OS/2 was accepted for use in gov up until Office 97's release. The fact that MS had found a way to completely break OS/2's 99.9% VM emulation had much to do with OS/2's demise in goverment. It also had much to do with the creation of MS Office as the defacto standard, btw. Consider this, within the goverment, a nice hardware rejunivation cycle started, with the higher ups finally saying yes, they needed shiny PCs on their desks, and they came with Office 97. O97 was notorious for its lack of backwards compatibility. The higher ups started sending attachments in their new gee wiz O97 formats. Lower folks had to be able to read them, so they upgraded. These underlings are also the ones that do much contract work, and send out documents (in O97 format of course!) to external companies, who also all need to upgrade/standardize on O97. These companies generally tend to subcontract...and so the cycle continued.
Now throw in the fact that O97 "broke" OS/2, and that O95 couldn't read O97's documents, nor could O97 properly save in earlier formats (not until a patch released much later) you'll see that this definitely didn't help OS/2, or any other OS out there. BTW, this also virtually killed Apple, as they were no longer able to do office automation either.
Now, I'll agree that IBM marketing didn't help the matter any either, but I'll argue that the blow MS paid out via O97 was a greater factor in reducing the viability of all other OSes, and directly contributed to the deathknell of several that otherwise might have been promising. Just think where Be, Apple, OS/2, and even Solaris might be on the desktop if a non-MS office software suite had become the defacto standard. (Until Office 95, WordPerfect, Lotus, and host of other office automation apps worked together grudgingly well on a host of OSes, but certainly not seamlessly, O97 killed the possibility of running office automation apps on any other OS if you wished to have bi-directional communication with 99% of the world.)
Because this goes directly against "fair use", not to mention that most of us won't buy that argument. Take a look at DivX or the current "expiring" DVDs. See them flying off the shelves?
You bought a set of cognac glasses. You open a restaurant. Now you have to pay a yearly fee to use your glasses in your restuarant. And, you don't pay that fee to the glass manufacturer, but to a third party group claiming to represent the drink vessel producers, which your particular glass manufacturer may or may not be a member of, or they'll sue you into oblivion.
Now if that doesn't remind you of the mafia, I don't know what would.
My neighbors are prime examples of people that need to be able to make backups. They have 3 kids between the ages of 3 and 10. They've managed to destroy at least 4 DVDs that I know of. Now, if he could (and he does, now) make copies of each DVD when bought, puts the original up in safe keeping and lets the kids destroy (ok, use, but that always seems to end in destruction:) the DVD. He can then make another copy whenever needed.
Contrary to popular belief, DVDs and CDs are far from indestructible. I personally copy all my CDs. I do not use original CDs in my car for instance, and right now, I have at least 2 CDs that the copies are better than the originals, as the originals were either badly manufactured or showing signs of CD rot (same thing really, but do I get a free replacement? Of course not....) but excellent extraction software Exact Audio Copy (EAC - free plug!) allows me to recover even the worst one error free.
I also like to play with DVD editing, which I am free to do for my own personal use under fair use. (Or, is someone going to argue that highlighting words in books or cutting out pictures/words/pages or splicing tape is illegal now? DMCA is damned.)
So, there's several cases, two of which directly address your question.
Take a look at OS/2 with its meta data for files. While sorting, searching, et al would be an addition, I pretty much never had an issue with a file made by program 'X' trying to be opened by program 'Y' because of the common extension. Actually, extensions were irrelevant, something I still miss in today's MS software. MS really does need to completely drop the 8.3 notation (and if you think they already did, please view your local file types in the explorer Folder Options, they're pretty much still stuck on the.3 part)
That's because there wasn't a PG-13 rating at the time. Guess what the cause of the PG-13 rating was? The bare breast in Clash of the Titans. It caused such an uproar that the PG-13 rating was instituted because a bare breast would corrupt all those blood and gore viewing young men. They actually wanted to rate Clash of the Titans 'R', but couldn't, because it didn't meet the requirements.
Read closely - VM process limitation (for Windows programs). OS/2 itself had no such limitation, and I believe the non VM processes could go up to the full 4GB (finding info on this now is more difficult, of course). I suppose I could dig through the paperwork accompanying my curiosity copy of Warp Server at home.
I'd agree that was an initial marketing blunder, although I don't recall the confusion. I probably adopted OS/2 prior to the introduction of the PS/2 series of computers. However, did you know that OS/2 apparently is still alive?
Shocked me, that did.
On your vendors too afraid to carry OS/2, much of that had to do with IBM's failure to attempt to get any sort of decent distribution contracts out with any of the major vendors initially. Later on, when MS's dominance and contracts were ironclad, the vendors were afraid to add the additional $100 per OS copy that they were saving thanks to their exclusivity contracts that were in place, because their major competitors had the same contracts.
I will agree that the short lived "OS/2 for Windows" was a stupid name, and didn't help matters at all. It resulted, again, because of IBM's licensing agreements, and the desire to reduce the cost of the OS/2 package to attempt to compete with MS on price.
I recall hearing about the billboards, and I too never saw one personally. I also recall something about those billboards being paid for by MS.... Truly underhanded, if true, but the internet memory doesn't go back that far, at least not on anything I can pull up. Then again, compared to 3 versions of MS software obliterating the CMOS configuration on my 486 EISA machine and was the reason I installed OS/2 out of frustration. It turned out MS Smartdrive was anything but, and on the EISA machine, some bug in Smartdrive and the MB drivers caused Smartdrive to lazily write to the CMOS, very cool and very repeatable!
I'd consider the biggest marketing mistake the release of OS/2 2.0. It wasn't ready, and the follow up release was much much much better. Regarding the memory requirements, who were the targets for OS/2 at the time? We had 32 and 64 MB machines, so memory wasn't the driver. We were also running NT (3.1, ugh!, and 3.5, which wasn't all that much better on that hardware). Basically, at the initial release of OS/2, I hold that Win 3.x was not the target audience, but the advanced users considering something like NT.
In short, OS/2 was too far ahead of its time, as it really needed a CDROM distro. The 100+ floppies were a nightmare, if you ever had to go through that install. I don't think I still have any of those disks. (I do still have the 47 floppy disk install of Borland C 4.0! Why, I don't know.)
Marketing had nothing to do with OS/2's success or failure. If you actually study the OS/2 debacle, you learn the following:
do not commit to long-term licenses of components at extravagant rates (HPFS was reputed to be $87 per OS/2 copy sold)
do not attempt to run another company's software on your system when that company also owns the underlying competing framework without an ironclad contract of said competing company's support for your platform. (Office and Windows - MS finally broke OS/2's support of Office by requesting a memory allocation at the 2GB barrier, OS/2's VM only allowed for 512MB per process)
Just because you were hit with anti-business practices in one category, don't pull back entirely from pushing for contracts with vendors (Dell, Gateway, Compaq), leaving the field entirely open to MS's strong-arm tactics.
I'm sure the list goes on much longer, but those are some of the highlights that truly brought OS/2 to its knees in the battle against MS. Not being able to run Office 97, and the inability of Office 97 to be backwards compatible with previous versions forcing large-scale upgrades (yes, I worked for the military back then, and when the admiral gets a shiny new PC with the latest and greatest Office on it and starts sending out Word attachments, you better be able to read them....).
I'm sure there's much more, but OS/2 failed for some bad decisions on IBM's part in licensing contracts, and some underhanded tactics on MS's part forcing sole distributorships while simultaneously forcing upgrade cycles. None of that hides the fact, however, that for all intents and purposes, a 10 year-old copy of OS/2 still smokes the latest from Redmond in almost every way technically.
MS Word used to be the one POS software MS made that was usable.
That was before they added in HTML/XML features, clippy, and that damn grammer/spell checker that doesn't know half the words I use, and can't seem to understand technical writing whatsoever. (Although its failure to handle method/variable names gracefully does assist in identifying typos... so I've even found a way to use its failure to assist me).
And as for Word's "ability" to generate XML, please. Really. That's like saying use Word to generate web pages.
I think it really depends on what you're programming for. For user applications, especially small ones, it doesn't really make sense to program in java unless portability is your overriding concern. For business applications, especially server applications, java makes much more sense precisely because of the security features inherent to the language, not to mention the maintainability of the code, provided that programmers with half an ounce of knowledge are working on it.
If Paul thinks lots of "great" programmers work for MS (they code in C, hence they must be "better" than java coders) I'd like to know how he explains the never ending list of bugs, many of them security bugs/buffer overflows that seem to permeate the entire set of MS code?
That aside, yes, a great programmer will be able to code something fast in the terse language of choice. That same code will most likely be unmaintainable when the poor maintenance guy comes along to attempt to track down the buffer overflow or whatever other error has cropped up in said code.
And just because you use a language like Java doesn't mean your code has to be verbose. You can approach C's terseness with Java, although you cannot utilize some of the pointer variable morphing attainable by C. But you certainly can approach C or Perl's unmaintainability with ease with Java, all it takes is 1 or 2 people that don't understand the language, architecture, nor OO. (Think 14K line "classes" here with 20 or so methods, 5 "inner" classes, and lots of circular dependencies)
But in today's world, most CDs only have 1 or 2 songs worth listening to. I'm not paying $10+ for such a CD. I wouldn't mind paying $1 a song though, the basic single price.
There will always be more one-hit wonders out there than good albums. Current pricing schemes hurt the one-hit wonder acts, imnsho, as the price promotes their piracy. At $1 a song, almost no one would bother ripping it off, especially if you could go into the store and buy a compilation you select. (The kiosk approach, don't know where that's gone to though) And, quite honestly, some people's year long effort isn't worth $0.01, nor would I want it in my house for free, even.
man and mankind still are the generic terms for "humans". Check out the definitation of man. The first definition refers striclty to male human, after that, the next 8 or so mean "man" as in mankind, or human. I'm not up enough on my etymology to know specifically where "woman" and "human" came from, although both go quite far back.
Actually, I'd have been happier if they just blocked access to the ports that MS left open for ease of use, not all ports. That generally means well known ports under 1024. Ports above, like P2P networks, most games, etc, only run if they're meant to run via an installed application. What exactly was MS trying to accomplish by this?
Are the next round of games going to include code to turn off their required ports? If so, that pretty much kills any usefulness of a "firewall".
This is more like ripping off the nose to spite the face than anything truly insightful or helpful on MS's part. Again, they took the easy way out. Rather than fix their software, they applied yet another bandaid. At some point, the number of bandaids will be thick enough to stop a bullet, but the bandaids themselves have this terrible habit of falling off at just the wrong time.
If you're scraping bottom on prices, try the Movie Trading company. They have a sidewalk sale going on now for no art-work DVDs 5 for $20. Guaranteed for 30 days. No questions asked on trade in within that time.
I have both a CRT and a flat screen. I use the flat screen for a lot more stuff than the CRT, mainly because most of what I do these days is programming or email. And since that comprises hours and hours of time, it's a lot easier on my eyes than staring into a CRT's radiation field.
If I were to do picture/video editing or action gaming, then I'd switch to the CRT, as the resolution/refresh performance is much better on the CRT. If money is your primary motivator (ie, spending $150) then CRTs are definitely your target. Do realize that there may be other considerations for some of us though.
It's always possible I just got one of a bad batch. I did only pay $18 for it, after all.:)
But, I bought it knowing they had problems, and no, I do not have the latest firmware flashed to it. I will give that one more shot before going for a third-party firmware. The innards are supposedly the same basic components as a Linksys WRT54g, so firmware like the vaunted Sveasoft should work fine. At most I'd be out $18.
Heck, for that matter, the Netgear 54g cost me $8.
Heck, I've got a virtually unusable Belkin 54g router sitting at home (well, at least until I flash its firmware with sveasoft or the like)
The damn thing won't hold a configuration for crap, reboots like a windows machine, and otherwise is about the most unpleasant networking product I've owned since the 3Com 503 (I think that was the model #, might have been 501). Fortunately I had a cheap netgear 54g router on the shelf, plugged it in and all was well, except for sustained connectivity. Seems there's lots of interference in my neighborhood (about 12 networks show up, maybe I should just use one of them?:)
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Are you so sure?
OS/2 was accepted for use in gov up until Office 97's release. The fact that MS had found a way to completely break OS/2's 99.9% VM emulation had much to do with OS/2's demise in goverment. It also had much to do with the creation of MS Office as the defacto standard, btw. Consider this, within the goverment, a nice hardware rejunivation cycle started, with the higher ups finally saying yes, they needed shiny PCs on their desks, and they came with Office 97. O97 was notorious for its lack of backwards compatibility. The higher ups started sending attachments in their new gee wiz O97 formats. Lower folks had to be able to read them, so they upgraded. These underlings are also the ones that do much contract work, and send out documents (in O97 format of course!) to external companies, who also all need to upgrade/standardize on O97. These companies generally tend to subcontract...and so the cycle continued.
Now throw in the fact that O97 "broke" OS/2, and that O95 couldn't read O97's documents, nor could O97 properly save in earlier formats (not until a patch released much later) you'll see that this definitely didn't help OS/2, or any other OS out there. BTW, this also virtually killed Apple, as they were no longer able to do office automation either.
Now, I'll agree that IBM marketing didn't help the matter any either, but I'll argue that the blow MS paid out via O97 was a greater factor in reducing the viability of all other OSes, and directly contributed to the deathknell of several that otherwise might have been promising. Just think where Be, Apple, OS/2, and even Solaris might be on the desktop if a non-MS office software suite had become the defacto standard. (Until Office 95, WordPerfect, Lotus, and host of other office automation apps worked together grudgingly well on a host of OSes, but certainly not seamlessly, O97 killed the possibility of running office automation apps on any other OS if you wished to have bi-directional communication with 99% of the world.)
Because this goes directly against "fair use", not to mention that most of us won't buy that argument. Take a look at DivX or the current "expiring" DVDs. See them flying off the shelves?
Actually, the analogy goes:
You bought a set of cognac glasses. You open a restaurant. Now you have to pay a yearly fee to use your glasses in your restuarant. And, you don't pay that fee to the glass manufacturer, but to a third party group claiming to represent the drink vessel producers, which your particular glass manufacturer may or may not be a member of, or they'll sue you into oblivion.
Now if that doesn't remind you of the mafia, I don't know what would.
My neighbors are prime examples of people that need to be able to make backups. They have 3 kids between the ages of 3 and 10. They've managed to destroy at least 4 DVDs that I know of. Now, if he could (and he does, now) make copies of each DVD when bought, puts the original up in safe keeping and lets the kids destroy (ok, use, but that always seems to end in destruction:) the DVD. He can then make another copy whenever needed.
Contrary to popular belief, DVDs and CDs are far from indestructible. I personally copy all my CDs. I do not use original CDs in my car for instance, and right now, I have at least 2 CDs that the copies are better than the originals, as the originals were either badly manufactured or showing signs of CD rot (same thing really, but do I get a free replacement? Of course not....) but excellent extraction software Exact Audio Copy (EAC - free plug!) allows me to recover even the worst one error free.
I also like to play with DVD editing, which I am free to do for my own personal use under fair use. (Or, is someone going to argue that highlighting words in books or cutting out pictures/words/pages or splicing tape is illegal now? DMCA is damned.)
So, there's several cases, two of which directly address your question.
Take a look at OS/2 with its meta data for files. While sorting, searching, et al would be an addition, I pretty much never had an issue with a file made by program 'X' trying to be opened by program 'Y' because of the common extension. Actually, extensions were irrelevant, something I still miss in today's MS software. MS really does need to completely drop the 8.3 notation (and if you think they already did, please view your local file types in the explorer Folder Options, they're pretty much still stuck on the .3 part)
LaTeX? You wimp. Use TeX. (No wimpy niceties for you, monkey-boy!)
That's because there wasn't a PG-13 rating at the time. Guess what the cause of the PG-13 rating was? The bare breast in Clash of the Titans. It caused such an uproar that the PG-13 rating was instituted because a bare breast would corrupt all those blood and gore viewing young men. They actually wanted to rate Clash of the Titans 'R', but couldn't, because it didn't meet the requirements.
Read closely - VM process limitation (for Windows programs). OS/2 itself had no such limitation, and I believe the non VM processes could go up to the full 4GB (finding info on this now is more difficult, of course). I suppose I could dig through the paperwork accompanying my curiosity copy of Warp Server at home.
On the other hand, I did find some stories while researching the exact memory limitations that .NET appears to crash when exceeding 1.2GB in a process.
I'd agree that was an initial marketing blunder, although I don't recall the confusion. I probably adopted OS/2 prior to the introduction of the PS/2 series of computers. However, did you know that OS/2 apparently is still alive? Shocked me, that did.
On your vendors too afraid to carry OS/2, much of that had to do with IBM's failure to attempt to get any sort of decent distribution contracts out with any of the major vendors initially. Later on, when MS's dominance and contracts were ironclad, the vendors were afraid to add the additional $100 per OS copy that they were saving thanks to their exclusivity contracts that were in place, because their major competitors had the same contracts.
I will agree that the short lived "OS/2 for Windows" was a stupid name, and didn't help matters at all. It resulted, again, because of IBM's licensing agreements, and the desire to reduce the cost of the OS/2 package to attempt to compete with MS on price.
I recall hearing about the billboards, and I too never saw one personally. I also recall something about those billboards being paid for by MS.... Truly underhanded, if true, but the internet memory doesn't go back that far, at least not on anything I can pull up. Then again, compared to 3 versions of MS software obliterating the CMOS configuration on my 486 EISA machine and was the reason I installed OS/2 out of frustration. It turned out MS Smartdrive was anything but, and on the EISA machine, some bug in Smartdrive and the MB drivers caused Smartdrive to lazily write to the CMOS, very cool and very repeatable!
I'd consider the biggest marketing mistake the release of OS/2 2.0. It wasn't ready, and the follow up release was much much much better. Regarding the memory requirements, who were the targets for OS/2 at the time? We had 32 and 64 MB machines, so memory wasn't the driver. We were also running NT (3.1, ugh!, and 3.5, which wasn't all that much better on that hardware). Basically, at the initial release of OS/2, I hold that Win 3.x was not the target audience, but the advanced users considering something like NT.
In short, OS/2 was too far ahead of its time, as it really needed a CDROM distro. The 100+ floppies were a nightmare, if you ever had to go through that install. I don't think I still have any of those disks. (I do still have the 47 floppy disk install of Borland C 4.0! Why, I don't know.)
I'm sure the list goes on much longer, but those are some of the highlights that truly brought OS/2 to its knees in the battle against MS. Not being able to run Office 97, and the inability of Office 97 to be backwards compatible with previous versions forcing large-scale upgrades (yes, I worked for the military back then, and when the admiral gets a shiny new PC with the latest and greatest Office on it and starts sending out Word attachments, you better be able to read them....).
I'm sure there's much more, but OS/2 failed for some bad decisions on IBM's part in licensing contracts, and some underhanded tactics on MS's part forcing sole distributorships while simultaneously forcing upgrade cycles. None of that hides the fact, however, that for all intents and purposes, a 10 year-old copy of OS/2 still smokes the latest from Redmond in almost every way technically.
MS Word used to be the one POS software MS made that was usable.
That was before they added in HTML/XML features, clippy, and that damn grammer/spell checker that doesn't know half the words I use, and can't seem to understand technical writing whatsoever. (Although its failure to handle method/variable names gracefully does assist in identifying typos... so I've even found a way to use its failure to assist me).
And as for Word's "ability" to generate XML, please. Really. That's like saying use Word to generate web pages.
I think it really depends on what you're programming for. For user applications, especially small ones, it doesn't really make sense to program in java unless portability is your overriding concern. For business applications, especially server applications, java makes much more sense precisely because of the security features inherent to the language, not to mention the maintainability of the code, provided that programmers with half an ounce of knowledge are working on it.
If Paul thinks lots of "great" programmers work for MS (they code in C, hence they must be "better" than java coders) I'd like to know how he explains the never ending list of bugs, many of them security bugs/buffer overflows that seem to permeate the entire set of MS code?
That aside, yes, a great programmer will be able to code something fast in the terse language of choice. That same code will most likely be unmaintainable when the poor maintenance guy comes along to attempt to track down the buffer overflow or whatever other error has cropped up in said code.
And just because you use a language like Java doesn't mean your code has to be verbose. You can approach C's terseness with Java, although you cannot utilize some of the pointer variable morphing attainable by C. But you certainly can approach C or Perl's unmaintainability with ease with Java, all it takes is 1 or 2 people that don't understand the language, architecture, nor OO. (Think 14K line "classes" here with 20 or so methods, 5 "inner" classes, and lots of circular dependencies)
Might that be because .NET is (partially) loaded already?
But in today's world, most CDs only have 1 or 2 songs worth listening to. I'm not paying $10+ for such a CD. I wouldn't mind paying $1 a song though, the basic single price.
There will always be more one-hit wonders out there than good albums. Current pricing schemes hurt the one-hit wonder acts, imnsho, as the price promotes their piracy. At $1 a song, almost no one would bother ripping it off, especially if you could go into the store and buy a compilation you select. (The kiosk approach, don't know where that's gone to though) And, quite honestly, some people's year long effort isn't worth $0.01, nor would I want it in my house for free, even.
man and mankind still are the generic terms for "humans". Check out the definitation of man. The first definition refers striclty to male human, after that, the next 8 or so mean "man" as in mankind, or human. I'm not up enough on my etymology to know specifically where "woman" and "human" came from, although both go quite far back.
In the case of MS OSes, ports = services, at least for those most often exploited.
Shutting down access to ports 135-139 pretty much kills the built-in network functionality of MS OSes and ease of use, as an example.
But, you are right, you can run sshd on port 80, if you want, just don't expect most browsers to be able to use it.
How many MS exploits are there for ports above 1024? No really, name one.
How many games, etc, are negatively affected by blocking ports above 1024?
And that's a pretty fucking hilarious mod - flamebait? Must have been a MS fanboy.
Actually, I'd have been happier if they just blocked access to the ports that MS left open for ease of use, not all ports. That generally means well known ports under 1024. Ports above, like P2P networks, most games, etc, only run if they're meant to run via an installed application. What exactly was MS trying to accomplish by this?
Are the next round of games going to include code to turn off their required ports? If so, that pretty much kills any usefulness of a "firewall".
This is more like ripping off the nose to spite the face than anything truly insightful or helpful on MS's part. Again, they took the easy way out. Rather than fix their software, they applied yet another bandaid. At some point, the number of bandaids will be thick enough to stop a bullet, but the bandaids themselves have this terrible habit of falling off at just the wrong time.
If you're scraping bottom on prices, try the Movie Trading company. They have a sidewalk sale going on now for no art-work DVDs 5 for $20. Guaranteed for 30 days. No questions asked on trade in within that time.
I have both a CRT and a flat screen. I use the flat screen for a lot more stuff than the CRT, mainly because most of what I do these days is programming or email. And since that comprises hours and hours of time, it's a lot easier on my eyes than staring into a CRT's radiation field.
If I were to do picture/video editing or action gaming, then I'd switch to the CRT, as the resolution/refresh performance is much better on the CRT. If money is your primary motivator (ie, spending $150) then CRTs are definitely your target. Do realize that there may be other considerations for some of us though.
It's always possible I just got one of a bad batch. I did only pay $18 for it, after all. :)
But, I bought it knowing they had problems, and no, I do not have the latest firmware flashed to it. I will give that one more shot before going for a third-party firmware. The innards are supposedly the same basic components as a Linksys WRT54g, so firmware like the vaunted Sveasoft should work fine. At most I'd be out $18.
Heck, for that matter, the Netgear 54g cost me $8.
From your post:
The numbers came directly from the article, no pulling out of Donkeys necessary.The damn thing won't hold a configuration for crap, reboots like a windows machine, and otherwise is about the most unpleasant networking product I've owned since the 3Com 503 (I think that was the model #, might have been 501). Fortunately I had a cheap netgear 54g router on the shelf, plugged it in and all was well, except for sustained connectivity. Seems there's lots of interference in my neighborhood (about 12 networks show up, maybe I should just use one of them? :)