I have a friend who works for a company that imports and rebrands ADSL routers and internal adaptors from overseas companies. I saw a disturbing and unfortunate side of Linux hardware support through them.
They used to advertise that one of their products, an internal ADSL adaptor was Linux compatible. They stopped claiming it was Linux compatible and dropped all Linux support after the endless woes they experienced trying to get the binary drivers for their devices installed on different distributions/kernel variations.
It seems that there is no way to make a driver that will definitely work with the next minor point release of the kernel, and often custom kernels will fail to work with the binary driver even when the supplied instructions are followed to the letter.
Their experience leads me to think that some kind of stable ABI is needed to allow device drivers to be distributed in a binary form. Recently I noticed some progress has been made in allowing Linux to use Windows device drivers.
It occurred to me that this seems a very good option for binary-only drivers for Linux users, and hardware manufacturers alike, allowing them to make a driver that won't be broken next time someone touches the code that the driver references, and will benefit Linux users too, giving them access to hardware for which no Linux driver yet exists, and after all who wants more binary-only cruft floating around?
Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers.
Nope, actually that doesn't clear anything up, because it's bullshit.
Apple don't let people using other brands of DVD-R drives use the software they created to author DVDs. You can still use other software to create DVDs including Apple's professional DVD authoring software. They don't have to subsidize other companies hardware with a product they created exclusively for users of Apple DVD recording hardware.
I take exception to the way they have chosen to enforce this policy (DMCA), but support the reasoning behind it.
You forgot to take your lithium today didn't you? The fact that Linux and NetBSD currently, or may one day be able to run OS X binaries isn't a threat.
No one is suggesting that YOU have to do anything, just bear in mind that these efforts may save your Mac one day when Apple decide it's not current enough to support.
Just because this isn't your cup of tea doesn't grant you a right to criticize how NetBSD/PPC developers spend their time. Maybe they just want to run photoshop on their Apple manufactured NetBSD box.
You're right about Aqua not being the best GUI the world has ever seen, but then nothing could take that crown because different people like different things.
Ya know... I have ctrl-option-esc set as a global key map to start a new instance of iTerm on my Mac using youpi-key. Since programs can stay in memory but not have an on screen presence, I usually don't close iTerm.
In my experience iTerm in it's 'docked' state takes about as long as an aterm to start up. Something which can't be claimed about any version of the gnome-terminal.
So anyway, what was the point of your rant?
I'll speculate and say that you've watched a couple of inexperienced trackpad users who were inexperienced with OS X fumbling around and proclaimed OS X to be the slowest thing you've ever seen.
Whatever the case, you certainly can't have spent enough effort checking the speed of OS X users to be able to do more than speculate yourself.
Just about any iCandy that makes OS X slower can be turned off. (Transparency doesn't make any difference to CPU usage on Quartz Extreme capable machines). The genie effect can be changed to scale, bouncing on app start (a big CPU hog) can be turned off. Anti-alias thresholds can be manipulated in the general preferences window.
People take a while to truly be "at home" with a new OS, particularly for Linux/Windows users, because OS X doesn't try to emulate the look and feel of windows like KDE and GNOME which most people use.
My experience after about 18 months of Mac usage is that Apple can't supply everything, but with the help of little hacks and a bit of tinkering with the GUI settings you can get OS X to work they way you do.
For you to claim that Aqua is mind-bogglingly inefficient seems a little misleading though, it's hardly likely to be as inefficient as X, and I've seen a lot of incredibly slow pretend transparency in X (terminals, KDE menus) that positively crawls in comparison to Quartz.
I guess you must have been talking about some kind of efficiency that doesn't involve speed or usability.
Nonetheless, you are left at the mercy and whims of Apple. You saw how they cracked down on PPC clone builders, destroying many livelihoods in the process.
Firstly, all PPC clone makers were using Apple's ROM under license, it's not like Apple went out and found people making compatible computers and squashed them. These people willingly put themselves "at the mercy and whims of Apple". In much the same way as PC manufacturers grease and prostrate themselves before Microsoft.
Further, management changed at Apple, and so did the outlook on the 'clones', which had not served to increase the market share of MacOS compatible computers in the two years of their existance. Apple were getting an ever decreasing share of a shrinking market.
All of the people who licensed the clone technology from Apple must have been able to see the big black shadow of change looming well before it happened due to the big management shake-up in Cupertino.
Apple could have gone two ways, dumping the hardware business and going software only, or dumping the clones and hoping to be able to compete with Dell and H[compaq & DEC]P. But they would have been foolish to sit around and wait for their company to go down the gurgler which seemed to be Gil Amelio's management strategy.
With Apple moving to OpenStep, they put themselves in a position to support multiple architectures by porting their version of Mach to a new CPU and adding a new target architecture into the app bundle via the old NeXT development tools.
In a few years time most applications will be Cocoa (OpenStep) based and that will open up the possibility for Apple to become a software only company and supply OpenStep X based technology to any platform if their last ditch effort to stay in the hardware business fails.
All in all, not a bad business decision, apart from the 'soft costs' of bad PR and thousands of pissed off customers and a few pissed off business partners. Something which may well come back to bite them in the bum, especially with people like you spreading misinformation about the whole cloning episode.
@stake recently fired their CTO because he had the nerve to suggest that if you don't run entirely Microsoft software, then all your computers might not get infected with the same virus at the same time.
Does this sound like the kind of company that would call up Apple and tell them about a possibly embarassing security problem, or might they just take the worst possible interpretation of events and present it as fact, purely to stick it to a competitor of their favorite customer?
As a matter of fact, you DO get the source to the OS, or at least to the part of the OS that's relevant to your 17 MB copies, the microkernel, I/O subsytems and file system code are all available as part of the Opendarwin project.
You don't even have to pay for the OS to get the source code to it. How generous is that for a commercial Unix vendor?
I'm betting that for all your bleating about source code, you wouldn't have a fucking clue what to do about the problem anyway, because like 99.999% of the world you wouldn't have a clue how to optimize a filesystem or IDE transfer.
Besides, contrary to what you're saying I've found I am easily able to sustain 100Mbit when copying files to and from my PowerBook, which is not bad for a laptop. Perhaps you should look at your samba configuration, or consider using something else for your file transfers if it's going to save you as much time as your concerns indicate.
I like my mac, and I'm willing to forgive a few shortcomings here and there, and I'm even prepared to fork over money for OS upgrades when I can afford it. But based on observation I think Apple have majorly dropped the ball on the transition from 10.2 to 10.3. Probably from stretching their resources a little too far to get it released on time.
$129 USD price tag aside, it took Apple weeks to provide a fix for the recent OpenSSH server vulnerability, and when they finally did provide the fix, they rolled it into an improperly tested 'point' upgrade that screwed up some gigabit ethernet ports, halved reported battery life on some portables, and made some iMacs unbootable.
Recently Apple patched some security holes in 10.3, suggesting that they also released 10.3 prematurely. It's possible that Apple will release patches for the remaining issues in 10.2.8, but from my perspective it seems that mismanagement probably had a large hand in the relatively crap support from Apple lately.
As the bug reports (and related fixing) stop rolling in, support will probably return to normal. I really hope that this isn't a sign that Apple is about to about to abandon their responsibilities to their customers. Support, and particularly security fixes is something that I would rate Apple as pretty good at until recently. But it really is inexcusable to effectively end-of-life a 1 year old operating system.
I feel your pain brother, I bought a Sony Walkman in 1984, Sony then pulled a fast one on me turned around at started making portables that can play CDs.
I've written at least a hundred letters to Sony ever since then asking them when they are going to fix my walkman so it plays CDs as well as tapes, but they never respond.
I'm never gonna buy another Sony product again and boy will they miss my money!
That was supposed to say 1 year old OS, but my stupid evil security-hole nickle-and-dime can't-swap-ctrl-and-caps-lock Apple keyboard has the 2 and the 1 keys right next to each other.
Agree'd. Just another argument for me to keep more Mac servers out of my office. If Apple expects us to update constantly (and most updates hoze everything anyways) we'll have a headache on our hand. Mac as servers not that good anyways...
What the fuck are you talking about? I've never had any problems with OS upgrades for my mac (I've gone from 10.0 through to 10.2.8) and I don't personally know anyone else who has, where are you getting your information that "most updates hoze everything"?
And what's with this "Apple expects us to update" when you've just said you want to "keep macs out of your office" why are you playing with macs if you want them out of your office?
I know, it's because you're full of shit and trolling, right?
This goes against a couple centuries of copyright law interpretation which is firmly *against* entry of any copyrighted work into the public domain without the express indication thereof by its author. This just isn't going to happen.
I'm not a historian, or a lawyer, but the way I understand; it used to be that if work wasn't explicitly copyrighted it was in the public domain, and a fairly recent law turned the tables so that work is implicitly copyrighted, and has to be explicitly placed in the public domain.
I don't know when this law change happened, but I do understand enough about copyright law to say that the chicken licken impersonator who posted the parent to my comment was majorly overreacting.
It seems a very remote possibility that the GPL would somehow dissolve into nothing, but I was saying even if that did happen, it still wouldn't be the end of the world, or even of open-source software.:)
If a ruling is passed in favour of the GPL, then well and good. What I'm worried about is what SCO (and guys like MS, and Sun I guess) would be angling for is that the GPL is defeated. In which case, where does that leave us? It'd be Armaggedon for those of us who feel the GPL serves a purpose and is a good tool. To add insult to injury, what would happen subsequently to that will be wholesale theft of the already-out-in-the-open GPL-ed code by all sorts of unscrupulous and/or "careless" companies.
No, it either leaves work under the GPL protected by basic copyrights, or in the public domain.
No-one is going to die, open-source is not going to disappear. The worst that can happen is more widespread rights for interested parties to incorporate GPL'd works without credit, and all the GPL favouring authors will have to find a new license to place future works under.
In a way, even the worst case scenario is likely to weaken the case for other corporates wanting to follow in SCO's footsteps, because commercial vendors are far more likely to incorporate the huge volumes of truely free software into their proprietary products, and will then have difficulty proving whether they incorporated said code into theirs before or after that code was licensed under the GPL2 or whatever replaces the GPL.
For this reason, smart companies will steer clear of assimilating GPL'd code regardless of the legal status of the GPL.
However, I think the GPL will be found to be legally sound, and SCO are just blowing steam like they have so far.
I think you're confusing the average slashdot reader with yourself.
The explainations of all these terms and more are available for anyone who cares to look. "Fair Use" and "Pump and Dump" are really pretty self-explanatory terms. Barratry is arcane, but the dictionary has a good explaination for anyone confused by it.
I was thinking of the G4 iBooks, the 12" one is only about $2100 NZD (1 NZ dollar = about 50 US cents). Only the super cheap brands (like Asus) can significantly undercut in that price bracket here in New Zealand.
Granted the iBooks aren't super fast machines, but they should be faster than my TiBook 667, which still hasn't hit the 'unbearably slow' category yet.:)
If you take the DIY market out of the equation, Apple's prices don't look too bad, but no amount of idealism is going to hike up the prices of the raw components for the so called 'white box manufacturers' or 'enthusiasts'.
Anyway back here on planet Earth, most people don't care what OS is running on that white box in the corner, particularly if it's never going to have a monitor attached, so it's not worth paying a premium for a well designed GUI or a pretty box.:)
Not true for Apple's laptops though, they cost about the same as PC laptops.
Apple's laptops and OS X make a really nice platform for controlling rooms full of headless boxes like I do. They come with a Unix like OS preconfigured to properly support PCMCIA, USB, and power management. Linux just doesn't do modern PC laptops very well, (Though the power management seems like it now works well in Linux). That has to be worth something.
wow, just imagine if microsoft (M$ to you slashbots) had done this. The editors would be up in arms screaming at the top of their lungs how evil MS is.
To be fair, this drive is designed to work with Windows, possibly to the detriment of other OS vendors who try to use standard ATAPI CD ROM drivers to access it.
Maybe there's a genuine "MS is evil" case to be answered here after all.
One more thing, what have MS done lately that makes them deserving of praise instead of the endless mountains of scorn that everyone seems to be pouring on them?
I'm pretty sure there a few other non-starters in the pack, but Sculley and Amelio made most of the supremo bad decisions with regard to marketing and sales.
I forgot another important player, Jean-Louis Gassee, who seemed to be doing his very best to alienate the developer community. A supremely self-absorbed person by all accounts, who left Apple to start his own company making computers based on a proprietary microkernel designed with POSIX compliance in mind. Ultimately admitting defeat by making it available on x86.
I feel there are some parallels between Jobs and Gassee, but I can't quite put my finger on what they might be.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a friend who works for a company that imports and rebrands ADSL routers and internal adaptors from overseas companies. I saw a disturbing and unfortunate side of Linux hardware support through them.
They used to advertise that one of their products, an internal ADSL adaptor was Linux compatible. They stopped claiming it was Linux compatible and dropped all Linux support after the endless woes they experienced trying to get the binary drivers for their devices installed on different distributions/kernel variations.
It seems that there is no way to make a driver that will definitely work with the next minor point release of the kernel, and often custom kernels will fail to work with the binary driver even when the supplied instructions are followed to the letter.
Their experience leads me to think that some kind of stable ABI is needed to allow device drivers to be distributed in a binary form. Recently I noticed some progress has been made in allowing Linux to use Windows device drivers.
It occurred to me that this seems a very good option for binary-only drivers for Linux users, and hardware manufacturers alike, allowing them to make a driver that won't be broken next time someone touches the code that the driver references, and will benefit Linux users too, giving them access to hardware for which no Linux driver yet exists, and after all who wants more binary-only cruft floating around?
Besides, having Linux native drivers might only serve to discourage people from creating open-source versions of the drivers.
You should get a G4 iBook instead then, they only cost around USD $1000 last time I checked.
Bzzt... I got developer tools with the 10.1 CDs when I bought my PowerBook 18 months ago.
Shouldn't you be hiding under a bridge somewhere waiting for billy-goats?
Nope, actually that doesn't clear anything up, because it's bullshit.
Apple don't let people using other brands of DVD-R drives use the software they created to author DVDs. You can still use other software to create DVDs including Apple's professional DVD authoring software. They don't have to subsidize other companies hardware with a product they created exclusively for users of Apple DVD recording hardware.
I take exception to the way they have chosen to enforce this policy (DMCA), but support the reasoning behind it.
Think Ranting Zealot.
You forgot to take your lithium today didn't you? The fact that Linux and NetBSD currently, or may one day be able to run OS X binaries isn't a threat.
No one is suggesting that YOU have to do anything, just bear in mind that these efforts may save your Mac one day when Apple decide it's not current enough to support.
Just because this isn't your cup of tea doesn't grant you a right to criticize how NetBSD/PPC developers spend their time. Maybe they just want to run photoshop on their Apple manufactured NetBSD box.
wow.
You're right about Aqua not being the best GUI the world has ever seen, but then nothing could take that crown because different people like different things.
Ya know... I have ctrl-option-esc set as a global key map to start a new instance of iTerm on my Mac using youpi-key. Since programs can stay in memory but not have an on screen presence, I usually don't close iTerm.
In my experience iTerm in it's 'docked' state takes about as long as an aterm to start up. Something which can't be claimed about any version of the gnome-terminal.
So anyway, what was the point of your rant?
I'll speculate and say that you've watched a couple of inexperienced trackpad users who were inexperienced with OS X fumbling around and proclaimed OS X to be the slowest thing you've ever seen.
Whatever the case, you certainly can't have spent enough effort checking the speed of OS X users to be able to do more than speculate yourself.
Just about any iCandy that makes OS X slower can be turned off. (Transparency doesn't make any difference to CPU usage on Quartz Extreme capable machines). The genie effect can be changed to scale, bouncing on app start (a big CPU hog) can be turned off. Anti-alias thresholds can be manipulated in the general preferences window.
People take a while to truly be "at home" with a new OS, particularly for Linux/Windows users, because OS X doesn't try to emulate the look and feel of windows like KDE and GNOME which most people use.
My experience after about 18 months of Mac usage is that Apple can't supply everything, but with the help of little hacks and a bit of tinkering with the GUI settings you can get OS X to work they way you do.
For you to claim that Aqua is mind-bogglingly inefficient seems a little misleading though, it's hardly likely to be as inefficient as X, and I've seen a lot of incredibly slow pretend transparency in X (terminals, KDE menus) that positively crawls in comparison to Quartz.
I guess you must have been talking about some kind of efficiency that doesn't involve speed or usability.
Wow! a tourettes syndrome filter. Where can I get one?
The trolls they are a-posting
it makes me feel sick
to see a grown person
act like such a dick
Wtf? TenCept the future? What does that mean?
Nonetheless, you are left at the mercy and whims of Apple. You saw how they cracked down on PPC clone builders, destroying many livelihoods in the process.
Firstly, all PPC clone makers were using Apple's ROM under license, it's not like Apple went out and found people making compatible computers and squashed them. These people willingly put themselves "at the mercy and whims of Apple". In much the same way as PC manufacturers grease and prostrate themselves before Microsoft.
Further, management changed at Apple, and so did the outlook on the 'clones', which had not served to increase the market share of MacOS compatible computers in the two years of their existance. Apple were getting an ever decreasing share of a shrinking market.
All of the people who licensed the clone technology from Apple must have been able to see the big black shadow of change looming well before it happened due to the big management shake-up in Cupertino.
Apple could have gone two ways, dumping the hardware business and going software only, or dumping the clones and hoping to be able to compete with Dell and H[compaq & DEC]P. But they would have been foolish to sit around and wait for their company to go down the gurgler which seemed to be Gil Amelio's management strategy.
With Apple moving to OpenStep, they put themselves in a position to support multiple architectures by porting their version of Mach to a new CPU and adding a new target architecture into the app bundle via the old NeXT development tools.
In a few years time most applications will be Cocoa (OpenStep) based and that will open up the possibility for Apple to become a software only company and supply OpenStep X based technology to any platform if their last ditch effort to stay in the hardware business fails.
All in all, not a bad business decision, apart from the 'soft costs' of bad PR and thousands of pissed off customers and a few pissed off business partners. Something which may well come back to bite them in the bum, especially with people like you spreading misinformation about the whole cloning episode.
@stake recently fired their CTO because he had the nerve to suggest that if you don't run entirely Microsoft software, then all your computers might not get infected with the same virus at the same time.
Does this sound like the kind of company that would call up Apple and tell them about a possibly embarassing security problem, or might they just take the worst possible interpretation of events and present it as fact, purely to stick it to a competitor of their favorite customer?
As a matter of fact, you DO get the source to the OS, or at least to the part of the OS that's relevant to your 17 MB copies, the microkernel, I/O subsytems and file system code are all available as part of the Opendarwin project.
You don't even have to pay for the OS to get the source code to it. How generous is that for a commercial Unix vendor?
I'm betting that for all your bleating about source code, you wouldn't have a fucking clue what to do about the problem anyway, because like 99.999% of the world you wouldn't have a clue how to optimize a filesystem or IDE transfer.
Besides, contrary to what you're saying I've found I am easily able to sustain 100Mbit when copying files to and from my PowerBook, which is not bad for a laptop. Perhaps you should look at your samba configuration, or consider using something else for your file transfers if it's going to save you as much time as your concerns indicate.
Ditto. :)
I like my mac, and I'm willing to forgive a few shortcomings here and there, and I'm even prepared to fork over money for OS upgrades when I can afford it. But based on observation I think Apple have majorly dropped the ball on the transition from 10.2 to 10.3. Probably from stretching their resources a little too far to get it released on time.
$129 USD price tag aside, it took Apple weeks to provide a fix for the recent OpenSSH server vulnerability, and when they finally did provide the fix, they rolled it into an improperly tested 'point' upgrade that screwed up some gigabit ethernet ports, halved reported battery life on some portables, and made some iMacs unbootable.
Recently Apple patched some security holes in 10.3, suggesting that they also released 10.3 prematurely. It's possible that Apple will release patches for the remaining issues in 10.2.8, but from my perspective it seems that mismanagement probably had a large hand in the relatively crap support from Apple lately.
As the bug reports (and related fixing) stop rolling in, support will probably return to normal. I really hope that this isn't a sign that Apple is about to about to abandon their responsibilities to their customers. Support, and particularly security fixes is something that I would rate Apple as pretty good at until recently. But it really is inexcusable to effectively end-of-life a 1 year old operating system.
I feel your pain brother, I bought a Sony Walkman in 1984, Sony then pulled a fast one on me turned around at started making portables that can play CDs.
I've written at least a hundred letters to Sony ever since then asking them when they are going to fix my walkman so it plays CDs as well as tapes, but they never respond.
I'm never gonna buy another Sony product again and boy will they miss my money!
That was supposed to say 1 year old OS, but my stupid evil security-hole nickle-and-dime can't-swap-ctrl-and-caps-lock Apple keyboard has the 2 and the 1 keys right next to each other.
Quick someone call Micros^W@stake about this!
Oh, well that makes dropping support for a 2 year old OS OK then :D
Agree'd. Just another argument for me to keep more Mac servers out of my office. If Apple expects us to update constantly (and most updates hoze everything anyways) we'll have a headache on our hand. Mac as servers not that good anyways...
What the fuck are you talking about? I've never had any problems with OS upgrades for my mac (I've gone from 10.0 through to 10.2.8) and I don't personally know anyone else who has, where are you getting your information that "most updates hoze everything"?
And what's with this "Apple expects us to update" when you've just said you want to "keep macs out of your office" why are you playing with macs if you want them out of your office?
I know, it's because you're full of shit and trolling, right?
This goes against a couple centuries of copyright law interpretation which is firmly *against* entry of any copyrighted work into the public domain without the express indication thereof by its author. This just isn't going to happen.
:)
I'm not a historian, or a lawyer, but the way I understand; it used to be that if work wasn't explicitly copyrighted it was in the public domain, and a fairly recent law turned the tables so that work is implicitly copyrighted, and has to be explicitly placed in the public domain.
I don't know when this law change happened, but I do understand enough about copyright law to say that the chicken licken impersonator who posted the parent to my comment was majorly overreacting.
It seems a very remote possibility that the GPL would somehow dissolve into nothing, but I was saying even if that did happen, it still wouldn't be the end of the world, or even of open-source software.
If a ruling is passed in favour of the GPL, then well and good. What I'm worried about is what SCO (and guys like MS, and Sun I guess) would be angling for is that the GPL is defeated. In which case, where does that leave us? It'd be Armaggedon for those of us who feel the GPL serves a purpose and is a good tool. To add insult to injury, what would happen subsequently to that will be wholesale theft of the already-out-in-the-open GPL-ed code by all sorts of unscrupulous and/or "careless" companies.
No, it either leaves work under the GPL protected by basic copyrights, or in the public domain.
No-one is going to die, open-source is not going to disappear. The worst that can happen is more widespread rights for interested parties to incorporate GPL'd works without credit, and all the GPL favouring authors will have to find a new license to place future works under.
In a way, even the worst case scenario is likely to weaken the case for other corporates wanting to follow in SCO's footsteps, because commercial vendors are far more likely to incorporate the huge volumes of truely free software into their proprietary products, and will then have difficulty proving whether they incorporated said code into theirs before or after that code was licensed under the GPL2 or whatever replaces the GPL.
For this reason, smart companies will steer clear of assimilating GPL'd code regardless of the legal status of the GPL.
However, I think the GPL will be found to be legally sound, and SCO are just blowing steam like they have so far.
I think you're confusing the average slashdot reader with yourself.
The explainations of all these terms and more are available for anyone who cares to look. "Fair Use" and "Pump and Dump" are really pretty self-explanatory terms. Barratry is arcane, but the dictionary has a good explaination for anyone confused by it.
I was thinking of the G4 iBooks, the 12" one is only about $2100 NZD (1 NZ dollar = about 50 US cents). Only the super cheap brands (like Asus) can significantly undercut in that price bracket here in New Zealand.
:)
:)
Granted the iBooks aren't super fast machines, but they should be faster than my TiBook 667, which still hasn't hit the 'unbearably slow' category yet.
If you take the DIY market out of the equation, Apple's prices don't look too bad, but no amount of idealism is going to hike up the prices of the raw components for the so called 'white box manufacturers' or 'enthusiasts'.
Anyway back here on planet Earth, most people don't care what OS is running on that white box in the corner, particularly if it's never going to have a monitor attached, so it's not worth paying a premium for a well designed GUI or a pretty box.
Not true for Apple's laptops though, they cost about the same as PC laptops.
Apple's laptops and OS X make a really nice platform for controlling rooms full of headless boxes like I do. They come with a Unix like OS preconfigured to properly support PCMCIA, USB, and power management. Linux just doesn't do modern PC laptops very well, (Though the power management seems like it now works well in Linux). That has to be worth something.
wow, just imagine if microsoft (M$ to you slashbots) had done this. The editors would be up in arms screaming at the top of their lungs how evil MS is.
To be fair, this drive is designed to work with Windows, possibly to the detriment of other OS vendors who try to use standard ATAPI CD ROM drivers to access it.
Maybe there's a genuine "MS is evil" case to be answered here after all.
One more thing, what have MS done lately that makes them deserving of praise instead of the endless mountains of scorn that everyone seems to be pouring on them?
I'm pretty sure there a few other non-starters in the pack, but Sculley and Amelio made most of the supremo bad decisions with regard to marketing and sales.
I forgot another important player, Jean-Louis Gassee, who seemed to be doing his very best to alienate the developer community. A supremely self-absorbed person by all accounts, who left Apple to start his own company making computers based on a proprietary microkernel designed with POSIX compliance in mind. Ultimately admitting defeat by making it available on x86.
I feel there are some parallels between Jobs and Gassee, but I can't quite put my finger on what they might be.
Yep, right up until the point that Pepsi and Apple give away 100 million songs in 300 million bottles of Pepsi.