Dang, they're still having that problem? We managed to only reboot every month. We didn't have to, we did it as a precautionary measure. This was in 97 when Bill Gates said you should reboot every week. (Exchange 5.5).
NT 3.1 - stable OS, absolutely useless. Nothing worked with it. It was an expensive file server, nothing more.
NT 3.5x. Still somewhat stable if you didn't run anything on it, horribly fragging file system, crap GUI interface, lots of BSODs running MS's own apps.
NT 4.x. Lots of problems, although many got ironed out by 98 or so.
Win2K. BSODs reduced, still frags your disk system to hell and back. Usability still sucks rocks, but it's far better than previous versions.
Win XP. Further reduction of BSODs. Nice eye candy makes a P4 3.4GHz machine (not invented at the time) run like the current Pentium Pro 200 with NT 4.x.
OS/2 workstation was intended as a single user workstation. The multi-user server version was dumbed down for single user use. When OS/2 first came out, the internet, such as it was, was comprised of a few thousand people on line. My first download of USENET on my OS/2 box comprised a mere 1200 newsgroups. IOW, network connectivity was far from the ubiquitous requirement it is today.
I personally don't recall too many 16 bit legacy limitations. The 512MB VM limitation was not related to OS/2's 2GB memory limit. (I don't recall if OS/2 supported the 4GB limit, I guess I could pull my OS/2 server docs out, but they're packed away).
When NT came out, just about NO ONE bought it. MS reduced the price several times and, IIRC, had to use their vendor contract muscle to get NT preloaded on certain classes of machines when those machines shipped. NT was on the road to complete failure until that point. Actuall, thanks to IBM's win32 module being able to run Word 6, NT seemed doomed to certain failure until MS pulled that Office 97 reverse incompatibility trick.
OS/2 not a server? Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about? The main reason people loved OS/2 in corporate environments was the ability to setup any server software you needed on your OS/2 box. SMTP server because your corporate SMTP server was down 50% of the time? No problem. FTP Server? No problem. SMB share? Again, no problem.
Your last assertion is unsupported. OS/2 server sold for about the same price as an equivalently licensed NT server OS. (NT Workstation came about with NT 4.0, again MS following someone else;) So, to make the assertion that without NT, the market would be richer than today, I say no. OS/2's major cost component, whether you wish to believe it or not, was the file system royaltly of $86 for every copy of OS/2 sold. That royalty went to MS, btw. It ended around 2000. Given the last price of OS/2 that I'm aware of in 1996, that would have dropped the price of OS/2 to $50.
Ugh. I think I might still have the 23 odd floppies that the TCPIP stack shipped with. (Or they went out with the last clean up) 2.1 was a major improvement.
As for the OO nature of the desktop, I think it was much more intuitive than the current POS's we're forced to endure. I like mail to have these colors. Here's the color cube, select a color, drag it over, voila. Next time I start the app - hey - it's still there. How long would that really have taken to get used to by the masses?
2.3 and 2.4 were pretty darn nice. I don't really recall too many issues with bugs. At least not in comparison to MS's bugs. I recall rebooting my machine 3 times in a year. I'd often hear colleagues scream in frustration as hours of work dissappeared in the all too familiar BSOD. (Well, familiar to them...;)
Had IBM capitulated to MS Office's underhanded call for memory @ 2GB when starting, even though it'd never use it, we might still be running OS/2. That manuever made Office95 incompatible with OS/2, and along with the then incompatible default file formats, the beginning of the end was near for OS/2.
While the PM interface did have some shortcomings, the OS was rock stable by 94. Heck, the PM shortcomings were minor compared to those of any other OS of the time. Multi-threaded applications, flat memory model, inherently non-fragging file system, the concept of shadows (closest weak analogies are symbolic links or shortcuts) that dissappeared when the root file was deleted, and the addition of extended file attributes that let a file name be anything and still tied to a particular application. A truly great OS with features yet unmatched by any other system, including, dare I say it, Mac OS X. (FYI: I'm about to purchase a Mac, so put the flame throwers away;)
If anyone wants to flame the 2MB cache cache limitation of the file system, do realize that the HPFS386 file system used in the server did not have that restraint. Also recall the time period that this OS came out in. 2MB was a significant portion of 16 or 32 MB of RAM. (Yeah, that's right, OS/2 would run just fine in 32 MB of RAM. Heck, it'd run on 4MB machines if you wanted it to, with the smallest system I recall hearing about was a 2MB system minus the PM.)
I still recall being able to run C&C in a window with sound while running Word 6, and several OS/2 apps with nary a problem. (Pentium Pro in 97).
A trip down Nostalgia Lane once more. Would I run it again? Sure, if it had the applications needed today.
You know, I could go lots of tasteless ways with this, however, I'll take a higher road, and mention that geez, you know, Word 5 through 95 just happened to process WordPerfect documents just fine, thank you. So did Lotus AmiPro. I believe all three majors also happened to read Wordstar files quite well.
Now, I do know that Word had a couple of issues with some of the fancier formatting, but none of the others did. Now why was that? Because the document formats actually made some sort of sense versus the verbose crap MS uses. (20Kb file representing a 100% empty document anyone? courtesy of OfficeXP in this instance)
So yes, shame on them. Shame shame shame.
OK, I went and tried this with Office 2003 just now. After spending about 10 minutes, I've concluded that yes, it is possible, but it certainly isn't a simple or user friendly thing to do. It requires you to jump through about 12 dialog boxes, and you better know exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Oh, and get ready to recreate your entire footer as well, as you can't just reset the page number. Nice.
If you want to see something simple, look at how WordPerfect handles this. From memory, it's about 3 keystrokes and you're done. Now how hard would it have been for MS to add a single right click menu item to allow you to reset the page number increment? (Given their document structure, most likely quite diffcult, as it's crap)
I still think you're missing the point. MS monopolisitic grab happened with Office97. Releases after Office97 were irrelevant in this respect, as MS already had a monopoly.
Apparantly you don't know nearly as much as you think about Office or MS's practices. Check out the Office97 SR-1 patch. Of particular interest are the first lines of the description:
Office 97 Service Release 1 (SR-1) is an update to Office 97 that makes it easier for users of different versions of Office to share files with one another....Of particular interest to Office 97 users, Office 97 SR-1 includes the Microsoft Word 6.0/95 Binary Converter for Word 97, which enables Word 97 users to save files in the Word 6.0/95 native file format.
Note that prior to the release of path SR-1 on 7/22/1998, Office97 only saved in Office97 format. This gave MS almost 2 years (at least 20 months according to the German language release) of time to allow the irrestible pressure of new systems to force everyone to upgrade. Office97 was the cudgel used to give MS the Office application monopoly it still currently enjoys, precisely how I described it, from 1st hand experience.
And if you doubt MS illegally forced the bundling of Office with its OS via the vendor contracts, read this
Egads, this is a +5 insightful troll? Well, here goes nothing.
MS didn't beat the competition, the competition was unfairly bludgeoned into defeat.
IE: bundled with OSes. Unfair tying when you're a monopoly.
Direct3D: bundled with OS. Marketing BS, promises, and incentives to developers, who fell for it.
"Modern desktop GUI": you're kidding, right? Next and OS/2 were the most advanced, arguably even by today's standards. (Haven't seen Be)
Office Products: Again, you must be kidding. They used threats of increased OS prices to force vendors to bundle Office, so everyone got Office with their new PC. Several incompatible versions of Office later, everyone was forced to upgrade. Why? Well, when the big wigs in government, for example, got their new PCs with Office 97, everyone they dealt with had to upgrade, which cascades quite quickly throughout a 3+ million person organization that does incredible amounts of business with outside companies.... I wonder what that means for the rumored Mac adoption?
Oh, and why doesn't Word allow me to do multiple page unmbering within a document easily? (Well, I stopped trying after OfficeXP) I'm talking about index page numbering, and then starting over with page "1" within a single document? It's not easy to do, if you can get it to do it at all. Also, why does Word print documents differently on different printers? I thought I specified the format, and the printer was subject to my whims, not the other way around? These observations by and large also apply to their other products, which are all pretty much crap.
So, I don't like to bash MS for taking other people's ideas. I'm obligated by my sense of ethics and morality to post the truth when presented with incorrect data.
A leap-frog platform. Take the Mac mini: it has standard parts, thus can easily be coded to. (All the things that make a game console better for game development). It's already a computer. None of the other 3 companies have that. It's out now.... Whoops.
They mention Eclipse, but the book is focused on NetBeans. Why, who the heck knows. Some conspiracy I'll bet! (where's the tinfoil hat? Oh crap, it's too late!)
Active X is only one of the security holes. Most of the recent security problems with IE, Outlook, MS in general have nothing to do with Active X. Heck, even SP 2, which disables Active X by default, still leaves the PC prone to several buffer overflow attacks and more.
You must be a youngster. You see, in 2000, I tried that approach. I voted for an independent (Not being able to stomach Bush or Gore). Look what it got me. Making an irrelevant vote meant nothing. Now, having dealt with 4 years of Bush, I had pretty much 2 choices, support Bush, or vote against Bush if I felt he should be outed. That meant casting a vote for Bush or for Kerry. Voting any other way effectively is casting your vote for Bush.
As for joining a party, there's not a party out there that supports me. Why? Because I'm a moderate with leanings towards both ends of the current political spectrum. There's not a moderate party out there, and there's not a party that caters to moderates. You have the super right neo-conservative party of the Republicans, and the ultra-liberal Democrats (although that tune may change now). Then you have the libertarians who go just a smidgin too far over the edge and are so small, they're meaningless. Independents... well, being independent is pretty self-explanatary, almost like the anti-social party.... (That last one's made up, for the humor-impaired.) Then there's the Green party, that in some ways make Democrats look like sane conservative folks.
So, in short, we've got our whacked super fringe parties, and then... wait, there's no real mainstream parties anymore. After all, it's quite hard to get a large group of people excited about... well, we like things the way they are mostly. Yep, a real "cause" there.
GAIM also supports Jabber. However, I'd rather have client to client encryption than client to server. There's still a man in the middle in that scenario.
While it's true you can make any choice you wish, the problem is, in the end we were effectively only presented with 2 choices, which in my case were others' choices. (I can't imagine I'm alone in this position).
News for you - voter turnout was the highest since 68. The turnout was about 60%. So less than half the country needs to "wake up". John Stewart quipped that voter turnout isn't working for the Democrats.
Personally, I felt the real problem was that we were given such poor choices to begin with. The 2 party system is sorely lacking, and we could seriously use a third, or even fourth, viable party. Both parties leave the majority wanting, at the moment, and both parties appear to be controlled by fringe elements.
The only reason DVDs are region encoded is so the MPAA can "control" where their DVDs are sold, and how much they can charge for them. It basically divides the globe up into 6 price regions, so they can theoretically charge what the regional market will bear, irrelevant of the real value of their product.
Personally, I could care less if a DVD is region encoded. It's their right to provide their content however they want. What's wrong is that the players are region encoded. (Yeah, there's not much point to region encoding disks if all players play them anywyas;) But fortunately, you can unlock a significant number of players.
For IM, use GAIM and get the GAIM encryption plug-in. Nice, seamless encryption over anyone's IM service. Only issue - your friends also need to be running Gaim with the encryption module.
Let me rephrase that: "P2P has vast significant non-infringing uses".
That should satisfy any and all arguments, as it has significant uses, and depriving those significant uses would affect a vast group of people.
Note: since P2P is still in its infancy, the "vast" number stands yet to grow in leaps and bounds not yet seen for anything other than perhaps instant messaging and the initial wave of P2P apps.
Think about this for a second. If the only purpose of the procedure is to keep you from dying, what's the point of extending your life beyond the point where you're babling like a 1 year old? (That whole second childhood thing going in reverse would become very obvious very quickly.) The entire point, to me anyways, of living longer would be living well, which includes being able to do physical and mental activities. Living forever as a vegetable isn't my idea of living.
I hadn't considered the disabled portion of SS as that's not deemed to be "problematic". It's the retirement portion, or rather, the looming number of benefits to be paid out to soon to be retirees.
As for made-up science, hasn't this been the "holy grail" of everyone?
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Dang, they're still having that problem? We managed to only reboot every month. We didn't have to, we did it as a precautionary measure. This was in 97 when Bill Gates said you should reboot every week. (Exchange 5.5).
OS/2 workstation was intended as a single user workstation. The multi-user server version was dumbed down for single user use. When OS/2 first came out, the internet, such as it was, was comprised of a few thousand people on line. My first download of USENET on my OS/2 box comprised a mere 1200 newsgroups. IOW, network connectivity was far from the ubiquitous requirement it is today.
I personally don't recall too many 16 bit legacy limitations. The 512MB VM limitation was not related to OS/2's 2GB memory limit. (I don't recall if OS/2 supported the 4GB limit, I guess I could pull my OS/2 server docs out, but they're packed away).
When NT came out, just about NO ONE bought it. MS reduced the price several times and, IIRC, had to use their vendor contract muscle to get NT preloaded on certain classes of machines when those machines shipped. NT was on the road to complete failure until that point. Actuall, thanks to IBM's win32 module being able to run Word 6, NT seemed doomed to certain failure until MS pulled that Office 97 reverse incompatibility trick.
OS/2 not a server? Do you have the slightest idea what you're talking about? The main reason people loved OS/2 in corporate environments was the ability to setup any server software you needed on your OS/2 box. SMTP server because your corporate SMTP server was down 50% of the time? No problem. FTP Server? No problem. SMB share? Again, no problem.
Your last assertion is unsupported. OS/2 server sold for about the same price as an equivalently licensed NT server OS. (NT Workstation came about with NT 4.0, again MS following someone else;) So, to make the assertion that without NT, the market would be richer than today, I say no. OS/2's major cost component, whether you wish to believe it or not, was the file system royaltly of $86 for every copy of OS/2 sold. That royalty went to MS, btw. It ended around 2000. Given the last price of OS/2 that I'm aware of in 1996, that would have dropped the price of OS/2 to $50.
Ugh. I think I might still have the 23 odd floppies that the TCPIP stack shipped with. (Or they went out with the last clean up) 2.1 was a major improvement.
As for the OO nature of the desktop, I think it was much more intuitive than the current POS's we're forced to endure. I like mail to have these colors. Here's the color cube, select a color, drag it over, voila. Next time I start the app - hey - it's still there. How long would that really have taken to get used to by the masses?
I agree - the full system would "walk", but you could pare it down quite easily just by removing the PM interface.
Btw, as for <2MB systems, what do you think all your ATMs used until at least 96 or so? I'd call them quite useful.
2.3 and 2.4 were pretty darn nice. I don't really recall too many issues with bugs. At least not in comparison to MS's bugs. I recall rebooting my machine 3 times in a year. I'd often hear colleagues scream in frustration as hours of work dissappeared in the all too familiar BSOD. (Well, familiar to them... ;)
Had IBM capitulated to MS Office's underhanded call for memory @ 2GB when starting, even though it'd never use it, we might still be running OS/2.
That manuever made Office95 incompatible with OS/2, and along with the then incompatible default file formats, the beginning of the end was near for OS/2.
While the PM interface did have some shortcomings, the OS was rock stable by 94. Heck, the PM shortcomings were minor compared to those of any other OS of the time. Multi-threaded applications, flat memory model, inherently non-fragging file system, the concept of shadows (closest weak analogies are symbolic links or shortcuts) that dissappeared when the root file was deleted, and the addition of extended file attributes that let a file name be anything and still tied to a particular application. A truly great OS with features yet unmatched by any other system, including, dare I say it, Mac OS X. (FYI: I'm about to purchase a Mac, so put the flame throwers away;)
If anyone wants to flame the 2MB cache cache limitation of the file system, do realize that the HPFS386 file system used in the server did not have that restraint. Also recall the time period that this OS came out in. 2MB was a significant portion of 16 or 32 MB of RAM. (Yeah, that's right, OS/2 would run just fine in 32 MB of RAM. Heck, it'd run on 4MB machines if you wanted it to, with the smallest system I recall hearing about was a 2MB system minus the PM.)
I still recall being able to run C&C in a window with sound while running Word 6, and several OS/2 apps with nary a problem. (Pentium Pro in 97).
A trip down Nostalgia Lane once more. Would I run it again? Sure, if it had the applications needed today.
You know, I could go lots of tasteless ways with this, however, I'll take a higher road, and mention that geez, you know, Word 5 through 95 just happened to process WordPerfect documents just fine, thank you. So did Lotus AmiPro. I believe all three majors also happened to read Wordstar files quite well. Now, I do know that Word had a couple of issues with some of the fancier formatting, but none of the others did. Now why was that? Because the document formats actually made some sort of sense versus the verbose crap MS uses. (20Kb file representing a 100% empty document anyone? courtesy of OfficeXP in this instance) So yes, shame on them. Shame shame shame.
It'll make you sick all the same.....
for me, it's the wasabi, I think.... 0 for 2, not trying it again.
OK, I went and tried this with Office 2003 just now. After spending about 10 minutes, I've concluded that yes, it is possible, but it certainly isn't a simple or user friendly thing to do. It requires you to jump through about 12 dialog boxes, and you better know exactly what you're trying to accomplish. Oh, and get ready to recreate your entire footer as well, as you can't just reset the page number. Nice.
If you want to see something simple, look at how WordPerfect handles this. From memory, it's about 3 keystrokes and you're done. Now how hard would it have been for MS to add a single right click menu item to allow you to reset the page number increment? (Given their document structure, most likely quite diffcult, as it's crap)
I still think you're missing the point. MS monopolisitic grab happened with Office97. Releases after Office97 were irrelevant in this respect, as MS already had a monopoly.
What version? Through Office XP this was still a pain to do, or it was completely undocumented.
And if you doubt MS illegally forced the bundling of Office with its OS via the vendor contracts, read this
Egads, this is a +5 insightful troll? Well, here goes nothing.
MS didn't beat the competition, the competition was unfairly bludgeoned into defeat.
IE: bundled with OSes. Unfair tying when you're a monopoly.
Direct3D: bundled with OS. Marketing BS, promises, and incentives to developers, who fell for it.
"Modern desktop GUI": you're kidding, right? Next and OS/2 were the most advanced, arguably even by today's standards. (Haven't seen Be)
Office Products: Again, you must be kidding. They used threats of increased OS prices to force vendors to bundle Office, so everyone got Office with their new PC. Several incompatible versions of Office later, everyone was forced to upgrade. Why? Well, when the big wigs in government, for example, got their new PCs with Office 97, everyone they dealt with had to upgrade, which cascades quite quickly throughout a 3+ million person organization that does incredible amounts of business with outside companies.... I wonder what that means for the rumored Mac adoption?
Oh, and why doesn't Word allow me to do multiple page unmbering within a document easily? (Well, I stopped trying after OfficeXP) I'm talking about index page numbering, and then starting over with page "1" within a single document? It's not easy to do, if you can get it to do it at all. Also, why does Word print documents differently on different printers? I thought I specified the format, and the printer was subject to my whims, not the other way around? These observations by and large also apply to their other products, which are all pretty much crap.
So, I don't like to bash MS for taking other people's ideas. I'm obligated by my sense of ethics and morality to post the truth when presented with incorrect data.
A leap-frog platform. Take the Mac mini: it has standard parts, thus can easily be coded to. (All the things that make a game console better for game development). It's already a computer. None of the other 3 companies have that. It's out now.... Whoops.
They mention Eclipse, but the book is focused on NetBeans. Why, who the heck knows. Some conspiracy I'll bet! (where's the tinfoil hat? Oh crap, it's too late!)
Active X is only one of the security holes. Most of the recent security problems with IE, Outlook, MS in general have nothing to do with Active X. Heck, even SP 2, which disables Active X by default, still leaves the PC prone to several buffer overflow attacks and more.
As for joining a party, there's not a party out there that supports me. Why? Because I'm a moderate with leanings towards both ends of the current political spectrum. There's not a moderate party out there, and there's not a party that caters to moderates. You have the super right neo-conservative party of the Republicans, and the ultra-liberal Democrats (although that tune may change now). Then you have the libertarians who go just a smidgin too far over the edge and are so small, they're meaningless. Independents... well, being independent is pretty self-explanatary, almost like the anti-social party.... (That last one's made up, for the humor-impaired.) Then there's the Green party, that in some ways make Democrats look like sane conservative folks.
So, in short, we've got our whacked super fringe parties, and then ... wait, there's no real mainstream parties anymore. After all, it's quite hard to get a large group of people excited about... well, we like things the way they are mostly. Yep, a real "cause" there.
GAIM also supports Jabber. However, I'd rather have client to client encryption than client to server. There's still a man in the middle in that scenario.
While it's true you can make any choice you wish, the problem is, in the end we were effectively only presented with 2 choices, which in my case were others' choices. (I can't imagine I'm alone in this position).
Personally, I felt the real problem was that we were given such poor choices to begin with. The 2 party system is sorely lacking, and we could seriously use a third, or even fourth, viable party. Both parties leave the majority wanting, at the moment, and both parties appear to be controlled by fringe elements.
Man, on a day I don't have mod points....
The only reason DVDs are region encoded is so the MPAA can "control" where their DVDs are sold, and how much they can charge for them. It basically divides the globe up into 6 price regions, so they can theoretically charge what the regional market will bear, irrelevant of the real value of their product.
Personally, I could care less if a DVD is region encoded. It's their right to provide their content however they want. What's wrong is that the players are region encoded. (Yeah, there's not much point to region encoding disks if all players play them anywyas;) But fortunately, you can unlock a significant number of players.
For IM, use GAIM and get the GAIM encryption plug-in. Nice, seamless encryption over anyone's IM service. Only issue - your friends also need to be running Gaim with the encryption module.
Let me rephrase that: "P2P has vast significant non-infringing uses".
That should satisfy any and all arguments, as it has significant uses, and depriving those significant uses would affect a vast group of people.
Note: since P2P is still in its infancy, the "vast" number stands yet to grow in leaps and bounds not yet seen for anything other than perhaps instant messaging and the initial wave of P2P apps.
Think about this for a second. If the only purpose of the procedure is to keep you from dying, what's the point of extending your life beyond the point where you're babling like a 1 year old? (That whole second childhood thing going in reverse would become very obvious very quickly.) The entire point, to me anyways, of living longer would be living well, which includes being able to do physical and mental activities. Living forever as a vegetable isn't my idea of living.
I hadn't considered the disabled portion of SS as that's not deemed to be "problematic". It's the retirement portion, or rather, the looming number of benefits to be paid out to soon to be retirees.
As for made-up science, hasn't this been the "holy grail" of everyone?