To be fair, when MS did this, it was not yet a full-fledged monopoly. However, its actions were definitely anti-competitive, and used illegal tying tactics to succeed.
Had MS merely published their software, there would have been little to argue about. However, in their vendor contracts, they utilized their perceived/virtual monopoly in OEM OS contracts to force Office 95 into the mix. That was illegal, and that's where they truly succeeded in killing the competitive market and we're left with what exists to this day.
If Longhorn's less stable than XP, you can forget anyone "upgrading" to it. Everyone will stick with XP no matter what MS decides. Their ability to take actions to force upgrades has been severely curtailed since they've been declared a monopoly, witness new Office versions being ignored uniformly for existing versions.
Given MS's history, it's not unfathomable that Longhorn will fail as badly as ME, or at least NT 3.x or even 4.x.
Let's take a look - supposedly completely different API set for full functionality. Major change in core code (moving to managed code) as a first iteration product. MS's history with first iteration products is uniformly bad. A "compatibility" layer. Hmmm, can we say "hamstrung performance"?
I can see businesses staying away from this in droves for years (look at how long XP took to make it to a majority of desktops). It may eventually succeed, but only because years of waves will wear down any cliff.
It's got so many gotcha's, it's not even funny. It's completely unsuitable for anything even remotely considered for true e-commerce unless you've got millions to spend on hardware/software licenses, and even then you're just asking to get burned.
I'm not talking about a 1 or 2 user system either, but something that does 100s of transactions per second. MS SQL has many known issues running at these kinds of loads. Oracle, DB/2, and Sybase certainly don't, and Postgres and MySQL will also beat it in certain arenas. (OK, so you can create problems with any of these systems by bad design, but none have issues that you cannot get around with good design - MS SQL has issues that you cannot work around.)
I can't think of 1 MS product I "prefer" to use over its counterparts. There are products made for Windows that I do utilize, but those are not made by MS. As a matter of fact, my Windows boxes don't have any MS applications installed, and even have some of the applications that come with the OS uninstalled or disabled, to enabled the system to be somewhat stable.
Microsoft having Office 95 ask for a memory address at the 2GB limit, even though no desktop machine at the time came with even 512MB. The sole purpose of this exercise? To have Office not be able to run on OS/2, whose VM had a limit of 512MB (the shame!!!).
Or about making Office 95 docs incompatible with all previous versions of Office (again, a direct stab at forcing everyone to upgrade, and leaving OS/2 out in the cold. It wasn't so much about other word processors, since none of them could accurately deal with the ever changing screwed up word markup, and they were always months and months behind at the time.)
Or, how about Microsoft selling an "OS" to IBM before they actually owned the rights to it?
And lastly, the little negotiating with a company for a year and stealing their tech has happened numerous times.
I wasn't comparing 12" laptops, although if we were, the iBook comes in @ $800 for a low price point, up to $1400 I believe for a fully decked out 14". You can't compare the price of a top-end powerbook with a bottom end Dell unless you list all the items the Dell doesn't have.
What I was comparing: 15" widescreen 5400+ rpm drives Gb ethernet BlueTooth 54g wireless 1.5GB RAM 4+ hour battery life Lots of style and usability features too numerous to list Reliability
I don't even know if the Toshiba had all those features, but I know some other things about Toshiba's, having used several.
Sure, here's a $2400 machine that closely matches features of a Powerbook.
Items considered to match - wide screen, drive size and speed, CPU capability and speed (This is an M with a slightly faster clock), memory size (which, btw, is only 512MB as shipped, add another $180) and a name-brand. Off-brand notebooks need not be considered. Their quality in general is too uncertain, and while some may be excellent, many are unreliable in one facet or another.
Last, there are the issues of size, battery life, and style. I don't know what the battery life is for the referred notebook, Toshiba's style is usually relatively clunky, and the size is considerably bigger than a Powerbook.
Now, for XP, yes, I agree, it's been out for years. I've not used it successfully on a notebook (only tried it on one, and that particular Toshiba did not have a full suite of XP compatible drivers) I'll also state that I never successfully got a Windows notebook to sleep successfully consistently. My powerbook's been through numerous sleep-wake cycles over the past 3 weeks with not a single hiccup, even running Windows Media Player and multiple MS Office X windows when going to sleep. BTW, Office X is the one thing that crashes regularly....
I already converted. I bought a 15" powerbook. With after market addition of a 1GB DIMM raising the price to $2100, it does everything a $2500 windows machine does with much less worries regarding a virus, and also does the sleep mode reliably. Previous experience with a Windows 2K laptop weren't near as pleasant and I've only been using it for 3 weeks.
Yes, there's some getting used to Mac ways of doing things, and some "unlearning" of bad windows habits. But, all in all, it's roughly equivalent to switching to a new Windows version as far as learning curve goes, with the additional benefit that everything just seems to work as a cohesive whole.
Now someone will come along and say - but this item works in some screwy way. I haven't found that item yet.;)
Re:I just want C++ programs to COMPILE faster
on
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Go back in time when the STL was still under development. The namespaces were first seriously used with the STL, and the compilers I was using on the SGI box were unable to handle the resulting 255+ character munged namespaces.
I'm not sure the business environment has ever based its choices on elegance.
I'd have to agree with you there - COBOL would finish that argument.;)
It seems the tide has turned, whether Dell sees it or not. A multi CPU Opteron system blows away any comparable (number of CPUs and GHz, even though GHz is fading fast as a true indicator) Intel system in performance, and $ for $, well, there's really no comparison.
Also look at the gaming world - they're pretty much all heading for AMD 64 systems.
You have a problem. I get 3-4 hours on my brand new 15" PB, and that's with the screen at about 50% brightness.
One thing you might want to check is whether you're running too many programs, thus utilizing all your memory and causing swapping. In that scenario, your HD will never spin down due to swapping, and that will eat up your battery life significantly. It would also explain the apparent "slowness" of your system. 1GB RAM for some of the items you're talking about would be minimum. I'd prefer 1.5GB or even 2GB. (BTW, an Intel desktop running Windows XP with 512MB RAM and doing any type of graphics editing will pretty much cause your system to crawl.)
There are also settings you can tweak in System Preferences that will either allow you to extend your battery life or increase responsiveness/performance. (It's a trade off) You might also want to turn off some of the eye candy to increase responsiveness. (The same can be done with Windows systems, their eye candy makes even the fastest desktop respond too slowly for me)
Last, there might be a problem with your battery or your system. In that case, you'll have to have Apple check out your PB.
Good Luck.
Re:I just want C++ programs to COMPILE faster
on
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Having just viewed C++ for the first time in 5 years, I must say, yuck! Namespaces in the STL are what drove me from C++ in the first place. I'm glad they got the STL to work, but namespaces are still ungodly ugly, and their pervasiveness within C++ make what used to look like an elegant language an ungainly loaded behemoth Pascal offspring, and compiling it pretty much brought down a decent SGI machine of the time.
I'd rather use straight C at this point than C++ with the STL. Java is ever more elegant, perhaps one reason it eclipses C++ in the general business environment. (OK, so there's the generally accepted benefits of built in memory management to prevent neophytes from stubbing their toes and bringing down the house....) But with the JDK improving performance with every release, and Java gaining many of the lacking items in the the 1.5 release (ok, so some are compile time only) it's easy to see why Java continues to be a favorite of developers.
It would depend on what you're doing. For multi-threaded apps, definitely dual core would be better in most cases, as there can be on-die memory optimizations (Power and AMD have these, Intel does not, at least not worth talking about)
For a partitioning of servers, such as 1 CPU per VM, most likely single CPUs would be better. If it's 2 CPUs per VM, then dual core wins again.
I can't wait for dual core CPUs myself, but I have to.:-/
It's a G4 dual core, most likely, or, if the Power5 multi-core specs can be believed, perhaps the next PowerBook major upgrade will house a dual core Power5 (G6?) CPU?
First, WinFS winds up not being a new file system, but a system on top of the NTFS file system. (Or, at least, that's their current statement on what it is)
Second, WinFS is stated to be a DB like layer of the file system, improving search and visual representation by offering multiple views. You'd think they would have done this with email clients first, yet they cannot even make this happen in an intuitive way. I seriously doubt that WinFS will happen anytime soon. Earlier, I'd made the statement that WinFS would indefinitely delay Longhorn, which apparently I was correct in, as WinFS was pulled from Longhorn.
I laughed when they stated it would be released for XP in castrated form - no network connectivity, hell, MS can't even show a "network neighborhood" in a reasonable amount of time for a small network (only about 1000 nodes, takes more than a minute easily, long enough for me to forget to time it or try it again).
In any case, Longhorn will wind up being mostly eye candy that will lead to a slew of new problems (MS "innovates" new bugs like no one else;)
As for Devil's Advocate, isn't anything on/. regarding MS beating all sides of the horse until it is pulp? What exactly are you looking for? Someone to say that WinFS is going to be great? It isn't, and everyone here knows that MS is wholly incapable of delivering something like WinFS is claimed to be. It'd be like arguing that you could go back in time and buy Manhattan for a few beads + 1.
Actually, it might still be OS/2, I'll have to reinstall it and see if it works on my new hardware. If it does, it probably will blow everything else out of the water.;)
And what if I happen to own said DLLs (ie, I happen to have bought a PC that came with the obligatory copy of Windows, therefore I have legal copies of everything required. What then?
Heck, at one time I had 27 unused copies of various flavors of Windows because of this nonsense (since discarded). You've bought into the "piracy" spiel hook, line, and sinker.
As for Nintendo, the money is in the ROM, not the system. They should care less if it runs in emulators, especially if that sells more ROMs.
Lastly, Office is never a "sorely missed" application. I wish everyone would send base documents in RTF, or the LCD format supporting the needed features. MS doc(uments) suck, have unneeded features buried within them, and, worse yet, are self-corrupting at times. 99% of folks running Office in emulation would prefer not to run Office at all. It's lazy Windows users with bad applications that force the issue (another major violator: Visio - not even compatible with itself in some cases)
All living languages are changing. Making new words from other words dates back at least to Old Latin.
Oh, and for your info - there's the Oxford English Dictionary, which is considered a reference tome. Webster's is relatively well considered American English tome.
The french are not "conservative", they got upset about all these "new english technical terms" showing up in the "pristine" french language, making it sound less french, and "ugly". Hence "courriel" for "e-mail"
There's a problem with that assertion, suppose I'm a MI resident with a billing address in MI:
What if I was outside MI when I bought it, but shipped it to an address in Michigan?
What if I was in MI, but shipped it outside MI?
What if I was outside MI, and shipped it outside MI?
What if I was outside MI, and shipped it outside MI and used it outside MI?
Ok, now in which cases do I owe the tax, and how are you going to apply the rules? For case 1), how does that differ from ordering something outside of MI, receiving outside MI, and then mailing it to myself or bringing it home? For case 2) how do you prove I was in MI when I bought it? I could have been anywhere.
That's one reason the states aren't allowed to tax interstate commerce. The ruleset becomes way too convoluted and complex, especially with today's highly distributed economies.
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To be fair, when MS did this, it was not yet a full-fledged monopoly. However, its actions were definitely anti-competitive, and used illegal tying tactics to succeed.
Had MS merely published their software, there would have been little to argue about. However, in their vendor contracts, they utilized their perceived/virtual monopoly in OEM OS contracts to force Office 95 into the mix. That was illegal, and that's where they truly succeeded in killing the competitive market and we're left with what exists to this day.
If Longhorn's less stable than XP, you can forget anyone "upgrading" to it. Everyone will stick with XP no matter what MS decides. Their ability to take actions to force upgrades has been severely curtailed since they've been declared a monopoly, witness new Office versions being ignored uniformly for existing versions.
Given MS's history, it's not unfathomable that Longhorn will fail as badly as ME, or at least NT 3.x or even 4.x.
Let's take a look - supposedly completely different API set for full functionality. Major change in core code (moving to managed code) as a first iteration product. MS's history with first iteration products is uniformly bad. A "compatibility" layer. Hmmm, can we say "hamstrung performance"?
I can see businesses staying away from this in droves for years (look at how long XP took to make it to a majority of desktops). It may eventually succeed, but only because years of waves will wear down any cliff.
MS SQL is a POS.
It's got so many gotcha's, it's not even funny. It's completely unsuitable for anything even remotely considered for true e-commerce unless you've got millions to spend on hardware/software licenses, and even then you're just asking to get burned.
I'm not talking about a 1 or 2 user system either, but something that does 100s of transactions per second. MS SQL has many known issues running at these kinds of loads. Oracle, DB/2, and Sybase certainly don't, and Postgres and MySQL will also beat it in certain arenas. (OK, so you can create problems with any of these systems by bad design, but none have issues that you cannot get around with good design - MS SQL has issues that you cannot work around.)
I can't think of 1 MS product I "prefer" to use over its counterparts. There are products made for Windows that I do utilize, but those are not made by MS. As a matter of fact, my Windows boxes don't have any MS applications installed, and even have some of the applications that come with the OS uninstalled or disabled, to enabled the system to be somewhat stable.
Excellent list of points. Add to that:
Microsoft having Office 95 ask for a memory address at the 2GB limit, even though no desktop machine at the time came with even 512MB. The sole purpose of this exercise? To have Office not be able to run on OS/2, whose VM had a limit of 512MB (the shame!!!).
Or about making Office 95 docs incompatible with all previous versions of Office (again, a direct stab at forcing everyone to upgrade, and leaving OS/2 out in the cold. It wasn't so much about other word processors, since none of them could accurately deal with the ever changing screwed up word markup, and they were always months and months behind at the time.)
Or, how about Microsoft selling an "OS" to IBM before they actually owned the rights to it?
And lastly, the little negotiating with a company for a year and stealing their tech has happened numerous times.
I wasn't comparing 12" laptops, although if we were, the iBook comes in @ $800 for a low price point, up to $1400 I believe for a fully decked out 14". You can't compare the price of a top-end powerbook with a bottom end Dell unless you list all the items the Dell doesn't have.
What I was comparing:
15" widescreen
5400+ rpm drives
Gb ethernet
BlueTooth
54g wireless
1.5GB RAM
4+ hour battery life
Lots of style and usability features too numerous to list
Reliability
I don't even know if the Toshiba had all those features, but I know some other things about Toshiba's, having used several.
Items considered to match - wide screen, drive size and speed, CPU capability and speed (This is an M with a slightly faster clock), memory size (which, btw, is only 512MB as shipped, add another $180) and a name-brand. Off-brand notebooks need not be considered. Their quality in general is too uncertain, and while some may be excellent, many are unreliable in one facet or another.
Last, there are the issues of size, battery life, and style. I don't know what the battery life is for the referred notebook, Toshiba's style is usually relatively clunky, and the size is considerably bigger than a Powerbook.
Now, for XP, yes, I agree, it's been out for years. I've not used it successfully on a notebook (only tried it on one, and that particular Toshiba did not have a full suite of XP compatible drivers) I'll also state that I never successfully got a Windows notebook to sleep successfully consistently. My powerbook's been through numerous sleep-wake cycles over the past 3 weeks with not a single hiccup, even running Windows Media Player and multiple MS Office X windows when going to sleep. BTW, Office X is the one thing that crashes regularly....
I already converted. I bought a 15" powerbook. With after market addition of a 1GB DIMM raising the price to $2100, it does everything a $2500 windows machine does with much less worries regarding a virus, and also does the sleep mode reliably. Previous experience with a Windows 2K laptop weren't near as pleasant and I've only been using it for 3 weeks.
;)
Yes, there's some getting used to Mac ways of doing things, and some "unlearning" of bad windows habits. But, all in all, it's roughly equivalent to switching to a new Windows version as far as learning curve goes, with the additional benefit that everything just seems to work as a cohesive whole.
Now someone will come along and say - but this item works in some screwy way. I haven't found that item yet.
I'm not sure the business environment has ever based its choices on elegance.
I'd have to agree with you there - COBOL would finish that argument. ;)
It seems the tide has turned, whether Dell sees it or not. A multi CPU Opteron system blows away any comparable (number of CPUs and GHz, even though GHz is fading fast as a true indicator) Intel system in performance, and $ for $, well, there's really no comparison.
Also look at the gaming world - they're pretty much all heading for AMD 64 systems.
You have a problem. I get 3-4 hours on my brand new 15" PB, and that's with the screen at about 50% brightness.
One thing you might want to check is whether you're running too many programs, thus utilizing all your memory and causing swapping. In that scenario, your HD will never spin down due to swapping, and that will eat up your battery life significantly. It would also explain the apparent "slowness" of your system. 1GB RAM for some of the items you're talking about would be minimum. I'd prefer 1.5GB or even 2GB. (BTW, an Intel desktop running Windows XP with 512MB RAM and doing any type of graphics editing will pretty much cause your system to crawl.)
There are also settings you can tweak in System Preferences that will either allow you to extend your battery life or increase responsiveness/performance. (It's a trade off) You might also want to turn off some of the eye candy to increase responsiveness. (The same can be done with Windows systems, their eye candy makes even the fastest desktop respond too slowly for me)
Last, there might be a problem with your battery or your system. In that case, you'll have to have Apple check out your PB.
Good Luck.
Having just viewed C++ for the first time in 5 years, I must say, yuck! Namespaces in the STL are what drove me from C++ in the first place. I'm glad they got the STL to work, but namespaces are still ungodly ugly, and their pervasiveness within C++ make what used to look like an elegant language an ungainly loaded behemoth Pascal offspring, and compiling it pretty much brought down a decent SGI machine of the time.
I'd rather use straight C at this point than C++ with the STL. Java is ever more elegant, perhaps one reason it eclipses C++ in the general business environment. (OK, so there's the generally accepted benefits of built in memory management to prevent neophytes from stubbing their toes and bringing down the house....) But with the JDK improving performance with every release, and Java gaining many of the lacking items in the the 1.5 release (ok, so some are compile time only) it's easy to see why Java continues to be a favorite of developers.
Sure it can. Don't believe there will be any confusion about a Pontiac G6 and an Apple/Mac G6.
It would depend on what you're doing. For multi-threaded apps, definitely dual core would be better in most cases, as there can be on-die memory optimizations (Power and AMD have these, Intel does not, at least not worth talking about)
:-/
For a partitioning of servers, such as 1 CPU per VM, most likely single CPUs would be better. If it's 2 CPUs per VM, then dual core wins again.
I can't wait for dual core CPUs myself, but I have to.
It's a G4 dual core, most likely, or, if the Power5 multi-core specs can be believed, perhaps the next PowerBook major upgrade will house a dual core Power5 (G6?) CPU?
That's one of the "power tweaks". It's been there since NT 4.0, I believe. (It's been a long long time since I mucked about with that stuff)
First, WinFS winds up not being a new file system, but a system on top of the NTFS file system. (Or, at least, that's their current statement on what it is)
/. regarding MS beating all sides of the horse until it is pulp? What exactly are you looking for? Someone to say that WinFS is going to be great? It isn't, and everyone here knows that MS is wholly incapable of delivering something like WinFS is claimed to be. It'd be like arguing that you could go back in time and buy Manhattan for a few beads + 1.
Second, WinFS is stated to be a DB like layer of the file system, improving search and visual representation by offering multiple views. You'd think they would have done this with email clients first, yet they cannot even make this happen in an intuitive way. I seriously doubt that WinFS will happen anytime soon. Earlier, I'd made the statement that WinFS would indefinitely delay Longhorn, which apparently I was correct in, as WinFS was pulled from Longhorn.
I laughed when they stated it would be released for XP in castrated form - no network connectivity, hell, MS can't even show a "network neighborhood" in a reasonable amount of time for a small network (only about 1000 nodes, takes more than a minute easily, long enough for me to forget to time it or try it again).
In any case, Longhorn will wind up being mostly eye candy that will lead to a slew of new problems (MS "innovates" new bugs like no one else;)
As for Devil's Advocate, isn't anything on
what if I swap out my motherboard? I won't be able to reinstall my legally bought software? What a crock!
The answer used to be OS/2 by far.
;)
Actually, it might still be OS/2, I'll have to reinstall it and see if it works on my new hardware. If it does, it probably will blow everything else out of the water.
And what if I happen to own said DLLs (ie, I happen to have bought a PC that came with the obligatory copy of Windows, therefore I have legal copies of everything required. What then?
Heck, at one time I had 27 unused copies of various flavors of Windows because of this nonsense (since discarded). You've bought into the "piracy" spiel hook, line, and sinker.
As for Nintendo, the money is in the ROM, not the system. They should care less if it runs in emulators, especially if that sells more ROMs.
Lastly, Office is never a "sorely missed" application. I wish everyone would send base documents in RTF, or the LCD format supporting the needed features. MS doc(uments) suck, have unneeded features buried within them, and, worse yet, are self-corrupting at times. 99% of folks running Office in emulation would prefer not to run Office at all. It's lazy Windows users with bad applications that force the issue (another major violator: Visio - not even compatible with itself in some cases)
What was that about "pristine" french?
All living languages are changing. Making new words from other words dates back at least to Old Latin.
Oh, and for your info - there's the Oxford English Dictionary, which is considered a reference tome. Webster's is relatively well considered American English tome.
The french are not "conservative", they got upset about all these "new english technical terms" showing up in the "pristine" french language, making it sound less french, and "ugly". Hence "courriel" for "e-mail"
only fry one egg at a time whilr doing anything other than staring at the login screen?
And what if the state law itself is actually illegal or unenforcable?
- What if I was outside MI when I bought it, but shipped it to an address in Michigan?
- What if I was in MI, but shipped it outside MI?
- What if I was outside MI, and shipped it outside MI?
- What if I was outside MI, and shipped it outside MI and used it outside MI?
Ok, now in which cases do I owe the tax, and how are you going to apply the rules? For case 1), how does that differ from ordering something outside of MI, receiving outside MI, and then mailing it to myself or bringing it home? For case 2) how do you prove I was in MI when I bought it? I could have been anywhere.That's one reason the states aren't allowed to tax interstate commerce. The ruleset becomes way too convoluted and complex, especially with today's highly distributed economies.
That is the Value Added Tax. See Canada or Europe for examples.
In practice it's a horribly complicated beast, fraught with just as much paper work and red tape as our current system.