Get real - the primary purpose of a VCR is to record and/or play tapes. I'd say just about everyone does at least 50% of that.
The primary purpose of Word...? Well, based on the feature set, seems to be something other than putting characters on a page. Which, btw, 90% of the users use it for. Don't know too many that attempt to use it for image editing or web page editing, for instance, or spread sheets, or even attempt column layouts.
How many fixes in wondows were for vulnerabilities that allowed the machine to be remotely owned, vs how many for Suse or RH? How many for local vulnerabilities?
Depending on your tastes, you may agree disagree with one or more on this list. Some are obviously better than others, namely, Queens of the Stone Age. I believe all fall within your 10 year window.
Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf
Blue Man Group: The Complex
Poe: Haunted
Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile
Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream
3 Doors Down: The Better Life
Depeche Mode: Violator
Godsmack: Godsmack
Green Day: American Idiot
Hole: Celebrity Skin
Marylin Manson: Mechanical Animals
Orgy: Candyass
The Toadies: Rubberneck
U2: Achtung Baby
Velvet Revolver: Contraband
Stone Temple Pilots: Core
Puddle of Mudd: Come Clean
I should mention that any Green Day album is good, if you happen to like their music. They never really pandered to the whole success thing. All Nine Inch Nails albums have recurring musical themes throughout, although The Fragile is probably the weakest of the bunch in "popularity", as it's more tame. I also happen to like all of Marilyn Manson's CDs since Mechanical Animals, but as a single piece of work, they may or may not meet your definition.
I have yet to get Muse, they sound interesting. The upcoming new Queens of the Stone Age disk may be promising. There's also some almost unknown current acts like Concrete Blonde, whose albums may not be "great", but who generally fall into the "full album" category and are still releasing albums about every 2 years.
What I've noticed is that some bands, esp new ones, will have 1 hyped song on the radio, and then fade, but their album may actually have good material on them. Others, those tending towards "pop" usually suck. You have to love P2P for allowing you to determine which are which. I bought several thanks to hearing the rest of their music, as radio royally sucks these days. Friends also help, introducing you to wider music provided your friends tastes diverge from yours. BTW, I own about 500 CDs, so I have a bit of a collection. My average price runs about $7.50/CD new, so I'm surely not paying the usurious fees the RIAA wants you to pay.;)
14 years ago, you could easily buy word processing software for < $150.
As for getting value for my money, what if all I want is to be able to type letters, or read the documents coming in? It's well known that 95% of Word users only utilize 20% of the features in Word. So why are they having to pay for the other 80%?
It's like I need a pickup for hauling plants and house construction materials. But, I can't just buy the pickup, because the dealer will only sell it with the DVD player, trailering package fifth wheel hitch (which actually inteferes with my intended usage), monster truck wheels and tires , a lift kit, a baja kit, a horse trailer, a 25 ft boat, and an Airstream travel travel.
And then saying I can only use said truck for a year, when I'll have to pay to "upgrade" the entire mess, because the Airstream travel trailer will now be made of something slightly shinier.
The problem is they don't give me Office for $49, or for $99, or even $200. They want $500. For $500, it better run until I decide it no longer meets my needs. Now, if it were a $20/year subscription, I'd go ahead and subscribe to that. The problem is, they'd want $50 or $100/year.
Do you think OS/2 Warp has drivers for an ATI 9800 Pro or the chipset for a 3.2 GHz P4 or AMD 64 FX 53? I'm sure it'd fly, as it already flew on a Pentium Pro 180 with 64MB of RAM.
Actually, Cairo was invented purely to keep people from migrating to OS/2. OS/2 included about 80% of what Cairo promised, and by the time OS/2 Warp 4 came around, filled in about 90% of those promises.
Heck, MS is still trying to catch up to any number of OSes from 10 years ago.:)
I believe they'll probably release something - the time line's too short to miss it by 4 years as they've done previously. Besides, they don't want the actual release of Tiger to have the limelight by itself, now, do they?
Heck, Cairo was announced, what? 14 years ago? Longhorn was the new Cairo, now delayed to Blackcomb, as "Cairo" wasn't getting any more press. After all, "we're writing about Cairo again?
I would phrase it more kindly, except Intel wasn't first. They weren't even second or third. IOW, they were caught with their pants down and "kludged" together something so they wouldn't be caught in dead last with nothing to show other than 10 year old technology (P6 single core).
A dual core shows that they're at least attempting to play in the same ballpark, no matter how badly executed their dual core solution is. (130W - YOUCH!)
Actually, IBM was strong in the financial sector, so strong that no one touched them for a long time. Novell was in a pissing match with MS, and probably didn't want to distract anyone with numbers in a sector that they'd both written off at the time.
yes yes yes, NT was originally designed for blah blah blah.
Then the reality of MS set in on top of Custer's probably great initial design. (VMS, whatever its flaws, was a reasonable OS after all) MS forced an "integrated" GUI into the mix. One based on Windows 3.x initially, and then migrated to mimic the Windows 95 GUI in NT 4.x. If you don't believe this, take a good look at the GUI subsystem, especially the GDI. Single threaded and a source of huge issues for years and years, thanks to its incredibly terrible design. 2K wasn't immune from these issues, although by then they'd fixed a large number of problems. XP still has some issues, related specifically to Office, including Office 2003. Take a look at how sluggish your computer becomes when Outlook 2003 tries to download a large attachment from an Exchange server and load that attachment dynamically into another application, especially another Office application. You may find your screen/input freezing for the duration. Bad design.
NT was designed for isolated networks. Not business networks though. Workgroups of 254 nodes was about the optimal size even for NT 4.x. (Domains were a joke, that's a whole other 10 pages of discussion though) Terminal server was way post NT 4.0 release. Way way post - Citrix was first on the scene, and I believe, IIRC, that MS bought their technology circa 1999/2000, and came out with their own version in 2000/2001.
As someone who helped design one of the largest initial MS networks out there, I can assure you MS was aware of their short comings in 1997, when we began moving 1.5M users onto a "single" business network. That work was completed in 1999. I can tell you that security was a problem from the first day, and that MS's chorus line was that there was no problem.
As for IE, apparently it can effectively be removed according to documents filed in their anti-trust case. IE is not a part of Windows problems today, it is part of MS's problems today, which typifies MS's core problem - all apps running with effectively no security layers on them. XP SP2 doesn't even really help, it only reduces some of the known older threats.
Anyway, long story short. MS's OSes are all fundamentally flawed, and have been from the first releases, with the possible exception of NT 3.1. That version, however, was completely useless to anyone, as just about nothing would run on it.
Listing for 1996 numbers. That's 178,100 new and upgraded OS/2 Server licenses for the first half of 1996. Not installed base. And yes, those are IDC numbers.
You're only partly right about the main problem with Windows. Its main problem is that it was designed as a non-networked, mostly single task, single user system with an "integrated" GUI for a non-protected mode architecture.
I'll predict now that Longhorn will be half of what you think it will be, and that would be, currently, less than 1/16th of what MS promised when the first PR about it came out. Longhorn will most likely face more resistance to adoption than 2K or XP did.
MS has had a built in firewall (whatever that means for you in particular) since NT or 2000. They choose to ship it with everything open by default. They could have blocked the known ports, and prevented many problems, but to "make things easier" for stupid consumers that can't tie their shoes, everything is open so "it just works".
Should have run the kill command for an app. (Don't recall anymore if this was an add-on or shipped with the system) I never had an issue killing any app.
Now, I do know there was an issue with killing certain threads running in Ring 0, which nothing was supposed to do other than the kernel and most if not all video drivers. Now, if some app was somehow improperly coded and ran in Ring 0 in one fashion or another, then you had major issues. The solution was to dump that app or get the vendor to fix their sloppy coding.
so why even dispute it's great features 8 years ago
Because its features are still current, and the point is that current OSes still don't match the features available 11 years ago in OS/2. That's a sad statement.
As for applications, there were quite a few, including some new paradigms that I expect to see repeated probably in another 2-5 years. I still fondly remember a certain word processor that totally redefined WYSIWYG document creation on a computer.
Oh, and/. isn't about where the lemmings are going....
NT Server didn't start outselling OS/2 until somewhere around 97. That's about 6 years after OS/2 2.0 debuted.
OS/2 Server 2.3 comes with TCPIP included. (I have the retail box at home) Software selection is determined by your needs. It is rock stable, with run times in the year(s) range. NT was weekly reboots if you did anything more than look at it. (Note NT 4.0 had a memory paging overflow bug that guaranteed corrupted memory after the 20 bit internal page counter rolled over - I'd link it but am too lazy to go digging for references to a problem that existed in 96/97.)
You had 16MB limits? I don't know with what. If you had problems with 16 bit code, it most likely was that you weren't using approved drivers. The only thing I recall being subject to 16 bit limitations was the HPFS file system shipped with "workstation" OS/2, not the server package.
The situation you describe is as it existed in 1990/91, when NT wasn't even in the picture and networking wasn't a true requirement yet for most of the world.
I will agree that OS/2 was not marketed as a server platform, because IBM really wanted that market for their big iron machines. They missed the boat on that one, and who knows what could have happened had the infighting at IBM not essentially helped kill off OS/2. I would still hold that the commodization of server quality hardware would have pretty continued on its uninterrupted path, as Intel would want to take ever bigger chunks out of the other machines lucrative markets. Of course, we'd all be looking at $3000 Itaniums now....
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Get real - the primary purpose of a VCR is to record and/or play tapes. I'd say just about everyone does at least 50% of that.
The primary purpose of Word...? Well, based on the feature set, seems to be something other than putting characters on a page. Which, btw, 90% of the users use it for. Don't know too many that attempt to use it for image editing or web page editing, for instance, or spread sheets, or even attempt column layouts.
Ack, time flies. I could have sworn I bought some of those "recently"
Too bad we can't mod the story as a troll....
How many fixes in wondows were for vulnerabilities that allowed the machine to be remotely owned, vs how many for Suse or RH? How many for local vulnerabilities?
- Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf
- Blue Man Group: The Complex
- Poe: Haunted
- Nine Inch Nails: The Fragile
- Smashing Pumpkins: Siamese Dream
- 3 Doors Down: The Better Life
- Depeche Mode: Violator
- Godsmack: Godsmack
- Green Day: American Idiot
- Hole: Celebrity Skin
- Marylin Manson: Mechanical Animals
- Orgy: Candyass
- The Toadies: Rubberneck
- U2: Achtung Baby
- Velvet Revolver: Contraband
- Stone Temple Pilots: Core
- Puddle of Mudd: Come Clean
I should mention that any Green Day album is good, if you happen to like their music. They never really pandered to the whole success thing. All Nine Inch Nails albums have recurring musical themes throughout, although The Fragile is probably the weakest of the bunch in "popularity", as it's more tame. I also happen to like all of Marilyn Manson's CDs since Mechanical Animals, but as a single piece of work, they may or may not meet your definition.I have yet to get Muse, they sound interesting. The upcoming new Queens of the Stone Age disk may be promising. There's also some almost unknown current acts like Concrete Blonde, whose albums may not be "great", but who generally fall into the "full album" category and are still releasing albums about every 2 years.
What I've noticed is that some bands, esp new ones, will have 1 hyped song on the radio, and then fade, but their album may actually have good material on them. Others, those tending towards "pop" usually suck. You have to love P2P for allowing you to determine which are which. I bought several thanks to hearing the rest of their music, as radio royally sucks these days. Friends also help, introducing you to wider music provided your friends tastes diverge from yours. BTW, I own about 500 CDs, so I have a bit of a collection. My average price runs about $7.50/CD new, so I'm surely not paying the usurious fees the RIAA wants you to pay. ;)
As for getting value for my money, what if all I want is to be able to type letters, or read the documents coming in? It's well known that 95% of Word users only utilize 20% of the features in Word. So why are they having to pay for the other 80%?
It's like I need a pickup for hauling plants and house construction materials. But, I can't just buy the pickup, because the dealer will only sell it with the DVD player, trailering package fifth wheel hitch (which actually inteferes with my intended usage), monster truck wheels and tires , a lift kit, a baja kit, a horse trailer, a 25 ft boat, and an Airstream travel travel.
And then saying I can only use said truck for a year, when I'll have to pay to "upgrade" the entire mess, because the Airstream travel trailer will now be made of something slightly shinier.
Are you getting the point yet?The problem is they don't give me Office for $49, or for $99, or even $200. They want $500. For $500, it better run until I decide it no longer meets my needs. Now, if it were a $20/year subscription, I'd go ahead and subscribe to that. The problem is, they'd want $50 or $100/year.
Do you think OS/2 Warp has drivers for an ATI 9800 Pro or the chipset for a 3.2 GHz P4 or AMD 64 FX 53? I'm sure it'd fly, as it already flew on a Pentium Pro 180 with 64MB of RAM.
If they actually get to a beta, vs an alpha, they'll release it as a .0 release.
Actually, Cairo was invented purely to keep people from migrating to OS/2. OS/2 included about 80% of what Cairo promised, and by the time OS/2 Warp 4 came around, filled in about 90% of those promises.
:)
Heck, MS is still trying to catch up to any number of OSes from 10 years ago.
Heck, Cairo was announced, what? 14 years ago? Longhorn was the new Cairo, now delayed to Blackcomb, as "Cairo" wasn't getting any more press. After all, "we're writing about Cairo again?
A dual core shows that they're at least attempting to play in the same ballpark, no matter how badly executed their dual core solution is. (130W - YOUCH!)
That's truly funny. If I only had mod points!
Great observation. Where's the Galactic Bypass?
They are kludges compared to the much better internal architectures of the AMD dual core chips, or the potentially even better Power5 chips.
Evidently not ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't converting Base X to Base Y prior art? Say, Circa 500+ years ago?
Actually, IBM was strong in the financial sector, so strong that no one touched them for a long time. Novell was in a pissing match with MS, and probably didn't want to distract anyone with numbers in a sector that they'd both written off at the time.
yes yes yes, NT was originally designed for blah blah blah.
Then the reality of MS set in on top of Custer's probably great initial design. (VMS, whatever its flaws, was a reasonable OS after all) MS forced an "integrated" GUI into the mix. One based on Windows 3.x initially, and then migrated to mimic the Windows 95 GUI in NT 4.x. If you don't believe this, take a good look at the GUI subsystem, especially the GDI. Single threaded and a source of huge issues for years and years, thanks to its incredibly terrible design. 2K wasn't immune from these issues, although by then they'd fixed a large number of problems. XP still has some issues, related specifically to Office, including Office 2003. Take a look at how sluggish your computer becomes when Outlook 2003 tries to download a large attachment from an Exchange server and load that attachment dynamically into another application, especially another Office application. You may find your screen/input freezing for the duration. Bad design.
NT was designed for isolated networks. Not business networks though. Workgroups of 254 nodes was about the optimal size even for NT 4.x. (Domains were a joke, that's a whole other 10 pages of discussion though) Terminal server was way post NT 4.0 release. Way way post - Citrix was first on the scene, and I believe, IIRC, that MS bought their technology circa 1999/2000, and came out with their own version in 2000/2001.
As someone who helped design one of the largest initial MS networks out there, I can assure you MS was aware of their short comings in 1997, when we began moving 1.5M users onto a "single" business network. That work was completed in 1999. I can tell you that security was a problem from the first day, and that MS's chorus line was that there was no problem.
As for IE, apparently it can effectively be removed according to documents filed in their anti-trust case. IE is not a part of Windows problems today, it is part of MS's problems today, which typifies MS's core problem - all apps running with effectively no security layers on them. XP SP2 doesn't even really help, it only reduces some of the known older threats.
Anyway, long story short. MS's OSes are all fundamentally flawed, and have been from the first releases, with the possible exception of NT 3.1. That version, however, was completely useless to anyone, as just about nothing would run on it.
Take a pill. I probably shouldn't bother with someone of your "id10t" intelligence, but:
Does an electrician leave the wires to an intended 3 way switch bare and hanging out of the switch box?
No.
Does the car manufacturer leave brakes off the car, ready as an available accessory?
No.
Should MS leave a computer wide open to network attacks for 15 years?
No.
Does that mean that they have to make it hard? Of course not. But by default, those known service ports for the masses should be turned off.
Now go back to your 9th grade class.
Listing for 1996 numbers. That's 178,100 new and upgraded OS/2 Server licenses for the first half of 1996. Not installed base. And yes, those are IDC numbers.
You're only partly right about the main problem with Windows. Its main problem is that it was designed as a non-networked, mostly single task, single user system with an "integrated" GUI for a non-protected mode architecture.
I'll predict now that Longhorn will be half of what you think it will be, and that would be, currently, less than 1/16th of what MS promised when the first PR about it came out. Longhorn will most likely face more resistance to adoption than 2K or XP did.
MS has had a built in firewall (whatever that means for you in particular) since NT or 2000. They choose to ship it with everything open by default. They could have blocked the known ports, and prevented many problems, but to "make things easier" for stupid consumers that can't tie their shoes, everything is open so "it just works".
Hopefully this little trip down memory lane will correct your misconceptions.
Should have run the kill command for an app. (Don't recall anymore if this was an add-on or shipped with the system) I never had an issue killing any app.
Now, I do know there was an issue with killing certain threads running in Ring 0, which nothing was supposed to do other than the kernel and most if not all video drivers. Now, if some app was somehow improperly coded and ran in Ring 0 in one fashion or another, then you had major issues. The solution was to dump that app or get the vendor to fix their sloppy coding.
Because its features are still current, and the point is that current OSes still don't match the features available 11 years ago in OS/2. That's a sad statement.
As for applications, there were quite a few, including some new paradigms that I expect to see repeated probably in another 2-5 years. I still fondly remember a certain word processor that totally redefined WYSIWYG document creation on a computer.
Oh, andNT Server didn't start outselling OS/2 until somewhere around 97. That's about 6 years after OS/2 2.0 debuted.
OS/2 Server 2.3 comes with TCPIP included. (I have the retail box at home) Software selection is determined by your needs. It is rock stable, with run times in the year(s) range. NT was weekly reboots if you did anything more than look at it. (Note NT 4.0 had a memory paging overflow bug that guaranteed corrupted memory after the 20 bit internal page counter rolled over - I'd link it but am too lazy to go digging for references to a problem that existed in 96/97.)
You had 16MB limits? I don't know with what. If you had problems with 16 bit code, it most likely was that you weren't using approved drivers. The only thing I recall being subject to 16 bit limitations was the HPFS file system shipped with "workstation" OS/2, not the server package.
The situation you describe is as it existed in 1990/91, when NT wasn't even in the picture and networking wasn't a true requirement yet for most of the world.
I will agree that OS/2 was not marketed as a server platform, because IBM really wanted that market for their big iron machines. They missed the boat on that one, and who knows what could have happened had the infighting at IBM not essentially helped kill off OS/2. I would still hold that the commodization of server quality hardware would have pretty continued on its uninterrupted path, as Intel would want to take ever bigger chunks out of the other machines lucrative markets. Of course, we'd all be looking at $3000 Itaniums now....