Well, I likewise think you're mistaken. Wikipedia confirms that IE 4s release heralded the "integration" of OS and browser. This "integration" is precisely the pile of crap that made IE completely unusable. It may have rendered "better", but it was not a better browser.
I remember lots of people getting up in arms about the changes to their systems after installing IE 4, and the fact that they couldn't uninstall it. I'd have to say that IE 4 was probably the "worst" browser out there, but that's based on the entire package, not just how it rendered a page.
IE 5+ certainly is not faster. There is a well-known configuration change you can make in Mozilla/FF if you want the "apparent" speed of IE. There's a 250ms delay in initiating rendering to allow the page to load. IE starts rendering as the page streams in. The "speed" is misleading, as Mozilla/FF will usually render the full page faster, although IE seems to start earlier, it has to reflow the page.
ActiveX is an abomination. Generally, innovation in the tech industry has connotations of "good", but you're technically correct and the proper statement is "ActiveX was a terrible innovation, much like MS Bob but worse".
I had issues with Word printing the same page on HP LaserJet IIs, LaserJet IIIs, LaserJet IVs, and QMS laser printers. You even had issues between a LaserJet IIIM and LaserJet IIIP. Paragraphs and lines of text would vary from printer to printer. This is directly due to the GDI architecture used by most printer drivers within Windows. I do not believe they've ever fixed this, nor that it is fixable without a core architectural change.
Postscript, on the other hand, always rendered the same information in the same way on a page. It's why we used Postscript to print all our documents. There's nothing more infuriating that going on Page 9, para 3, line 4 - next to word 'x', wait, you don't have that? You neither? OK, the para starts with... You have that on page 10? Wow, thinking about that still makes me cringe.
WordPerfect also did not suffer from this problem, quite possibly because my version was DOS based and had its own printer driver set.
I only recently printed PDFs, and they've always printed precisely how I'd expect as related to what I see on a single page.
I wonder why people see this a such a bad thing. Reinventing the wheel is viewed as a anti-pattern in the programming world, but when a large company chooses to not do it through acquisitions, it's viewed as a bad thing. Probably because when the MS monopoly gets a hold of it, the product is usually doomed. They don't acquire things to add features, they acquire things to dominate a market niche. Look at IE - they dominated and disbanded the team until someone else came along (Firefox) and kicked IE's worthless butt.
Note that I did not state that MS stole Sybase's code, mainly because I recall some vague unpleasantness about the split up wherein MS legally but underhandedly took advantage of Sybase. Then again, that's pretty much what they did with IBM too. Took DDE and made it the basis for OLE which is a big part of the reason Windows "won". Think about this: had IBM said "no, we won't share that patent" what would have happend when OS/2 w/ (D)SOM came out and was able to do all this nifty functionality that didn't exist on Windows?
Netscape's demise was partly due to IE's tying, and partly to internal stupid mistakes. They were the better browser when they were releasing. There was also Opera at the time, which has been better than IE since IE took over market dominance from Netscape in 99. (Yes, it was that recently, although everyone saw it coming)
Netscape 6 was a flaky POS, and left you with Netscape 4.78 if you were virulently anti-MS.:)
Look at word is now from where it started, or Windows for that matter. Yes, let's. Word - POS that still cannot consistently print text from printer to printer. That may in part be because of...Windows a POS that still runs like shit, even after 15 years of "development".
OK, two bad examples:
MS/Bought/ DOS, and they innovated (or in some cases as another slasdotter mentioned, pilfered) quite a bit onto it to get another OS - the 9x branch of Windows. Actually, MS were fortunate to be able to buy DOS after they'd effectively already sold it. And windows certainly wasn't much of an innovation. It was so bad, people regularly dropped out of it to actually get some work done. The later 9x versions were a little slicker and certainly worked better than the previous incarnations, but were still flaky as hell. DOS mode was used heavily before the first service packs came out, along with new versions of third party software. In any case, the Win9x interface was still a bare shadow of the functionality of Next or PM on OS/2, and no where near as solid as either of those, Solaris or Irix.
Another bad example of merely copying others. That's not innovation.
Another thought: IE, look at where it was when MS bought it. Look at it now. Some of the stuff on their is their innovation, some of it is cloned from things others have done. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. IE - manipulated into dominance by MS with what is undoubtedly the worst browser implementation out there with some of the worst features (ActiveX being #1 on that list). It fails to render standard HTML. It fails in CSS support. It fails in security. It just fails.
What's good about it? At least prior to IE 4.02 (I think it was) you could at least effectively uninstall the POS.
List me some innovation. I see none in your examples.
Sometimes they don't steal the idea, they steal the code : anyone remembers Stacker? It wasn't just Stacker. SPC QDOS (they sold it then bought it, so they sold something they didn't own.) There's also the Spyglass incident.
And we can't overlook the Sybase SQL code that became the basis for SQL Server, although that was done under a negotiated license... which sounds familiarly like Spyglass.
But seriously, why would it have to be an astronaut "currently active" in the space program? Surely you could still have Neil Armstrong or John Glenn be your astronaut hero. I'm sure a lot of people still hold up Michael Jordan as their sports hero, even though he's been retired for years.
That illustrates my point precisely. First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
I'm not sure we compare Michael Jordan to an astronaut. The analogy holds, however, much deeper than you think. More below:
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings.
That could be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first who did something only 12 humans have done, and we remember some firsts. Heck, do you know who stayed in the command capsule and flew around the moon while the other two were cavorting? Do you know who the first 3 were that flew around the moon? Do you know the first 3 that died?
Today, I think only some will know about Virgil (Gus) Grissom, even fewer will know his two crew members names: Edward White and Roger B. Chaffee. Astronaut deaths unfortunately became a lot more common with the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and thus the uniqueness of the deaths of the first three faded (Time has a lot to do with it as well, although had those other two disasters not happened, many more would know about the original Apollo 1 crew). Other than Christa McAuliffe, who else died on Challenger? Why do we know her? (Hint, she was a civilian astronaut - the first) What about Columbia?
Now to get back to the Michael Jordan analogy. Note that while we may still know Michael Jordan, I will guarantee you that many of today's teenagers do not. He's not a hero to them, he's before their time. He will fade although he will be remembered for a while. Look at Wilt Chamberlain. He too has largely faded, although he still holds several records. Charles Barkley, on the other hand, flashed and is almost forgotten.
Basically fame is fleeting, unless you're completely severed from the rest of the population by your actions. Certain (in)famous people will long be remembered (Charlemagne, Hitler, Einstein, Nixon, Washington, Armstrong, Stalin, Hawking, Julius Caesar, etc) and you'll note there are more infamous than famous ones in that list. There's a definite reason for that, and that is that (fortunately) it is much easier to go very negative than very positive outside the envelop of normal human behavior.
Even when someone does go far outside the norm, they can be forgotten. Quick - who was the first person to break the sound barrier? That was considered at the time to be as large a feat as the moon landing. You should have seen some of the articles of the time, even by scientists, about the absolute BS about what happens when you break the sound barrier. Makes for very entertaining, but sobering, reading. You see, the equations for air flow reach an asymptotic limit, or singularity, at Mach 1. In reality, it's quite similar to our current understanding about the speed limit of light. It too reaches a asymptotic limit, but the laws of physics as we understand them prevent us from accelerating anything faster
But suspensions and the like are mixtures with sometimes odd behavior. Toothpaste and liquid body armor are two with oddball properties. Basic glass is another odd material, a homogeneous super-cooled liquid that mostly acts like a solid. But they all fall within the "normal" states.
Plasma and B-E condensates have both been created in the lab. It's interesting to see a natural new state appearing on the planet.
While Belgium makes lots of chocolate, the best chocolate I've had by far is from Holland, which is also the land of cheese. Belgium is the land of beer. France, champagne and perhaps some reds and food made out of things you'd scrape off your shoe, Italy also has red wine, and Germany white whine and sausages.
There - if I left anything out - someone's sure to come along and point that out.
Unfortunately, while TFA is descriptive and informative, it reads more like a PR than a scientific paper. It sounds like everything still needs to be verified. The headline is certainly misleading, as no experiments of any sort have been done to prove that they can do any of the manipulations that are required to advance quantum computing.
This is merely the very very early stages of basic research. Very interesting none the less.
it also gives you a couple of pounds of electricity sucking weight and a single point of failure. BTW, when I looked up prices for self-powered hard drives with this capability, $300 got you a maximum 200GB drive. $150 got you 40-80GB.
I'm sure you could probably find something cheaper, but those were the prices I found. The real question is where are you going and what are your storage needs.
5GB? That's all? Seriously, why cart around a $300+ HD when you can just buy large amounts of flash memory cards for about $10/GB, perhaps less if you shop ahead of time with rebates etc.
This seems way cheaper and certainly lighter than the HD option.
However, if you're truly going backpacking, don't bring a notebook of any type. You won't use it. I went for a 30 day trip through just Europe a while back (pre digital camera days) and brought 35mm camera with a couple of lenses and a medium sized lightweight tripod. Got great pictures, but that rig sure got heavy.
Went on another much later with a small digital camera and a super small tripod, took about twice as many pictures, got some relatively decent ones considering it was a point and shoot on a 4" tripod:) and in general had a great time. The tripod/camera combo was pocketable, used xD cards so carrying a 1000 pictures worth of memory was no problem. I enjoyed that vacation more because taking pictures was quick and easy, without having to lug what seemed like tons of crap.
It really depends upon what the purpose of your trip is. The time frame of 1 year also adds to it. If you're frequently going to places where power in unreliable or unavailable, look for something to take that runs on easy to get batteries.
I'm also going to guess you're going to be carrying some sort of cell phone, since you were considering a notebook. Maybe look at getting a phone that doubles as some or most of the functionality of the notebook that you needed will suffice?
Most importantly, remember you're going to see stuff, not your gear (you can do that @ home) unless you're writing a travel book or something like it.
Really, the category is almost too tight to call. While MythTV has some better UI choices and abilities, TiVo's standard interface is more simple to setup (turn on the box) and more people are use to it.
Read: "more people have used it and learned it"
If that isn't the worst reason to rate something better than it obviously is from their own tests, I don't know what would be.
Look at what Microsoft foisted upon the world, in the form of Win9X. Talk about your high level of suck... and we accepted it! Not for all of us. Win9x existed solely on a separate partition for the couple of games that weren't supported on OS/2. Linux just wasn't up to the job at the time of playing desktop, although it made a damn good server even back then.
There's another problem with multi-cast: MS's stack doesn't handle it correctly. If multi-cast did work correctly, youTube could utilize it to stream their videos. Might save them some bandwidth as well.
There was also the 12221-1111-111-111 string (or something very close to that). They worked for more than merely 98. Note that once dominance was achieved, around the release of Win2K, or was it XP, a new alpha-numeric key scheme was devised without the good "dev" license that made generic piracy much more difficult. It also caused issues in the corporate environment, hence the volume licensing keys, of which at least two were revoked.
As their dominance grew, WGA came out. Then several interesting things happened. Apple's market share actually started growing. Linux became actually almost friendly to install, and the server base for MS stalled, if not going into decline. Solaris became "Open". Vista came out and did a $300/copy face plant as predicted everywhere but in Redmond.
WGA all of a sudden becomes "less" restrictive.
I don't think that's a coincidence. MS needs people exposed to Vista, or it will truly fail.
You deserve a funny mod, at the least. Whatever my memory of the event(s), I could find no definitive statement to the effect that MS was pro-piracy. Lenient, lack of action, indifferent, yes. Pro? No.
Actually, Symantec AV, XP and Outlook w/ large PSTs can, under certain circumstances, create a 0 length PST. I had it happen twice. I no longer use Outlook for anything I care about, it was what moved me to Thunderbird 0.5, I think it was.
Does this surprise anyone? An installed base is marketing base. If people have pirated your OS instead of installing a competing product, the only issue you have is getting them to pay for it instead of convincing them to switch. Seems the former is much easier than the latter from all experiences so far. You also have the ability to sell them additional packages for your system without having to develop/sell such product supporting third party software. Another win, even if you can't convince them to pay for the OS to begin with.
I recall in the late 80s early 90s MS almost encouraged piracy, in an effort to kill off a slew of alternate OSes.
I used to not buy a car that was worth more than 20-25% of the original new value. I drove some of those for years. I also spent lots and lots of time repairing them. At some point, my "spare" time for car repairs including disruptions to schedules wound up being more expensive than buying a new car and having a reliable vehicle.
My last vehicle was 7 years old. It required around $2K of repairs that I just didn't have time to do myself. It probably would have cost me at least 1 week's worth of spare time, and I'm not sure I had the right equipment anyways, as it involved a manifold leak of antifreeze and oil into the cylinders. I did buy it new, and I did do my own brake job (still cost over $120 just for after market parts, but much better than the $700 the dealer wanted). But other issues related to age and mileage were starting to crop up, so I sold it and got a new BMW. Why the BMW? Because after 3 years, according to the depreciation charts and expected maintenance, I'll lose less than I did on the previous 7 year old car on a per year basis. I also considered second hand cars. With the higher repair costs associated with those and continued depreciation they also came out to be about the same year over year, not to mention there's no real warranty and you're relatively unsure of the history. So if you don't mind a chunk of cash sitting on 4 wheels, for the type of car I was looking for new was a better deal than used.
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Well, I likewise think you're mistaken. Wikipedia confirms that IE 4s release heralded the "integration" of OS and browser. This "integration" is precisely the pile of crap that made IE completely unusable. It may have rendered "better", but it was not a better browser.
I remember lots of people getting up in arms about the changes to their systems after installing IE 4, and the fact that they couldn't uninstall it. I'd have to say that IE 4 was probably the "worst" browser out there, but that's based on the entire package, not just how it rendered a page.
IE 5+ certainly is not faster. There is a well-known configuration change you can make in Mozilla/FF if you want the "apparent" speed of IE. There's a 250ms delay in initiating rendering to allow the page to load. IE starts rendering as the page streams in. The "speed" is misleading, as Mozilla/FF will usually render the full page faster, although IE seems to start earlier, it has to reflow the page.
ActiveX is an abomination. Generally, innovation in the tech industry has connotations of "good", but you're technically correct and the proper statement is "ActiveX was a terrible innovation, much like MS Bob but worse".
I had issues with Word printing the same page on HP LaserJet IIs, LaserJet IIIs, LaserJet IVs, and QMS laser printers. You even had issues between a LaserJet IIIM and LaserJet IIIP. Paragraphs and lines of text would vary from printer to printer. This is directly due to the GDI architecture used by most printer drivers within Windows. I do not believe they've ever fixed this, nor that it is fixable without a core architectural change.
Postscript, on the other hand, always rendered the same information in the same way on a page. It's why we used Postscript to print all our documents. There's nothing more infuriating that going on Page 9, para 3, line 4 - next to word 'x', wait, you don't have that? You neither? OK, the para starts with... You have that on page 10? Wow, thinking about that still makes me cringe.
WordPerfect also did not suffer from this problem, quite possibly because my version was DOS based and had its own printer driver set.
I only recently printed PDFs, and they've always printed precisely how I'd expect as related to what I see on a single page.
As for Duvel, sorry to hear that. Maybe there's an online shippable solution for you?
Note that I did not state that MS stole Sybase's code, mainly because I recall some vague unpleasantness about the split up wherein MS legally but underhandedly took advantage of Sybase. Then again, that's pretty much what they did with IBM too. Took DDE and made it the basis for OLE which is a big part of the reason Windows "won". Think about this: had IBM said "no, we won't share that patent" what would have happend when OS/2 w/ (D)SOM came out and was able to do all this nifty functionality that didn't exist on Windows?
What ifs.... so many what ifs.
Netscape's demise was partly due to IE's tying, and partly to internal stupid mistakes. They were the better browser when they were releasing. There was also Opera at the time, which has been better than IE since IE took over market dominance from Netscape in 99. (Yes, it was that recently, although everyone saw it coming)
:)
Netscape 6 was a flaky POS, and left you with Netscape 4.78 if you were virulently anti-MS.
Look at word is now from where it started, or Windows for that matter. Yes, let's. Word - POS that still cannot consistently print text from printer to printer. That may in part be because of...Windows a POS that still runs like shit, even after 15 years of "development".
OK, two bad examples: MS
Another bad example of merely copying others. That's not innovation. Another thought: IE, look at where it was when MS bought it. Look at it now. Some of the stuff on their is their innovation, some of it is cloned from things others have done. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. IE - manipulated into dominance by MS with what is undoubtedly the worst browser implementation out there with some of the worst features (ActiveX being #1 on that list). It fails to render standard HTML. It fails in CSS support. It fails in security. It just fails.
What's good about it? At least prior to IE 4.02 (I think it was) you could at least effectively uninstall the POS.
List me some innovation. I see none in your examples.
And we can't overlook the Sybase SQL code that became the basis for SQL Server, although that was done under a negotiated license... which sounds familiarly like Spyglass.
Dropping to $0 won't cause much of a splash as it's barely a step down. The big sucking sound as SCO's hot air vanishes will be notable though.
But seriously, why would it have to be an astronaut "currently active" in the space program? Surely you could still have Neil Armstrong or John Glenn be your astronaut hero. I'm sure a lot of people still hold up Michael Jordan as their sports hero, even though he's been retired for years.
That illustrates my point precisely. First, on the sports angle - it's sad that we would even compare some guy who scored lots of points in a game where you throw a ball in a hole and who could jump high to a guy who straps himself into skyscraper sized machine with enough fuel to incinerate Florida, escapes the atmosphere, throws on a suit and leaves the shuttle to walk around in the empty vacuum of space, tethered by a little stringy rope and risking his life every second of the way in a manner that no other man or woman on the planet could even comprehend.
I'm not sure we compare Michael Jordan to an astronaut. The analogy holds, however, much deeper than you think. More below:
Second, on the Neil Armstrong angle. That the only space heroes we could conjure up are those that were around when most of our parents were still watching Saturday morning cartoons is the perfect illustration of how pathetic our desire for exploration has become. Astronauts today are doing far more heroic things every time they step into that suit above and beyond most other human beings.
That could be because Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first who did something only 12 humans have done, and we remember some firsts. Heck, do you know who stayed in the command capsule and flew around the moon while the other two were cavorting? Do you know who the first 3 were that flew around the moon? Do you know the first 3 that died?
Today, I think only some will know about Virgil (Gus) Grissom, even fewer will know his two crew members names: Edward White and Roger B. Chaffee. Astronaut deaths unfortunately became a lot more common with the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and thus the uniqueness of the deaths of the first three faded (Time has a lot to do with it as well, although had those other two disasters not happened, many more would know about the original Apollo 1 crew). Other than Christa McAuliffe, who else died on Challenger? Why do we know her? (Hint, she was a civilian astronaut - the first) What about Columbia?
Now to get back to the Michael Jordan analogy. Note that while we may still know Michael Jordan, I will guarantee you that many of today's teenagers do not. He's not a hero to them, he's before their time. He will fade although he will be remembered for a while. Look at Wilt Chamberlain. He too has largely faded, although he still holds several records. Charles Barkley, on the other hand, flashed and is almost forgotten.
Basically fame is fleeting, unless you're completely severed from the rest of the population by your actions. Certain (in)famous people will long be remembered (Charlemagne, Hitler, Einstein, Nixon, Washington, Armstrong, Stalin, Hawking, Julius Caesar, etc) and you'll note there are more infamous than famous ones in that list. There's a definite reason for that, and that is that (fortunately) it is much easier to go very negative than very positive outside the envelop of normal human behavior.
Even when someone does go far outside the norm, they can be forgotten. Quick - who was the first person to break the sound barrier? That was considered at the time to be as large a feat as the moon landing. You should have seen some of the articles of the time, even by scientists, about the absolute BS about what happens when you break the sound barrier. Makes for very entertaining, but sobering, reading. You see, the equations for air flow reach an asymptotic limit, or singularity, at Mach 1. In reality, it's quite similar to our current understanding about the speed limit of light. It too reaches a asymptotic limit, but the laws of physics as we understand them prevent us from accelerating anything faster
But suspensions and the like are mixtures with sometimes odd behavior. Toothpaste and liquid body armor are two with oddball properties. Basic glass is another odd material, a homogeneous super-cooled liquid that mostly acts like a solid. But they all fall within the "normal" states.
Plasma and B-E condensates have both been created in the lab. It's interesting to see a natural new state appearing on the planet.
Just as long as they continue to support DX9 fully, I don't really care. I'd rather have them support OpenGL, but that's wishing for the whole pie.
While Belgium makes lots of chocolate, the best chocolate I've had by far is from Holland, which is also the land of cheese. Belgium is the land of beer. France, champagne and perhaps some reds and food made out of things you'd scrape off your shoe, Italy also has red wine, and Germany white whine and sausages.
There - if I left anything out - someone's sure to come along and point that out.
Unfortunately, while TFA is descriptive and informative, it reads more like a PR than a scientific paper. It sounds like everything still needs to be verified. The headline is certainly misleading, as no experiments of any sort have been done to prove that they can do any of the manipulations that are required to advance quantum computing.
This is merely the very very early stages of basic research. Very interesting none the less.
it also gives you a couple of pounds of electricity sucking weight and a single point of failure. BTW, when I looked up prices for self-powered hard drives with this capability, $300 got you a maximum 200GB drive. $150 got you 40-80GB.
I'm sure you could probably find something cheaper, but those were the prices I found. The real question is where are you going and what are your storage needs.
5GB? That's all? Seriously, why cart around a $300+ HD when you can just buy large amounts of flash memory cards for about $10/GB, perhaps less if you shop ahead of time with rebates etc.
This seems way cheaper and certainly lighter than the HD option.
Well said.
:) and in general had a great time. The tripod/camera combo was pocketable, used xD cards so carrying a 1000 pictures worth of memory was no problem. I enjoyed that vacation more because taking pictures was quick and easy, without having to lug what seemed like tons of crap.
However, if you're truly going backpacking, don't bring a notebook of any type. You won't use it. I went for a 30 day trip through just Europe a while back (pre digital camera days) and brought 35mm camera with a couple of lenses and a medium sized lightweight tripod. Got great pictures, but that rig sure got heavy.
Went on another much later with a small digital camera and a super small tripod, took about twice as many pictures, got some relatively decent ones considering it was a point and shoot on a 4" tripod
It really depends upon what the purpose of your trip is. The time frame of 1 year also adds to it. If you're frequently going to places where power in unreliable or unavailable, look for something to take that runs on easy to get batteries.
I'm also going to guess you're going to be carrying some sort of cell phone, since you were considering a notebook. Maybe look at getting a phone that doubles as some or most of the functionality of the notebook that you needed will suffice?
Most importantly, remember you're going to see stuff, not your gear (you can do that @ home) unless you're writing a travel book or something like it.
If that isn't the worst reason to rate something better than it obviously is from their own tests, I don't know what would be.
There's another problem with multi-cast: MS's stack doesn't handle it correctly. If multi-cast did work correctly, youTube could utilize it to stream their videos. Might save them some bandwidth as well.
There was also the 12221-1111-111-111 string (or something very close to that). They worked for more than merely 98. Note that once dominance was achieved, around the release of Win2K, or was it XP, a new alpha-numeric key scheme was devised without the good "dev" license that made generic piracy much more difficult. It also caused issues in the corporate environment, hence the volume licensing keys, of which at least two were revoked.
As their dominance grew, WGA came out. Then several interesting things happened. Apple's market share actually started growing. Linux became actually almost friendly to install, and the server base for MS stalled, if not going into decline. Solaris became "Open". Vista came out and did a $300/copy face plant as predicted everywhere but in Redmond.
WGA all of a sudden becomes "less" restrictive.
I don't think that's a coincidence. MS needs people exposed to Vista, or it will truly fail.
You deserve a funny mod, at the least. Whatever my memory of the event(s), I could find no definitive statement to the effect that MS was pro-piracy. Lenient, lack of action, indifferent, yes. Pro? No.
That's not really the same thing - that's more akin to downloading a CD to see if it's worth buying.
Actually, Symantec AV, XP and Outlook w/ large PSTs can, under certain circumstances, create a 0 length PST. I had it happen twice. I no longer use Outlook for anything I care about, it was what moved me to Thunderbird 0.5, I think it was.
Does this surprise anyone? An installed base is marketing base. If people have pirated your OS instead of installing a competing product, the only issue you have is getting them to pay for it instead of convincing them to switch. Seems the former is much easier than the latter from all experiences so far. You also have the ability to sell them additional packages for your system without having to develop/sell such product supporting third party software. Another win, even if you can't convince them to pay for the OS to begin with.
I recall in the late 80s early 90s MS almost encouraged piracy, in an effort to kill off a slew of alternate OSes.
I used to not buy a car that was worth more than 20-25% of the original new value. I drove some of those for years. I also spent lots and lots of time repairing them. At some point, my "spare" time for car repairs including disruptions to schedules wound up being more expensive than buying a new car and having a reliable vehicle.
My last vehicle was 7 years old. It required around $2K of repairs that I just didn't have time to do myself. It probably would have cost me at least 1 week's worth of spare time, and I'm not sure I had the right equipment anyways, as it involved a manifold leak of antifreeze and oil into the cylinders. I did buy it new, and I did do my own brake job (still cost over $120 just for after market parts, but much better than the $700 the dealer wanted). But other issues related to age and mileage were starting to crop up, so I sold it and got a new BMW. Why the BMW? Because after 3 years, according to the depreciation charts and expected maintenance, I'll lose less than I did on the previous 7 year old car on a per year basis. I also considered second hand cars. With the higher repair costs associated with those and continued depreciation they also came out to be about the same year over year, not to mention there's no real warranty and you're relatively unsure of the history. So if you don't mind a chunk of cash sitting on 4 wheels, for the type of car I was looking for new was a better deal than used.