They will also be forced to stop bundling Media Player with Windows
For fucks sake. I actually enjoy being able to install an operating system and using it right out of the box as opposed to having to go on an internet scavanger hunt for the crap I need to actually make the thing useless.
Not sure if you checked but there is no dearth of PocketPC and Symbian OS applications. These closed systems have certainly not been hinderences (to application software) in my experience.
So all of the OSS projects that are attempting to replicate microsoft functionality should just pack it in and fold?
You know building a better mousetrap starts with the basics and if another company or project has the basics down pat you pretty much have to re-invent that wheel before you can innovate. It's why being able to read MS file formats has always been pretty high on the list of features that have to be working for all of the MS Office knock-offs (until they get the basics down pat and begin to really innovate).
Let me prefix all of this by saying that I'm a GameCube fanboi and have no particular love for the XBox...
Although, compared to other consoles it is quite powerful, its still fairly weak.
When it comes to hardware specs it is not weak. It's marginally better than both the GC and PS2.
It lacks the possibility for upgrades (such as the processor or memory) and by today's standards 800mhz is hardly anything (i think thats what the clock speed is off the top of my head).
You make two point here and I'll address them both. As for being upgradable, that's true, and a GOOD thing. By having a locked specification game companines can QA a game on a single system and never have to worry about this driver or that driver for some new piece of hardware causing trouble for them. The second a user can upgrade a game console is the second they become useless to a large majority of the people who own them. Mom and Pop with a 10 year old son to no want to install patches, see blue screens of death (or kernel panics), or any of the other nonsense that comes along a full blown PC. They want an appliance, a black box if you will, that has a hole to put media in and "just works."
As for the processor speed... The GC and PS2 both have processors running at lower speeds. Not that it makes much of an argument for anything as the GC has a PowerPC and the PS2 has an "Emotion Engine." Not sure what that is, but as long as it plays the games it's not really a concern.
Another thing i think is 'less noble' about the xbox, is the fact that most of the important components in the machine aren't even made by microsoft (nvidia i believe).
This is fairly common now and will be the norm in the future. ATI and NVidia invest millions (billions?) into GPU design. Why should MS/Sony/Nintendo do the same when they can buy off the shelf parts that will likely do a better job and pass the savings on to the consumer so they can buy more games?
I don't believe console gaming will catch up to pc gaming any time soon.
I don't believe PC gaming will catch up to console gaming any time soon.
Ok, decided to check out the PDAs. I'm a gadgit freak so maybe there is something cool.
1. Sharp Zaurus - They look pretty cool and one of them has even been released worldwide!
2. Royal LineaLX - Can't find any mention on the vendor's website, do not think it exists yet. Can't buy vaporware.
3. Simputer - From the description: "a computer with price and technology appropriate for rural Indian villages." Can not find anywhere to buy this. Not sure I would want to.
4. G.Mate Yopy - Looks nifty. One american distributer. But hey, that's better than most of the rest here. Even the english version of the website keeps asking me to install korean fonts. Must be a problem with IE.
5. Sun Telecom S-935 - A pager. And another website asking me to install korean fonts. Any can't seem to find a single outlet on the net selling these things. More vapor?
6. IBM e-LAP reference design - Not a product. Why is listed as a product?
7. GSPDA V-2002 - "this Linux PDA for the Chinese market..." *sigh*
8. CDL Paron 'secure PDA' - Secure PDA, phone, bluetooth, backed by IBM... Wow! Did a search to try to see where I could actually BUY one. Might have been able to find something on the manufacturers web site (http://www.cdlusa.com/) but it was down. Starting to notice a trend.
9. Q-Reader Ebook - "this Linux-powered electronic reading device targets the education market in China." It looks like crap, too. Trend continues unabated.
10. Esfia PDA reference design - Another reference design. Another something that I can't own. Another county heard from.
11. Mizi Linux PDA developer kit - Another korean language pack query from IE. Can find no information about any hardware ever being released.
12. AML M7100 wireless data collection terminal - I don't want to scan barcodes.
12. Infomart Kaii - Vapor. And even when (if) it comes out it'll be for India. Here are two different pages with photoshopped images of this thing: http://www.kaii.info/ and http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8619741565. html
13. Invair Filewalker - Specs show this to be such an outdated machine that I didn't even bother to see if it exists. Even if it does, trust me, no one cares.
14. Royal Lin@x - Vapor or discontinued. Check out the Royal PDA lineup: http://www.royal.com/templates/searchnf.cfm?rowsta rt=1&whichord=264576&wherefrom=PICTURE&special=R&c lass=N&usepasswords=Y&nextrow=!&prevrow=ZZZZZZ&nex tprev=0&globaldesc=na&subclass=ALL&subname=ALL&dep artment=ORG&checkcookie=YES&uas=N&CFID=151236&CFTO KEN=81872969
15. Empower PowerPlay - Can be purchased!!! (The company is in Redmond, must be something in the water). It's made to look *exactly* like PalmOS. Heh.
16. Softfield VR3 - Sweet jesus it actually exists! And its inexpensive! And it's not made for the emerging tandori slum market!
17. Compaq iPAQ - The ONLY item in this roundup I can purchase at breast buy. Not sure why I would want to remove the software it came with, though.
18. HanGil C3224 multimedia PDA - Went to both the manufactures websites. One no longer exists. The other pings the same annoying flash (in korean, aint that a suprise) message over and over. My rough translation is: "We went out of business". Of course I read NO korean, but that's my guess.
19. MasterIA PDA - Froogle.com says "NO ONE SELLS THIS!" In addition I got to cancel a boatload of 'install chinese language pack' dialogs which was a nice change of pace from the usual messages prompting me to install the korean pack.
20. CIIT multimedia PDA - Shame this one was never actually sold. Looks pretty slick. Visiting the website that creates the distro for the device did get me b
The best part of this is how much money goes back to the tabacco farmers to subsidize them for the money they're losing from the people quitting smoking based on the publicity of the lawsuits negatively affecting cig sales.
Basically, the money goes in a big circle with lawyers peeling off most of it as it goes around.
Amazing how stupid litigation (eolas, your idea) is praised when the business end is aimed firmly at Microsoft, but "other" stupid litigation (riaa suits, sco) is decried when its business end is pointed at the "average Slashdotter's" belly.
This is going to go a bit off topic from the original discussion and expect it to be moderated as such (so meta-mods, don't slam the people who rightfully mod this down)...
One of the reasons I continue to program for windows is the fact that I can continually make money off of it. But the prospect of fewer customers and higher margins does sound nice. Even when tempted to make a move I tell myself that it would be pointless since non-open source does not do so well on unix systems. So my question to you is what sort of software are you writing that is easy (possible?) to market for unix? What sort of companies consume this sort of software and what are you doing to locate them?
keep re-reading your reply, but I don't see a demonstration or depiction of multiple concurrent users.
Specifically XP cannot support multiple concurrent users. But the NT kernel was made for and supports it just fine. I've a 2k3 box that's been running since the product was RTM and I keep a terminal services session open to it from my main machine at all times. Also have accounts set up for a few other folks who I work with. No problems with multiple users at the same time.
I set up Opera for myself about a year and a half ago when I was experiencing intermittant lockups with IE. Unfortunately the crashes in Opera were more frequent than the IE lockups so I switched back.
Yes, but you'll need this extra time for recompiling your kernel, tweaking your window manager, and finding perfectly matched skins for all of your appplications.
The interesting twist, IIRC, is that Microsoft decided to but a dagger in IBM's back half-way through, and began forking their effort into what would become Windows NT.
Yep. IBM had promised a few big customers that it was going to run on the 286, and by god, even if the OS was to be 4 years late and all of said customers had already donated those 286 boxen to a landfill, it was going to be a 16 bit OS. Microsoft saw OS/2 as having a big albatross hanging around its neck and decided to spin off. Wise choice, really.
But OS/2 was nice in its time. I'd (still) take it over win9x any day of the week, and twice on sundays.
I specifically said Office 2000 and Office XP, no?
BTW, doing a 'feeling lucky' google search on 'installing access 97' brings you to a MS KB article on installing access 97 (there is no access 98) and 2000 on the same box.
Anyhow, point was that going forward the formats are going to be compatible back to Office 2000.
All protocols, APIs and data formats fully documented.
Get back to me when the open source camp achieves this. Oh, I can look at the source? You can look at a disassembly. Trudging through x86 asm is a bit more taxing than looking at poorly commented C code. But just a bit.
A tool set comparable to Linux, free. That is, compilers and interpreters for C, C++, Fortran, Ada, Pascal, Objective C, Prolog, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, Python, Awk, lex, yacc, Basic, etc., etc. Debuggers, libraries, editors, profilers. Libraries for test scaffolding like CppUnit and JUnit.
All already available. Do you mean MS should foot the bill for recoding all of these and then release them under the GPL? Why? Does it bother you that it's the gcc team and not Linus writing the C++ compiler for Linux? Oh, and with regards to some of the newer stuff (like C# and VB.NET) the compilers are free for the downloading. In addition there are open source compilers that are coming along nicely.
A promise that existing formats will be readable and losslessly convertable to future formats, forever.
I'm going to assume that you're talking about the Office formats. Guess what? Done. I can save any Office file in 2003 and it's readable on both 2000 and XP with no conversions or hassle. I think Microsoft recognized that people were simply not upgrading because having to deal with clients on older versions was such a hassle.
No coerced upgrades, where existing users have to plead with people who have already upgraded to jump through hoops to avoid sending unreadable new formats.
The fact it is customizable also seems to present itself as a major security issue. How are we to know that these customized ATMs that also deal out lottery tickets or supermarket coupons were necessarily programmed (by the banker) correctly and securely?
I dunno, has suntrust had a ton of hacks and break ins at their ATM machines (with the custom code they used to sell postage stamps) in the five years they have been in use?
From the Wired article: "With open technologies it is easier to run different types of hardware on the same software."
Holy shit, I can't believe the banks are so gullible. Did they actually believe what a saleman told them?!?
I think someone got confused and said "open" as opposed to "modern". Regardless of the reason given, the statement about NT being able to utilize more varied hardware than OS/2 is dead on.
Slashdot Mirror
They will also be forced to stop bundling Media Player with Windows
For fucks sake. I actually enjoy being able to install an operating system and using it right out of the box as opposed to having to go on an internet scavanger hunt for the crap I need to actually make the thing useless.
Yay, let's legislate the technology back to 1887!
Not sure if you checked but there is no dearth of PocketPC and Symbian OS applications. These closed systems have certainly not been hinderences (to application software) in my experience.
Can we compromise and use a plastic spork from Popeyes?
So all of the OSS projects that are attempting to replicate microsoft functionality should just pack it in and fold?
You know building a better mousetrap starts with the basics and if another company or project has the basics down pat you pretty much have to re-invent that wheel before you can innovate. It's why being able to read MS file formats has always been pretty high on the list of features that have to be working for all of the MS Office knock-offs (until they get the basics down pat and begin to really innovate).
Let me prefix all of this by saying that I'm a GameCube fanboi and have no particular love for the XBox...
Although, compared to other consoles it is quite powerful, its still fairly weak.
When it comes to hardware specs it is not weak. It's marginally better than both the GC and PS2. It lacks the possibility for upgrades (such as the processor or memory) and by today's standards 800mhz is hardly anything (i think thats what the clock speed is off the top of my head).
You make two point here and I'll address them both. As for being upgradable, that's true, and a GOOD thing. By having a locked specification game companines can QA a game on a single system and never have to worry about this driver or that driver for some new piece of hardware causing trouble for them. The second a user can upgrade a game console is the second they become useless to a large majority of the people who own them. Mom and Pop with a 10 year old son to no want to install patches, see blue screens of death (or kernel panics), or any of the other nonsense that comes along a full blown PC. They want an appliance, a black box if you will, that has a hole to put media in and "just works."
As for the processor speed... The GC and PS2 both have processors running at lower speeds. Not that it makes much of an argument for anything as the GC has a PowerPC and the PS2 has an "Emotion Engine." Not sure what that is, but as long as it plays the games it's not really a concern.
Another thing i think is 'less noble' about the xbox, is the fact that most of the important components in the machine aren't even made by microsoft (nvidia i believe).
This is fairly common now and will be the norm in the future. ATI and NVidia invest millions (billions?) into GPU design. Why should MS/Sony/Nintendo do the same when they can buy off the shelf parts that will likely do a better job and pass the savings on to the consumer so they can buy more games?
I don't believe console gaming will catch up to pc gaming any time soon.
I don't believe PC gaming will catch up to console gaming any time soon.
Ok, decided to check out the PDAs. I'm a gadgit freak so maybe there is something cool.
..." *sigh*
1. Sharp Zaurus - They look pretty cool and one of them has even been released worldwide!
2. Royal LineaLX - Can't find any mention on the vendor's website, do not think it exists yet. Can't buy vaporware.
3. Simputer - From the description: "a computer with price and technology appropriate for rural Indian villages." Can not find anywhere to buy this. Not sure I would want to.
4. G.Mate Yopy - Looks nifty. One american distributer. But hey, that's better than most of the rest here. Even the english version of the website keeps asking me to install korean fonts. Must be a problem with IE.
5. Sun Telecom S-935 - A pager. And another website asking me to install korean fonts. Any can't seem to find a single outlet on the net selling these things. More vapor?
6. IBM e-LAP reference design - Not a product. Why is listed as a product?
7. GSPDA V-2002 - "this Linux PDA for the Chinese market
8. CDL Paron 'secure PDA' - Secure PDA, phone, bluetooth, backed by IBM... Wow! Did a search to try to see where I could actually BUY one. Might have been able to find something on the manufacturers web site (http://www.cdlusa.com/) but it was down. Starting to notice a trend.
9. Q-Reader Ebook - "this Linux-powered electronic reading device targets the education market in China." It looks like crap, too. Trend continues unabated.
10. Esfia PDA reference design - Another reference design. Another something that I can't own. Another county heard from.
11. Mizi Linux PDA developer kit - Another korean language pack query from IE. Can find no information about any hardware ever being released.
12. AML M7100 wireless data collection terminal - I don't want to scan barcodes.
12. Infomart Kaii - Vapor. And even when (if) it comes out it'll be for India. Here are two different pages with photoshopped images of this thing: http://www.kaii.info/ and http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8619741565. html
13. Invair Filewalker - Specs show this to be such an outdated machine that I didn't even bother to see if it exists. Even if it does, trust me, no one cares.
14. Royal Lin@x - Vapor or discontinued. Check out the Royal PDA lineup: http://www.royal.com/templates/searchnf.cfm?rowsta rt=1&whichord=264576&wherefrom=PICTURE&special=R&c lass=N&usepasswords=Y&nextrow=!&prevrow=ZZZZZZ&nex tprev=0&globaldesc=na&subclass=ALL&subname=ALL&dep artment=ORG&checkcookie=YES&uas=N&CFID=151236&CFTO KEN=81872969
15. Empower PowerPlay - Can be purchased!!! (The company is in Redmond, must be something in the water). It's made to look *exactly* like PalmOS. Heh.
16. Softfield VR3 - Sweet jesus it actually exists! And its inexpensive! And it's not made for the emerging tandori slum market!
17. Compaq iPAQ - The ONLY item in this roundup I can purchase at breast buy. Not sure why I would want to remove the software it came with, though.
18. HanGil C3224 multimedia PDA - Went to both the manufactures websites. One no longer exists. The other pings the same annoying flash (in korean, aint that a suprise) message over and over. My rough translation is: "We went out of business". Of course I read NO korean, but that's my guess.
19. MasterIA PDA - Froogle.com says "NO ONE SELLS THIS!" In addition I got to cancel a boatload of 'install chinese language pack' dialogs which was a nice change of pace from the usual messages prompting me to install the korean pack.
20. CIIT multimedia PDA - Shame this one was never actually sold. Looks pretty slick. Visiting the website that creates the distro for the device did get me b
The best part of this is how much money goes back to the tabacco farmers to subsidize them for the money they're losing from the people quitting smoking based on the publicity of the lawsuits negatively affecting cig sales.
Basically, the money goes in a big circle with lawyers peeling off most of it as it goes around.
Amazing how stupid litigation (eolas, your idea) is praised when the business end is aimed firmly at Microsoft, but "other" stupid litigation (riaa suits, sco) is decried when its business end is pointed at the "average Slashdotter's" belly.
This is going to go a bit off topic from the original discussion and expect it to be moderated as such (so meta-mods, don't slam the people who rightfully mod this down)...
One of the reasons I continue to program for windows is the fact that I can continually make money off of it. But the prospect of fewer customers and higher margins does sound nice. Even when tempted to make a move I tell myself that it would be pointless since non-open source does not do so well on unix systems. So my question to you is what sort of software are you writing that is easy (possible?) to market for unix? What sort of companies consume this sort of software and what are you doing to locate them?
I do.
Source Gear.
With XP that is true. Not so for 2000 Server or 2003.
The "remote desktop connection" is not enough
Why not?
keep re-reading your reply, but I don't see a demonstration or depiction of multiple concurrent users.
Specifically XP cannot support multiple concurrent users. But the NT kernel was made for and supports it just fine. I've a 2k3 box that's been running since the product was RTM and I keep a terminal services session open to it from my main machine at all times. Also have accounts set up for a few other folks who I work with. No problems with multiple users at the same time.
I set up Opera for myself about a year and a half ago when I was experiencing intermittant lockups with IE. Unfortunately the crashes in Opera were more frequent than the IE lockups so I switched back.
Yes, but you'll need this extra time for recompiling your kernel, tweaking your window manager, and finding perfectly matched skins for all of your appplications.
The interesting twist, IIRC, is that Microsoft decided to but a dagger in IBM's back half-way through, and began forking their effort into what would become Windows NT.
Yep. IBM had promised a few big customers that it was going to run on the 286, and by god, even if the OS was to be 4 years late and all of said customers had already donated those 286 boxen to a landfill, it was going to be a 16 bit OS. Microsoft saw OS/2 as having a big albatross hanging around its neck and decided to spin off. Wise choice, really.
But OS/2 was nice in its time. I'd (still) take it over win9x any day of the week, and twice on sundays.
I specifically said Office 2000 and Office XP, no?
BTW, doing a 'feeling lucky' google search on 'installing access 97' brings you to a MS KB article on installing access 97 (there is no access 98) and 2000 on the same box.
Anyhow, point was that going forward the formats are going to be compatible back to Office 2000.
All protocols, APIs and data formats fully documented.
Get back to me when the open source camp achieves this. Oh, I can look at the source? You can look at a disassembly. Trudging through x86 asm is a bit more taxing than looking at poorly commented C code. But just a bit.
A tool set comparable to Linux, free. That is, compilers and interpreters for C, C++, Fortran, Ada, Pascal, Objective C, Prolog, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, Python, Awk, lex, yacc, Basic, etc., etc. Debuggers, libraries, editors, profilers. Libraries for test scaffolding like CppUnit and JUnit.
All already available. Do you mean MS should foot the bill for recoding all of these and then release them under the GPL? Why? Does it bother you that it's the gcc team and not Linus writing the C++ compiler for Linux? Oh, and with regards to some of the newer stuff (like C# and VB.NET) the compilers are free for the downloading. In addition there are open source compilers that are coming along nicely.
A promise that existing formats will be readable and losslessly convertable to future formats, forever.
I'm going to assume that you're talking about the Office formats. Guess what? Done. I can save any Office file in 2003 and it's readable on both 2000 and XP with no conversions or hassle. I think Microsoft recognized that people were simply not upgrading because having to deal with clients on older versions was such a hassle.
No coerced upgrades, where existing users have to plead with people who have already upgraded to jump through hoops to avoid sending unreadable new formats.
Taken care of, really. See previous item.
Because it was a microsoft bash on slashdot?
nothing to do with a sudden price drop in the cost of IE?
I don't remember netscape costing. At what version did this happen?
Then they should use a stripped-down NetBSD with a curses or basic GUI interface.
Why? They want to be able to run nifty multimedia marking kiosks.
The fact it is customizable also seems to present itself as a major security issue. How are we to know that these customized ATMs that also deal out lottery tickets or supermarket coupons were necessarily programmed (by the banker) correctly and securely?
I dunno, has suntrust had a ton of hacks and break ins at their ATM machines (with the custom code they used to sell postage stamps) in the five years they have been in use?
From the Wired article: "With open technologies it is easier to run different types of hardware on the same software."
Holy shit, I can't believe the banks are so gullible. Did they actually believe what a saleman told them?!?
I think someone got confused and said "open" as opposed to "modern". Regardless of the reason given, the statement about NT being able to utilize more varied hardware than OS/2 is dead on.
With no link on the page that says 'Buy this domain now?'
tripthong: str