry, but Windows exited DLLhell years ago - you'd think Linux would be light-years beyond it by 2006.
On the installation front, in fact, it'd be better to emulate the "ease" model of OS X, where most apps are distributed as special archives, and I simply drag the app (distributed as a disk image which mounts by double-clicking) into a folder of my choosing (which also means that I don't have to dive into the make file or do a find to figure out that "make install" decided to install the app into
I'm not sure that many of us consumers would "want" another format war, no. I'd suspect that a large number of us aren't particularly interested in a new format at this point, either. I'm not sure I see a major market driver here for acceptance of EITHER format - HD still isn't ubiquitous enough yet, and even in that (relatively) limited market I'm not sure that there's enough demand for higher fidelity (the only real consumer-marketable advantage I see to the format beyond the data storage expansion) to justify yet ANOTHER format.
/.'ers I'm not particularly fond of technology that very intentionally limits my usage, choice, etc.
I mean, jeeze, looking around my local video rental house, probably about half the shelf space is still allocated to VHS.
Even amongst the techno-savvy (the primary early-adopters of the formats and te consumers who are most likely to drive acceptance of either format), there are folks like me that are worried about the limitations in fair use and usability that content providers are trying to embed inside HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The restrictions are a bit more watered down than what had been proposed for each originally, but like most
What "modern" OS still runs a TCP stack as it was created many, many moons ago?
TCP has evolved quite a bit over the last 30 years, and new RFCs and other standards are constantly enhancing and obsoleting older versions of the standard.
You seem to imply that an implementation built today "to-the-spec" would be built against on some 30-year-old draft and design. Today's TCP standards (which include a number of "experimental", "optional", "designed-for-high-latency" etc extensions), however, are quite capable of running on the "networks it runs on today".
Windows has never had the BEST stack, but it's at least been fairly comptetive (and even the original Win95 add-on wasn't based on "30-year old spec"). Win2k, for example, included a relatively good implementation of SACK and NewReno and recovery mechanisms (See RFCs 2581 and 2582 which were posted only in 1999).
I'm not sure what TCP changes Vista has over previous revs, but like every other OS vendor I'm sure Microsoft is trying (and may or not be succeeding =) to improve the performance/scalability of their stack, partly by keeping current "standards", RFCs (like 3782, the 2004 obsoleting of 2582), drafts, etc in mind.
Yeah! This site isn't about "News"! It's "Discussions for Nerds. Stuff that matters"!
...It can. Visit your user preferences sometime, and explore your default options for posts.
One of the first things I noticed about Netscape 8 when I downloaded it the other day is that it does this by default. It also (by default but can be changed) jumps back to the most recently selected tab when closing an open one, which is something else I've wanted for a while.
Actually, I have to admit, once I spent 10 minutes figuring out how to re-organize the browser (get rid of the multi-tab bar, get my "Personal Toolbar" bookmarks back, turn Netscape Trust Ratings off), I actually like it a lot. Even the "browse in IE" feature is nice - I can classify a sub-range of sites at work that only open in IE, have it switch to IE only in those cases and browse with Firefox in all others. Don't get me wrong, I tend towards the "Mozilla should be standards-compliant, not IE-compliant" side of that particular argument, but at work it's the best possible compromise I've been able to come up with...since there's no chance that IT is going to convert our documentation storage system any time before the end of the decade.
It's got a handful of quirks (and not nearly enough extensions or themes - yet), but after spending some time with it Netscape 8 really DOES have some decent value to it.
Just wondering if it'll be another 6 months after Firefox 1.1 is released for Netscape to pick up the changes =)
Er, you mean that there's a NON-Windows version?
If the folder contains .m3u files, iTunes appears to import the files pointed to by the playlist as well, regardless of whether or not that file has already been added. Many people have playlists in each directory, or at least playlists that also include most files in a particular library, so importing everything (including the playlists) seems to duplicate files. I suspect this is tripping a lot of people up.