I'd say stealing the BSD kernel is a bit of a stretch. Apple bought NeXT in 96-ish and got their spinoff of the Mach-based kernel architecture (formerly used in NeXTSTeP) which is roughly based on BSD Lite2. They used it for Darwin. The sockets implementation and most of the command-line tools are almost exact copies of BSD, though. I've seen OpenBSD in a man page footnote in Mac OS X!
You're right, I was a bit over the top there. I'll happily stand corrected, and thanks for the education.
While I'm making corrections, I didn't mean to imply that Apple doesn't have good systems programmers, just that they haven't been associated with the Apple name and especially not the Macintosh brand. IMO, Apple's marketroids need to be pushing the NeXT angle for all it's worth - there's a name the suits aren't going to look at you funny for suggesting.
Well, since you seem to be gunning for a response from a Linux/x86 person for some reason, I'll bite.
Your argument is well taken, and in fact I think it is an excellent point to use when debating Windows vs. Mac as a desktop machine. Apple has a beautiful UI, can run MS Word for those who need it, and is built atop BSD so I would expect it to be very stable. The extra purchase price of a suitable Mac with OSX for daily desktop use and as a network client in an office setting is more than offset by the smaller number of tech support people required to maintain it, resulting in a net savings vs. Windows. I wish Apple would make OSX available on x86 so it can run on the legacy x86 hardware that most places already have. Apple's currently exhibiting their biggest market miscalculation since they priced themselves out of the personal computer market in the '80s, by not releasing an x86 version! Heck, Longhorn and DRM and Trusted Computing and Subscription-Pricing and all that is an open invitation for someone to come in and eat MS's cake. If the option existed on existing hardware, I'd recommend migration to it as a standard desktop ASAP. I might well be running it at home right now instead of Linux; I'd at least give it a try for sure.
Where I think your argument breaks down a bit is in the server room. OSX is beautiful, and all that, but there is no reason to be running a GUI on the server. When it's loaded up with connections and is busy being a server, then you start opening windows with those flashy effects, it's going to bog the whole network down once the CPUs peak out. Your phone will start ringing off the hook with users helpfully telling you that their spreadsheets are taking forever to load. Unix GUIs have historically been so clunky and ugly to save clock cycles for more useful things, like serving up files and SQL data records to clients. When GUIs were used at all. This is part of why *NIX is eating MS for lunch in the server space (leaving security aside).
Being a BSD beneath it all, I'd expect there's a way to boot OSX into a command line and not use the GUI. If you do that, I'd expect it to be similar to running BSD on any other machine. As a server, OSX should require no more and no less of a knowledgeable maintenance staff than any other BSD implementation. Once you're underneath the GUI what's it matter whether it's Apple's BSD or OpenBSD or any other flavor BSD?
Now, given Apple is a sole-source outfit, if their stuff is well integration-tested prior to release, it might save a little bit of time, but that cuts both ways - I'm currently stuck with a used Beige G3 that I picked up (after consulting apple.com) last weekend intending to give OSX a spin, and now they've decided it's not going to be supported after all. The moral is, any savings in support staff must be weighed against the risk of getting locked into a marketing-driven, sole-source vendor for both hardware and software. So far, OSX looks very promising, but the very nature of Apple's business model presents the risk of Microsoft-style lock-in and a similar forced-upgrade treadmill without the benefit of commodity hardware pricing. Remember to take that into account. Given how much babysitting a Windows box requires, it might still pay off to switch though!
Additionally, Apple has very little of a track-record with enterprise servers. It wasn't until a few years ago that they managed to properly implement multitasking and multithreading, and to do it, they basically admitted to themselves they weren't ever going to figure it out so they copped the BSD kernel instead. I commend them for the decision, but it still leaves a seed of doubt as to their ability to follow through at the enterprise level. I've seen Apple change direction, suddenly drop product lines, and almost go bankrupt more times than I can count; you'll have to forgive me if I adopt a wait-and-see attitude for a while before I recommend bet
if the MacOS X program you are porting uses the X11 and other open source libraries then you have a good shot of it being compiled on just about any platform out there.
I was under the impression that Apple's X11 is an add-on interface layer that provides emulation? If that's true, then an X11 app isn't a MacOS app at all, any more than a Windows app is a Linux app just because I can run it under Wine.
I'm asking about things that link to OSX libraries specifically (that is, OSX apps), not things written to run under an emulator. Does Apple make the source to those libraries openly available for porting to other platforms, or are they proprietary? I'm not flaming, I really don't know.
It's an honest and legitimate question, from a non-Mac user who might consider switching, if it was demonstrated that I wouldn't be trading MS lock-in for Apple lock-in. Nothing tricky about it.
if an app is opensource, it should have no problem being compiled for an apple system using the OPENSOUCE GCC compiler provided by apple for their system. Thus discarding the proprietary Mach-O argument.
How about the other way? Will I have a problem re-compiling my favorite OSX apps on a non-apple Linux or BSD system?
As an alternative viewpoint, I see them setting themselves up to scavenge the best-of-breed GPL and BSD stuff, build proprietary 'extensions', and then not release the source back. It's not like there isn't precedent. Heck, it's what OSX is.
I still remember Apple as the 'we won't share our floppy disk format' people. The 'putting one window on top of another is our IP, you can only tile' people. The ones who only have 6% share mostly because they tried to exercise monopoly pricing on hardware before they had the monopoly. Now they want to be the 'we can use your software and you can't use ours' people. Same ol' tune... Too bad, 'cuz they're stuff's usually so good (system 7-point-pi notwithstanding).
FSF gets it. Zealots and fanatics perhaps, but on the Apple licensing point, they also happen to be right.
They arent licensing Linux. They are saying go get linux somewhere, they are giving the code away. Then, buy this license so you can use our proprietary code in your copy of linux.
The way I see it, that would be true if they would tell me what part they claim is theirs, so I can make an informed consumer decision about whether to use it. So long as they refuse to identify which is their proprietary code, from a consumer perpective, their actions are indistinguishable from trying to license all of Linux, since it's all or nothing in the absence of code identification.
What SCO is doing, in common terms, is this: Suppose I own an art store, and have paintings in the window for display. Some of these paintings are my own original work; most aren't. I claim that you have a painting in your store, purchased from your supplier, that is a copy of one of my originals. I won't say which painting it is, or even demonstrate that it was one of my originals and not a public-domain copy of a classical work, but I'm suing you for a grand for having the alleged copy all the same. I've offered to show art experts the painting in question, but they had to sign a document promising not to ID the painting in question. I believe that IDing the painting would reveal some kind of secret that would damage me if it became known, despite the fact that my paintings are mounted in a window on a public street for all to see, and hold that only by removing all paintings from your store and leaving the art business or else paying me for a license to sell my art (that I won't say what it is) can you protect yourself. I'm offering to let you settle right now for $500, and intend to use this offer as proof that you do indeed have a copy of whatever painting it is that I won't say.
And now, the art buying public is nervous, and don't want to buy art from you until this is settled, lest I sue them too, which I have already threatened to do. Of course you could pay the settlement, but remember: if you pay me the $500, you cede that I own the rights to potentially all the paintings in your store (I never said which one!), and that I have the right to unilaterally set and collect fees from you for the privelege of selling art. If you don't, you'll spend much more on lawyers and continue to lose income in the meantime.
When, after the dust settles, it is plainly obvious that everyone in power at SCO knew darn well that this entire tack was fraudulent.... well, perhaps we could pierce the corporate veil and serve the class-action against the officers personally? I don't want to bankrupt SCO (that's happening on its own), I want to see Darl McBride living in a trailer in Kansas, paying 1/3 of his income in settlement for the rest of his life...
I didn't see so much as a banner ad, much less a pop-up or Gator install with KDE/Konqueror. Mozilla came up clean also, though the little yellow (!) icon was lit to show it had blocked something.
Just checked with IE on my roomie's Windows box... Egads! Even with all the spam, my email still has a better signal/noise ratio than that. Nice though, to see that Gator's text now admits that PrecisionTime is adware.
Ballmer... suggested IBM adds an illusion of support and accountability to Linux.
I laugh out loud. IBM adds an Illusion of support? Gimme a break. IBM's support has, in my experience, been pretty darn good. Maybe we got a green tech from time to time, but at least they showed up and I could tell my boss IBM was on it. Management will usually take that for an answer.
What does Microsoft contribute in that arena? A fingerpointing game with the OEM?
I distincly remember waiting two years and five service packs just to get NT4's DHCP server fixed(*). Who do I hold accountable for the decision that integrating IE4 into the server(!) so I could view my server's desktop 'as a web page' (whatever that means) was more important than functional DHCP? Will they reimburse my employer for the *nix box they eventually bought to do DHCP, after having been promised that functionality in Windows at time of purchase? How about me, for my OT and aggravation, and having to explain to unreceptive Management that yes, the product they blew their budget on (against my recommendation) was defective and there was nothing I could do to fix it until MS patched it, which they were apparently in no hurry to do, so they had to spend more money to get what they paid for the first time?
At least I had the good sense to quit the next year when they shoved Outlook/Exchange Server down my throat. I hear my replacement spent a lot of nights and weekends cleaning up the worms and script attacks that I warned them were inevitable. Who at MS is 'accountable' for deciding that auto-executing attachments as SYSTEM was a good idea?
And people wonder why we hate Microsoft so much. After over 15 years working with (more like cleaning up after) their products, nothing triggers FUD in me like 'New from Microsoft.' Where'd I learn that reaction? Redmond taught me, the hard way.
(*) Well, DHCP did work as far as distributing IP leases from a block, probably looked just fine at the trade show demos. Problem was, once the block was exhausted and it wrapped around to the beginning again, it reassigned addresses without checking to see if they were still leased, knocking both users off the network and generating two support calls and two workstation reboots each time it happened. If you had to reboot the server for some reason (which in Windows, could be any minor change to anything), it started at the beginning of the list again, and every client on the network would need to be rebooted before the network would stabilize. MS support's answer: Don't use DHCP, use static IPs. They even suggested using Excel to track the assignments - yeah, I'm going to buy another MS product to replace the one I already bought that doesn't work. 'Illusion of support,' indeed!
Northgate Omnikey. Wish I'd bought a truckload of the Ultra model before they faded to black. Two complete sets of FN keys (one set programmable), two complete keypads (one for arrows and one for numbers - hasta la vista, Num Lock), and a nice mechanical clicky-clacky feel. And no sodding Windows keys!
I am writing to inform you that your posts in the reply chain entitled 'First Patent!!!' and its derivitave replies are in violation of FishSoft's patent regarding statement termination (patent #000000000.1-alpha).
Please be aware that the use of the semicolon (;) character for the termination of statements in a programming language is the registered intellectual property of FishSoft. You are hereby ordered to cease and desisit use of the semicolon character as a line terminator in your postings, source code, and derivative works.
Our counsel at the law firm of Vinnie and Guido will be contacting you shortly to discuss protec^D^D^D^D^D^D^D^D^Dlicensing fees.
Legally, of course, there's no defense for copying music and passing out copies to all and sundry unless explicitly authorized to do so by the copyright holder. RIAA will win this battle, easily.
But look at how recorded music purchases have been driven, historically, and it becomes obvious how the industry is really fighting against itself, and the more effective they are in this battle, the more they lose the war.
Used to be, if you didn't want to buy the whole filler album from One Hit Wonder just to get the one song that was good, you could buy a single. The 45-rpm single was a cheap impulse-buy item, a way you could try out a new band without shelling out for the whole album. Yeah, 45's had lame sound quality, but were small and cheap and available and effective enough. Sound like MP3 anyone?
Oh, and back when vinyl ruled the earth, radio stations weren't as heavily formatted and locked in to tiny top-40 playlists. You had a decent chance of turning on the radio and hearing something you hadn't heard before (heh! Try that now...). Rather than fight the homogenization of radio that cuts off the revenue stream of most of the RIAA's back-catalog and even current material, they instead encouraged it thinking they'd lock down the market that way.
So the industry has by design or inattention locked most of its audience out of ever hearing about most of its product in the media, and abandoned the cheap single-song take-a-chance impulse-buy market. It's little wonder that their sales are down, even leaving the recession out of it.
In the void, P2P has flourished, performing much the same function as 'illegal' British pirate radio did in the '60s (spurring a second British Invasion in the USA selling hudreds of millons of LPs, BTW). Like the BBC did back then, the RIAA's fighting an enemy of its own creation, and rather than listen to the market and meet its demand for more exposure to more different music (and at less than $20/gamble, thanks), it's suing the market instead.
Their solution seems to be to sue anyone who essentially passes a copy of a song to a friend - illegal, probably, but also the last possible way for people to be exposed to new music in the current media market. It's asnine, cutting-off-nose-to-spite-face kind of stuff, and it prevents records from being sold. Idiocy.
What a great idea! Imagine, indie bands having to pay $4 per blank CD for the privilege of recording their own original music without a label. The competition might eat into corporate-music profits, after all, so it must be piracy and the majors should be reimbursed somehow! [We all know that the reason for the RIAA's declining sales couldn't possibly have anything to do with their elimination of the single format or statements comparing Eminem to Sinatra.]
I also like the opportunity to inderectly pay the operating expenses of a large software company, whose products I utterly refuse to purchase or use, for the privilege of creating and maintaining bootable CDs for my Linux installation.
Come again? I'm using KDE 3.1 and Konqueror right now as I write this; I didn't install Flash or Real or even Java at first. It ran just fine without 'em (unless I wanted to view a Flash site or run a Java applet of course - the same deal as with any other browser).
Are you kidding? Let's play Match MS's "Innovation" to the product that preceded it, shall we?
Word? WordPerfect, Wordstar. MS was WAY late in the game. Cripes, I was word-processing ten years before Word 1.0. And the Mac had a WYSIWYG word-processor long before Word 1.0.
Excel? Lotus 1.2.3./VisiCalc. Remember, Lotus sued MS (and won) over this point. I don't agree with the decision in that particular case, but still, as for which came first, Lotus has that proven in court.
Access? dBase, Foxpro, Paradox... All were many years ahead, and were not originally MS products.
Visual Studio? Spare me? Borland's IDE beat 'em to it by many years. Even their Turbo-Vision interface for DOS put MSC7's environment to shame, years prior, and when it did come out MSC for WIndows still ran in DOS mode. "Programmer's Workbench" they called it, but impossible to work in as it only allowed one open file at a time. Not viable in C.
Windows? MacOS/Xerox Star. I guess MS innovated doing it so badly, compared to Apple's uber-elegant (for the time) offering.
Windows NT? Early installations popped open clearly visible "OS/2 Windows," so you tell me.
Disk Compression? Stac Software's Stacker 2.0, without the useful utilities.
Disk Defrag? Norton Utilities 4.0, without the advanced features and hex editor. [With a hex-editor, you could fix the Windows 3.1 version checker and make it run on DR-DOS and 4DOS.]
MS-DOS? Seattle Systems' CP/M-86.
Even good old HIMEM.SYS was preceded by 386Max and Quarterdeck's (FAR superior) QEMM product. And MS-DOS didn't get EMM/XMM support until DR-DOS and 4DOS started taking hold. And unlike Quarterdeck's offering, MS's couldn't re-allocate between Extended and Expanded memory on the fly.
Speaking of Quarterdeck, anyone remember Gates's semi-famous quote about it being "impossible" to multi-task MS-DOS? I read it for the first time in a DOS window under DesqView, one of three DOS sessions I had open at the time... MS has never had a firm grasp of how their software works, because it's so rarely theirs to begin with.
Come to think of it, PowerPoint is the only successful MS product that I can't find a clear 1:1 predecessor for. And even then, I knew people who were using Autodesk Animator for that purpose, almost a decade prior. That's not 1:1 so I'll let it go.
Oh yeah, there's also Bob. Who else would have thought of putting a GUI shell on a GUI shell?
Just as with sexual content, it seems that the arguments about violence tend to fall towards one of two camps: those professing the "Desensitization Theory" (exposure in media leads to increased tendency IRL), and those who believe in a "Safety Valve Theory" (providing a socially harmless outlet).
Perhaps both arguments are, in fact, true. It seems perfectly reasonable to believe that in x% of the populatuion, the [violence sex whatever] provides a release, making antisocial real-life outbursts less likely, but some other y% of the population, it has the opposite effect. In this instance, people on both sides of the argument would be able to truthfully provide real life examples of why their position is correct.
While a simple "(x>y) ? allow() : disallow();" solution seems reasonable, in the USA at least, our Constitution seems to imply that the y% who do act on sociopathic impulse should not be a reason to infringe the rights of the x% who don't, no matter what the ratio, so long as that x% exists. [Compare US gun laws, contrast DMCA.]
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I'd say stealing the BSD kernel is a bit of a stretch. Apple bought NeXT in 96-ish and got their spinoff of the Mach-based kernel architecture (formerly used in NeXTSTeP) which is roughly based on BSD Lite2. They used it for Darwin. The sockets implementation and most of the command-line tools are almost exact copies of BSD, though. I've seen OpenBSD in a man page footnote in Mac OS X!
You're right, I was a bit over the top there. I'll happily stand corrected, and thanks for the education.
While I'm making corrections, I didn't mean to imply that Apple doesn't have good systems programmers, just that they haven't been associated with the Apple name and especially not the Macintosh brand. IMO, Apple's marketroids need to be pushing the NeXT angle for all it's worth - there's a name the suits aren't going to look at you funny for suggesting.
Well, since you seem to be gunning for a response from a Linux/x86 person for some reason, I'll bite.
Your argument is well taken, and in fact I think it is an excellent point to use when debating Windows vs. Mac as a desktop machine. Apple has a beautiful UI, can run MS Word for those who need it, and is built atop BSD so I would expect it to be very stable. The extra purchase price of a suitable Mac with OSX for daily desktop use and as a network client in an office setting is more than offset by the smaller number of tech support people required to maintain it, resulting in a net savings vs. Windows. I wish Apple would make OSX available on x86 so it can run on the legacy x86 hardware that most places already have. Apple's currently exhibiting their biggest market miscalculation since they priced themselves out of the personal computer market in the '80s, by not releasing an x86 version! Heck, Longhorn and DRM and Trusted Computing and Subscription-Pricing and all that is an open invitation for someone to come in and eat MS's cake. If the option existed on existing hardware, I'd recommend migration to it as a standard desktop ASAP. I might well be running it at home right now instead of Linux; I'd at least give it a try for sure.
Where I think your argument breaks down a bit is in the server room. OSX is beautiful, and all that, but there is no reason to be running a GUI on the server. When it's loaded up with connections and is busy being a server, then you start opening windows with those flashy effects, it's going to bog the whole network down once the CPUs peak out. Your phone will start ringing off the hook with users helpfully telling you that their spreadsheets are taking forever to load. Unix GUIs have historically been so clunky and ugly to save clock cycles for more useful things, like serving up files and SQL data records to clients. When GUIs were used at all. This is part of why *NIX is eating MS for lunch in the server space (leaving security aside).
Being a BSD beneath it all, I'd expect there's a way to boot OSX into a command line and not use the GUI. If you do that, I'd expect it to be similar to running BSD on any other machine. As a server, OSX should require no more and no less of a knowledgeable maintenance staff than any other BSD implementation. Once you're underneath the GUI what's it matter whether it's Apple's BSD or OpenBSD or any other flavor BSD?
Now, given Apple is a sole-source outfit, if their stuff is well integration-tested prior to release, it might save a little bit of time, but that cuts both ways - I'm currently stuck with a used Beige G3 that I picked up (after consulting apple.com) last weekend intending to give OSX a spin, and now they've decided it's not going to be supported after all. The moral is, any savings in support staff must be weighed against the risk of getting locked into a marketing-driven, sole-source vendor for both hardware and software. So far, OSX looks very promising, but the very nature of Apple's business model presents the risk of Microsoft-style lock-in and a similar forced-upgrade treadmill without the benefit of commodity hardware pricing. Remember to take that into account. Given how much babysitting a Windows box requires, it might still pay off to switch though!
Additionally, Apple has very little of a track-record with enterprise servers. It wasn't until a few years ago that they managed to properly implement multitasking and multithreading, and to do it, they basically admitted to themselves they weren't ever going to figure it out so they copped the BSD kernel instead. I commend them for the decision, but it still leaves a seed of doubt as to their ability to follow through at the enterprise level. I've seen Apple change direction, suddenly drop product lines, and almost go bankrupt more times than I can count; you'll have to forgive me if I adopt a wait-and-see attitude for a while before I recommend bet
If I had mod points, I'd give that a +1 informative. Gotta respect a /. user ID under 2000 anyway. ;)
Thank you - it's much clearer now. I get what the other poster was saying about linking, no wonder he seemed a little confused by my question!
if the MacOS X program you are porting uses the X11 and other open source libraries then you have a good shot of it being compiled on just about any platform out there.
I was under the impression that Apple's X11 is an add-on interface layer that provides emulation? If that's true, then an X11 app isn't a MacOS app at all, any more than a Windows app is a Linux app just because I can run it under Wine.
I'm asking about things that link to OSX libraries specifically (that is, OSX apps), not things written to run under an emulator. Does Apple make the source to those libraries openly available for porting to other platforms, or are they proprietary? I'm not flaming, I really don't know.
It's an honest and legitimate question, from a non-Mac user who might consider switching, if it was demonstrated that I wouldn't be trading MS lock-in for Apple lock-in. Nothing tricky about it.
if an app is opensource, it should have no problem being compiled for an apple system using the OPENSOUCE GCC compiler provided by apple for their system. Thus discarding the proprietary Mach-O argument.
How about the other way? Will I have a problem re-compiling my favorite OSX apps on a non-apple Linux or BSD system?
As an alternative viewpoint, I see them setting themselves up to scavenge the best-of-breed GPL and BSD stuff, build proprietary 'extensions', and then not release the source back. It's not like there isn't precedent. Heck, it's what OSX is.
I still remember Apple as the 'we won't share our floppy disk format' people. The 'putting one window on top of another is our IP, you can only tile' people. The ones who only have 6% share mostly because they tried to exercise monopoly pricing on hardware before they had the monopoly. Now they want to be the 'we can use your software and you can't use ours' people. Same ol' tune... Too bad, 'cuz they're stuff's usually so good (system 7-point-pi notwithstanding).
FSF gets it. Zealots and fanatics perhaps, but on the Apple licensing point, they also happen to be right.
I have a scanner (HP5p) under 'drake and can jump in here. The install procedure for me was:
1) Plug scanner into SCSI chain.
2) Boot machine.
3) Use scanner.
Tough stuff, I know, but you get used to it.
They arent licensing Linux. They are saying go get linux somewhere, they are giving the code away. Then, buy this license so you can use our proprietary code in your copy of linux.
The way I see it, that would be true if they would tell me what part they claim is theirs, so I can make an informed consumer decision about whether to use it. So long as they refuse to identify which is their proprietary code, from a consumer perpective, their actions are indistinguishable from trying to license all of Linux, since it's all or nothing in the absence of code identification.
Slashdot is starting to need a +1: Knows German category.
What SCO is doing, in common terms, is this: Suppose I own an art store, and have paintings in the window for display. Some of these paintings are my own original work; most aren't. I claim that you have a painting in your store, purchased from your supplier, that is a copy of one of my originals. I won't say which painting it is, or even demonstrate that it was one of my originals and not a public-domain copy of a classical work, but I'm suing you for a grand for having the alleged copy all the same. I've offered to show art experts the painting in question, but they had to sign a document promising not to ID the painting in question. I believe that IDing the painting would reveal some kind of secret that would damage me if it became known, despite the fact that my paintings are mounted in a window on a public street for all to see, and hold that only by removing all paintings from your store and leaving the art business or else paying me for a license to sell my art (that I won't say what it is) can you protect yourself. I'm offering to let you settle right now for $500, and intend to use this offer as proof that you do indeed have a copy of whatever painting it is that I won't say.
And now, the art buying public is nervous, and don't want to buy art from you until this is settled, lest I sue them too, which I have already threatened to do. Of course you could pay the settlement, but remember: if you pay me the $500, you cede that I own the rights to potentially all the paintings in your store (I never said which one!), and that I have the right to unilaterally set and collect fees from you for the privelege of selling art. If you don't, you'll spend much more on lawyers and continue to lose income in the meantime.
Clear now?
When, after the dust settles, it is plainly obvious that everyone in power at SCO knew darn well that this entire tack was fraudulent.... well, perhaps we could pierce the corporate veil and serve the class-action against the officers personally? I don't want to bankrupt SCO (that's happening on its own), I want to see Darl McBride living in a trailer in Kansas, paying 1/3 of his income in settlement for the rest of his life...
I didn't see so much as a banner ad, much less a pop-up or Gator install with KDE/Konqueror. Mozilla came up clean also, though the little yellow (!) icon was lit to show it had blocked something.
Just checked with IE on my roomie's Windows box... Egads! Even with all the spam, my email still has a better signal/noise ratio than that. Nice though, to see that Gator's text now admits that PrecisionTime is adware.
My fave quote is this one:
Ballmer ... suggested IBM adds an illusion of support and accountability to Linux.
I laugh out loud. IBM adds an Illusion of support? Gimme a break. IBM's support has, in my experience, been pretty darn good. Maybe we got a green tech from time to time, but at least they showed up and I could tell my boss IBM was on it. Management will usually take that for an answer.
What does Microsoft contribute in that arena? A fingerpointing game with the OEM?
I distincly remember waiting two years and five service packs just to get NT4's DHCP server fixed(*). Who do I hold accountable for the decision that integrating IE4 into the server(!) so I could view my server's desktop 'as a web page' (whatever that means) was more important than functional DHCP? Will they reimburse my employer for the *nix box they eventually bought to do DHCP, after having been promised that functionality in Windows at time of purchase? How about me, for my OT and aggravation, and having to explain to unreceptive Management that yes, the product they blew their budget on (against my recommendation) was defective and there was nothing I could do to fix it until MS patched it, which they were apparently in no hurry to do, so they had to spend more money to get what they paid for the first time?
At least I had the good sense to quit the next year when they shoved Outlook/Exchange Server down my throat. I hear my replacement spent a lot of nights and weekends cleaning up the worms and script attacks that I warned them were inevitable. Who at MS is 'accountable' for deciding that auto-executing attachments as SYSTEM was a good idea?
And people wonder why we hate Microsoft so much. After over 15 years working with (more like cleaning up after) their products, nothing triggers FUD in me like 'New from Microsoft.' Where'd I learn that reaction? Redmond taught me, the hard way.
(*) Well, DHCP did work as far as distributing IP leases from a block, probably looked just fine at the trade show demos. Problem was, once the block was exhausted and it wrapped around to the beginning again, it reassigned addresses without checking to see if they were still leased, knocking both users off the network and generating two support calls and two workstation reboots each time it happened. If you had to reboot the server for some reason (which in Windows, could be any minor change to anything), it started at the beginning of the list again, and every client on the network would need to be rebooted before the network would stabilize. MS support's answer: Don't use DHCP, use static IPs. They even suggested using Excel to track the assignments - yeah, I'm going to buy another MS product to replace the one I already bought that doesn't work. 'Illusion of support,' indeed!
What is your favorite keyboard type?
Northgate Omnikey. Wish I'd bought a truckload of the Ultra model before they faded to black. Two complete sets of FN keys (one set programmable), two complete keypads (one for arrows and one for numbers - hasta la vista, Num Lock), and a nice mechanical clicky-clacky feel. And no sodding Windows keys!
Dear posters:
I am writing to inform you that your posts in the reply chain entitled 'First Patent!!!' and its derivitave replies are in violation of FishSoft's patent regarding statement termination (patent #000000000.1-alpha).
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So are you saying that jack-booted thugs are forcing you to install and use Windows?
Install and use, no... Forcing me to purchase Windows whether I want it or not just to get quality x86 boxes from a respectable vendor, YES.
Don't forget the extremely ill-fated SP4... Where I was working, we jumped from SP3 to SP5, and skipped 4 entirely.
They're going to win the battle and lose the war.
Legally, of course, there's no defense for copying music and passing out copies to all and sundry unless explicitly authorized to do so by the copyright holder. RIAA will win this battle, easily.
But look at how recorded music purchases have been driven, historically, and it becomes obvious how the industry is really fighting against itself, and the more effective they are in this battle, the more they lose the war.
Used to be, if you didn't want to buy the whole filler album from One Hit Wonder just to get the one song that was good, you could buy a single. The 45-rpm single was a cheap impulse-buy item, a way you could try out a new band without shelling out for the whole album. Yeah, 45's had lame sound quality, but were small and cheap and available and effective enough. Sound like MP3 anyone?
Oh, and back when vinyl ruled the earth, radio stations weren't as heavily formatted and locked in to tiny top-40 playlists. You had a decent chance of turning on the radio and hearing something you hadn't heard before (heh! Try that now...). Rather than fight the homogenization of radio that cuts off the revenue stream of most of the RIAA's back-catalog and even current material, they instead encouraged it thinking they'd lock down the market that way.
So the industry has by design or inattention locked most of its audience out of ever hearing about most of its product in the media, and abandoned the cheap single-song take-a-chance impulse-buy market. It's little wonder that their sales are down, even leaving the recession out of it.
In the void, P2P has flourished, performing much the same function as 'illegal' British pirate radio did in the '60s (spurring a second British Invasion in the USA selling hudreds of millons of LPs, BTW). Like the BBC did back then, the RIAA's fighting an enemy of its own creation, and rather than listen to the market and meet its demand for more exposure to more different music (and at less than $20/gamble, thanks), it's suing the market instead.
Their solution seems to be to sue anyone who essentially passes a copy of a song to a friend - illegal, probably, but also the last possible way for people to be exposed to new music in the current media market. It's asnine, cutting-off-nose-to-spite-face kind of stuff, and it prevents records from being sold. Idiocy.
What a great idea! Imagine, indie bands having to pay $4 per blank CD for the privilege of recording their own original music without a label. The competition might eat into corporate-music profits, after all, so it must be piracy and the majors should be reimbursed somehow! [We all know that the reason for the RIAA's declining sales couldn't possibly have anything to do with their elimination of the single format or statements comparing Eminem to Sinatra.]
I also like the opportunity to inderectly pay the operating expenses of a large software company, whose products I utterly refuse to purchase or use, for the privilege of creating and maintaining bootable CDs for my Linux installation.
Way to go, Sweden!
Come again? I'm using KDE 3.1 and Konqueror right now as I write this; I didn't install Flash or Real or even Java at first. It ran just fine without 'em (unless I wanted to view a Flash site or run a Java applet of course - the same deal as with any other browser).
Are you kidding? Let's play Match MS's "Innovation" to the product that preceded it, shall we?
Word? WordPerfect, Wordstar. MS was WAY late in the game. Cripes, I was word-processing ten years before Word 1.0. And the Mac had a WYSIWYG word-processor long before Word 1.0.
Excel? Lotus 1.2.3./VisiCalc. Remember, Lotus sued MS (and won) over this point. I don't agree with the decision in that particular case, but still, as for which came first, Lotus has that proven in court.
Access? dBase, Foxpro, Paradox... All were many years ahead, and were not originally MS products.
Visual Studio? Spare me? Borland's IDE beat 'em to it by many years. Even their Turbo-Vision interface for DOS put MSC7's environment to shame, years prior, and when it did come out MSC for WIndows still ran in DOS mode. "Programmer's Workbench" they called it, but impossible to work in as it only allowed one open file at a time. Not viable in C.
Windows? MacOS/Xerox Star. I guess MS innovated doing it so badly, compared to Apple's uber-elegant (for the time) offering.
Windows NT? Early installations popped open clearly visible "OS/2 Windows," so you tell me.
Disk Compression? Stac Software's Stacker 2.0, without the useful utilities.
Disk Defrag? Norton Utilities 4.0, without the advanced features and hex editor. [With a hex-editor, you could fix the Windows 3.1 version checker and make it run on DR-DOS and 4DOS.]
MS-DOS? Seattle Systems' CP/M-86.
Even good old HIMEM.SYS was preceded by 386Max and Quarterdeck's (FAR superior) QEMM product. And MS-DOS didn't get EMM/XMM support until DR-DOS and 4DOS started taking hold. And unlike Quarterdeck's offering, MS's couldn't re-allocate between Extended and Expanded memory on the fly.
Speaking of Quarterdeck, anyone remember Gates's semi-famous quote about it being "impossible" to multi-task MS-DOS? I read it for the first time in a DOS window under DesqView, one of three DOS sessions I had open at the time... MS has never had a firm grasp of how their software works, because it's so rarely theirs to begin with.
Come to think of it, PowerPoint is the only successful MS product that I can't find a clear 1:1 predecessor for. And even then, I knew people who were using Autodesk Animator for that purpose, almost a decade prior. That's not 1:1 so I'll let it go.
Oh yeah, there's also Bob. Who else would have thought of putting a GUI shell on a GUI shell?
Just as with sexual content, it seems that the arguments about violence tend to fall towards one of two camps: those professing the "Desensitization Theory" (exposure in media leads to increased tendency IRL), and those who believe in a "Safety Valve Theory" (providing a socially harmless outlet). Perhaps both arguments are, in fact, true. It seems perfectly reasonable to believe that in x% of the populatuion, the [violence sex whatever] provides a release, making antisocial real-life outbursts less likely, but some other y% of the population, it has the opposite effect. In this instance, people on both sides of the argument would be able to truthfully provide real life examples of why their position is correct. While a simple "(x>y) ? allow() : disallow();" solution seems reasonable, in the USA at least, our Constitution seems to imply that the y% who do act on sociopathic impulse should not be a reason to infringe the rights of the x% who don't, no matter what the ratio, so long as that x% exists. [Compare US gun laws, contrast DMCA.]
Yeah, I have that problem too, at least under Linux. Seems to work OK under Windows though.
I hate having to say that.