I think most people are worried what influence Microsoft might make on Linux. In reality, Microsoft has already influenced Linux more than people realize. Do you think Linux would be as popular as it is now if there weren't a need for Free (and sometimes free) alternatives to Windows? The key is to get aggressive on desktops and servers. The Linux community has a unique opening to steal Microsoft's customers here. Might as well make use of the situation. And remember, if you are an OSS developer and Novell knocks on your door with a patch that only benefits them, decide if it makes sense to help them and Microsoft.
I think this Novell stunt might have just woken up the world to what they are really like. Perhaps people will start to understand why I don't like dealing with their products. Try supporting netware or groupwise for a living and see if you like them!
You can get a barebones kit to build a laptop but at considerable cost compared to a dell. Asus sells kits for instance that require you to purchase drives, ram and wireless card. I wouldn't consider that "building" completely as its partially assembled. If you look at the case designs and specs, you'll realize other PC vendors (HP's compaq division for instance) probably use these for their systems. You can get one from compaq (HP) for roughly the same price as the barebones kit including everything and a warrenty as well as a windows license.
When a dell laptop costs $599 but a home built > $1000, what makes more sense to buy? Granted I researched pricing a few months ago, but it makes no sense to build a laptop without a warranty to me. Too many things can happen to them.
In my opinion, the real crime is that the EULA doesn't allow you to run windows virtualized on that laptop. For business use, it would be great to put linux on a system and then just setup vmware with your windows copy that came with it. Microsoft's licensing terms are rough. You can't use their open licensed versions of windows on PCs that did not ship with windows. They are considered upgrade versions only. If you buy a PC with no copy of windows, and later require it you must buy a retail copy of Windows by their terms.
Version numbers are irrelevant. NetBSD released everything as 1.x for so long they are "behind" FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Big deal. There is a huge jump between 1.x and 2.x in NetBSD just as FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x have some major differences. All the BSDs share with each other. There are imports from OpenBSD and NetBSD and vice versa. There are even a few changes from DragonFly in FreeBSD and possibly others. Where you don't see code sharing is with PC/Desktop BSD since they are just distros and MidnightBSD has not evolved far enough to offer anything significant yet.
From my perspective, OpenBSD and DragonFly are the innovators right now. FreeBSD is starting to track down the problems they created with 5.x and by FreeBSD 8.x I suspect it will be a very nice system assuming they don't change threading libraries AGAIN. Last I knew 7.x is going to libthr (1:1) and they may keep (M:N) threading as a backup for some apps.
OpenBSD has some momentum, but still they don't have adequate funding. Many of their developers have been interested in other projects too. Most of the people who contact me about committing to MidnightBSD are OpenBSD developers. I'm assuming the newer developers don't share the projects view on licensing as much considering my project goals conflict with OpenBSD philosophy. I'm willing to include GPL software in addition to binutils and gcc.
I think all the BSD projects are growing at different rates, and some are side tracked right now. DF and FreeBSD will eventually find their way back.
No, many people need to use windows professionally regardless of what there personal environment is. I dual boot Windows XP and MidnightBSD on my desktop. I use windows for gaming. Having a Mac that could run all three would be great on the road. I could develop and use MidnightBSD, boot into OS X if I want to watch iTunes content or do website design and run games and do.NET development in windows.
I'm actually more curious how Linux and BSD run but I don't think a mainstream site would publish such details. Given a windows estimate, I could get a rough idea of performance versus other systems. Any os that can run on all the systems is ok, but Windows is most likely to have adequate driver support up front for all the platforms. Linux and BSD is often behind on driver support. Take the sata to pata converter on many of the new intel 965 based motherboards. The Linux community supports one of two common devices. The other one does not work. BSD doesn't even have that yet. Granted, you can hack around it with linux by enabling generic IDE support, although this does not seem to work in FreeBSD 6.2 beta 2 or MidnightBSD which does not detect any cdroms although it sees the controller.
People who will buy this include open source fans, consultants who require multiple platforms, and business people who need windows for work. My wife's employer has been considering buying intel Macs for their next upgrade as they are starting to get requests for Mac software development as well as.NET and PHP. (she's a programmer)
Funny, I think that Office 2003 is better than 2000 especially after supporting both. OpenOffice isn't that good, but there are only a few open source office productivity suites available. People like it because its one of the best pieces of software in that genre that is free. That does not make it good. Personally, I'd rather use Apple Pages or Mac Office 2004 for word processing than anything else. The real problem is that open office, word perfect and a slew of other apps tried to duplicate office 97 or 2000's appearance. Some suites are moving away from that, but I find it irritating. If it is going to look like office, it better damn well be identical. Every feature better act the same and be in the same place. If they can't do that, then make it feel unique. I'd rather use lotus smartsuite which looks like crap but works ok than to try to use something that is a wannabe MS product. I feel the same way about KDE although I have to say KDE works well. I also say this as someone trying to create a GNUstep based desktop system. My intention is to give it a unique gui eventually but at first it will suffer from what I described above. At least I admit I am doing a wannabe product,
I was excited to see the headline. I look at the site and its just comparing several models to a baseline previous MacBook Pro. What is the point in that? I want to see real benchmarks like perhaps windows running on it vs a comparable "PC" laptop from say dell, toshiba or some other vendor. I'd also like to see a benchmark compared to desktop models like iMacs, Mac Pros, etc. To put it in perspective, maybe some benchmarks from G4/G5 models as well.
I want to know how apple compares to other vendors now that apples to apples comparisons are more fair. You could argue driver support if the mac loses, but its not like dell ships great drivers for their modified chipsets either. I have an iBook now and it would be nice to know how PC operating systems run on this thing. I now have a good reason to want to run BSD on one of these:)
Novell has been trying to replace groupwise with a.NET version for some time. They want it to run in mono on linux as well as in windows. Anything to get rid of the terrible memory leaks would be an improvement. I should explain... Groupwise 6.5 has a little issue. Once a user sent an email to everyone at the university I worked for. She did not use a list, but actually addressed everyone individually. On most computers, Groupwise consumed so much ram that it actually overwrote memory for other processes including the Intel graphics drivers. The result was strange corruptions and crashes across all machines. I worked support at the time and some of the techs initially assumed it was some new virus but it turned out just to be groupwise. Novell was in the process of rolling out groupwise 7 and therefore would not consider fixing 6.5.
I like id software games, but one could argue they also follow the pattern you outlined. How many games did they release on the quake 2 and quake 3 engines which were similar? What about the doom 3 engine? What is different between Doom 3 and Quake 4 aside from the tone and a few bad guys? How about Quake 3 vs RTCW vs ET? They added objectives to ET...
Yes, all these companies are not doing that well today. They are not out of business either. I think Redhat makes a good point about Novell pulling out of Linux before they do. Look at the Novell track record. The real issue is why is Novell making the deal with Microsoft? Could it be that many people don't consider them relevant anymore with Netware and Groupwise? Perhaps their plans for Suse have not come to pass. I've worked for two different Universities that use Netware/Groupwise and are slowly migrating off of it for Microsoft, Sun and Apple solutions. Linux was not deployed. Granted universities tend to make terrible choices in software and hardware.
This is Novell's big attempt to get relevant again. Perhaps if we ignore it they will go away!
Yes, and I think apple's sales numbers will improve when people get larger hard drives. At that point, they might see an increase in sales that may allow them to negotiate with other studios. Most desktops have large disks, but laptops from Apple are still rather small. Pirates of the Caribbean is roughly 1.53GB. Consider iBooks used to ship with 30-40GB of space. You can only put 26 movies on the drive and that presumes you don't care about having an OS, music or software on there. I have about 22GB of content in iTunes with 15GB purchased from the iTunes store. My drive is always around 2GB and I can't afford to buy another movie on that system. I could buy one on my desktop, but if I wanted to watch movies on my desktop I can simply buy DVDs. My iBook was an academic model G4 which did not come with a combo drive and I don't think most people like lugging around DVDs with their laptops that do have DVD drives. Sure you can always dump DVDs to disk in quicktime or divx or whatever.
I've purchased quite a few TV shows on iTunes and I'd love them to add more content. I particularly like the universal studios content as their DVDs are always defective. For any season of any show I've purchased, at least 2 episodes won't play all the way through without skipping or losing audio/video. And no, its not the 3 DVD players + 6 DVD drives on PCs/Macs in my home. Worst part is that the knight rider 2000 movie skips right at the "scotty at the ATM" sequence which is the only good thing in that whole movie! (it was included with season 1 of knight rider) You can argue take it back, but it doesn't help. Its happened with 3 seasons of knight rider and my forth is on its way. If I didn't love knight rider so much, I'd say F it. At least with iTunes I could rebuy the damn episodes from the first two seasons that didn't play right. On a side note, Paramount DVDs work great. Star Trek (seasons 1-3), TNG season 6 and seasons 1-6 of Macgyver play perfectly. On topic, I love buying Monk and other shows on iTunes and hope they get the movie content. Eventually I will buy a new laptop with some space beyond the 60GB drive I already put in it. (52 screws precludes me from upgrading it again)
Yes, and I found a faulty hard drive by reinstalling windows on the same drive. When the data corruption started again with the same drive I knew it was the drive. I had previously tried several cables. The smart status did not detect it as bad but I noticed the error rate was twice as high as a second identical drive purchased at the same time. Damn WD.
I'm happy about this news as I had decided not to buy vista after reading the EULA. This might change my mind. I still have to use windows for gaming, although WINE is improving all the time. With the evil Novell + Microsoft agreement, we might see a setback in the linux community and it will be even more important to have WINE and other tools. Its possible Mono and other software might not be available for emulation requiring people to buy windows or look for alternatives that do work.
Using XHTML does not break IE. I've been using XHTML since 2000 on most sites I create. Granted, you can't pass the correct content type, but aside from that it renders fine. Microsoft was an early adopter of CSS and an employee at Microsoft created XML.
Wannabe Web Designers are stupid and can't figure out how to add / to a few tags and make everything lowercase. I don't see how introducing a new standard for them to learn will help.
As for the dreamweaver comment, it does generate XHTML and you can select from various doctypes in the latest version of Adobe Dreamweaver 8. (Macromedia is gone)
To solve this problem, browsers must not render HTML 4 anymore. Web Designers would have to create XHTML documents. You can't surf on the first web browser anymore anyway. kernel.org and apache.org work but nothing with xhtml. See http://www.foolishgames.com/luke/firstbrowser.tiff
I don't think anyone would actually stop rendering HTML 4 so the W3C is in a pickle. They always give up when their standards aren't adopted. HTML 3.0 was never implemented so they released 3.2 which didn't include half the features.
There are certain types of content that use more memory. Firefox 2 seems much better than 1.x for me, but I still notice high memory usage when browsing heavy javascript pages. There are extensions for leak detection in javascript code, but then again isn't javascript supposed to handle memory cleanup for you? It seems like the implementation is not working in these modern browsers or that implementing the higher DOM interactions has caused an inconsistency with the original intent of javascript.
In order to speed up reload times, they keep pages you've left in memory. That is part of the problem. There should be a clear limit on how much memory will be used for a page that you've already left. If it is very large, reload it from disk cache. If it uses flash or java, don't cache it in memory when you leave.
I don't know what the intended behavior is, but this is the perceived behavior I've noticed in Firefox 1.x. On my system, Firefox uses less memory when starting vs IE7 but quickly surpasses it in use.
There are training issues with Vista as well. It does not look just like XP. Some users freak out when the "screens" are different. If someone picked a windows like environment such as KDE, end users might believe its the new Windows version. They still have to learn new screens either way. Remember the new MS Office version also has a face lift. IE7 is now different looking.. the transition from IE6 to firefox, IE7 or another browser is the same. This is the time to do it. Microsoft has set everyone up to switch. They felt they had to change the UI to get people to upgrade and it might just cost them a few percent market share in the long run.
Yes, but when making policy issues its difficult to draw the line. Sometimes its hard to represent the majority with corner cases and other times its not. Sometimes shades of gray help a situation. Pro-life people have trouble when they say that abortion is not ok in cases of rape. Most people think rape victims shouldn't have to have a forced upon baby.
Accepting shades of gray can change your life, but you have to be careful you don't dwell on it. In high school I was a psycho Christian and now my wife is a witch. And no, I didn't convert although I'm not welcome in most Christian churches now.
Forget reading.. you can go to newegg.com or many other sites and order an OEM System Builder version of Windows XP. I'm sure the same will happen with vista. I recently built a new PC and bought OEM XP Home SP2 for it. Works great and came with a beta 2 copy of vista which was useless to me since I had RC1 anyway.
And before anyone asks, I use XP for gaming and.NET development. The rest of the time I use MidnightBSD or Mac OS X.
As for XP installation, it took me two tries to get it just right. The first install assigned C: to my old sata drive formatted with NTFS and so the OS installed on F:\ which caused several hardware and software problems. My Microsoft fingerprint reader keyboard software didn't work properly for instance. In the end, I ended up reinstalling after I formatted the old sata disk to put MidnightBSD on the system and Windows conveniently changed F: to C: which caused windows not to boot properly. They should really use %systemroot% or something.
After my last install I have everything working properly except for a few issues with Creative's Audigy driver not detecting mic and line in and some known bugs with Nvidia's Geforce driver and Enemy Territory's command map screen. 52 windows update + IE7 + Windows Media Player 10.
I tried vista on this machine before XP came. Aside from problems with the nvidia driver and OpenGL, I found it to be tolerable. The new start menu layout sucks but I said the same thing about XP at first. I might get used to it. Its not revolutionary by any means. In fact, it felt like KDE in a way. It almost looks like windows but behaves a little different. Disclaimer: I'm not a big KDE fan
I can report that Microsoft almost caught up to Mac OS 10.4. The bar has been raised a little for open source projects and I'm sure many of them will meet or exceed it soon. MidnightBSD might take awhile though:)
On a side note, anyone interested in using FreeBSD or MidnightBSD on a Intel DP965LT motherboard might want to know there are problems with SATA/IDE support. FreeBSD 6.2 beta2 can boot up on it but fails to detect the cdrom during install. MidnightBSD does not detect chipset yet, but the latest snapshot can get into sysinstall and fails just as FreeBSD does. Vista and XP can both work with the motherboard and I haven't tried linux but the latest kernel added ICH8 support.
Read about xenix. Microsoft has tried to enter various markets over the years. They even have a supercomputer version of Windows. Microsoft claims to have a mulituser system. NT and later version have terminal services and other functionality that arguably makes them mulituser albeit weak.
The marketshare argument is not bogus. I was talking about desktops where most viruses are intended to hit. There have been a few linux/apache viruses in the past and there are security problems in apache history as well. IIS has the same number of security problems as apache provided you don't try to count ASP holes or Windows vulnerabilities. ASP equates to PHP and while it comes with the webserver, its still a different area. If you group apache + php which arguably you could do since we have mod_php and I know you're thinking asp is a dll, then we have at least equal vulnerabilities over the years.
Apple doesn't give a shit about their customers with older systems. Even machines 2 os versions back can't get security patches anymore. Microsoft is cutting off 9x now but they extended it several times. If you own a Mac, you must upgrade and stay current if you care about security. I do feel apple hardware is worth the price of admission though.
I'm sick of the Microsoft can't break corporate America argument. How many times have new versions of windows forced people to rebuy software? Do you think Office 97 will run on vista? Even it if does, I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't support it. At the minimum you have to have the previous version of office or the latest during most windows upgrade cycles and you have to rebuy your utility software. (backup, antivirus, etc)
More on the market share. Remember Apache runs on many operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X client and server, *BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc. Now try it with a desktop product with 70% market share and see if it gets targeted. Adobe Flash comes to mind. Ask myspace about versions prior to flash 9. Remember flash has a large install base but its very simple compared to an entire operating system.
"This isn't about what browser is best, it's about this little clique who feels superior to IE users while ignoring the fact that Opera is a better product overall."
This isn't about what browser is best, it's about this little clique who feels superior to IE users while ignoring the fact that Firefox is a better product overall.
See I can insert any browser into that statement and it still sounds like trolling. Opera fanboys can have their browser. Go for it. I even included Opera in MidnightBSD mports. Please realize not everyone feels that Opera is the best browser or that it is bug free. To this day I'm haunted by opera 3.5 and 4.0 with the reversed z-index. That was the day I gave up on Opera. Granted they are up to Opera 9 now and that issue was resolved a long time ago. I just have this knee jerk reaction whenever someone brings up Opera to scream. I'm sure you feel the same way about Firefox. Currently, Firefox is my second favorite browser and first favorite on Windows, BSD and Linux. I also have IE7 installed in Windows and find it to be a huge improvement.
You have to realize that Firefox was advertised and pushed to end users. At my university, everyone is told to use opera in all the labs regardless of operating system. Its the new netscape. Some of us hate netscape, but I personally loved it until 6.0 was released with gecko. Until firefox came out, I didn't like mozilla very much. I used it for email and that was about it. There are little problems with Firefox just like there were problems with netscape 1-4, but it will keep getting better until they hit a point where a rewrite is in order. I suspect Microsoft is nearing that point with IE. IE4 was a big overhaul and just as they have to rewrite windows every so many years, they will need to do the same with IE.
One good thing I'll say about opera is that its adaptive. The company finds ways to bolt on new technology. Regardless how you feel about the implementation, you must give them credit for that.
IE was discontinued years ago. If you wish to make browser comparisons use Safari. Apple makes a browser for their platform just as Microsoft makes Windows Internet Explorer (as they call it now). In fact, if I were comparing KDE based systems, I would compare Konquerer to Firefox. IE is dead on the Mac. Thank God.
Mac OS X is not that secure. I'm an OS X admin and student by day and a BSD developer who has a Mac, NeXT, and several PCs. I can tell you that all operating systems have similar problems. Even on a mac, users will often type their password to install crap. They don't know when to do it and when no to. The reason apple has less virus problems is because the marketshare isn't there for people to bother. If OS X or linux ever took say 25% marketshare, I bet we'd start seeing many viruses. Microsoft makes mistakes, but its not like the days of Windows 95 or System 7. Remember, Apple didn't even have a multiuser operating system until A/UX and no one used that. Later, they BOUGHT OS X and added their gui changes on it. I don't think apple learned security overnight, they bought it. Even Microsoft used to sell UNIX (XENIX).
I've tried vista and its not that bad. There are issues with it and I do think Apple and the open source community will have answers to it. Mostly vista reminds me of KDE with a few things borrowed from Apple. We might see an even playing ground between everyone next year. Consumers will have real choice then. You may see the Mac viruses next year too.
As for Symantec and McAfee, I think their recent products are bloated and don't do their key task well. I don't want a third party firewall. I don't mind windows firewall or OS X/BSD's ipfw. Its good enough for a desktop. I do like some of the third party backup solutions. Backup software might be a big business again. In reality, regardess of what av software you use, backups are key. Hardware failure can happen to anyone. Microsoft is moving down the.Mac path with onecare backup and currently have surveys about.Mac style backup features. I love that option on OSX and its the only reason I have a.Mac account. Syncing and backup are very handy. That would be a nice feature in an OSS OS. In fact, I'll have to consider it for MidnightBSD down the road.
Well if we can't audit the code, perhaps we could alternate who runs diebold. Republican, Democrat, etc... Of course when we got to a small party like the american nazis I don't think anyone would like that system. (insert Republican joke here) Every party would get an easy chance to rig the elections then. What do you say?
Apple added Objective C++ support to OS X years ago. There are some issues, but there are ways to integrate the code. Consult ADC for more information.
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I think most people are worried what influence Microsoft might make on Linux. In reality, Microsoft has already influenced Linux more than people realize. Do you think Linux would be as popular as it is now if there weren't a need for Free (and sometimes free) alternatives to Windows? The key is to get aggressive on desktops and servers. The Linux community has a unique opening to steal Microsoft's customers here. Might as well make use of the situation. And remember, if you are an OSS developer and Novell knocks on your door with a patch that only benefits them, decide if it makes sense to help them and Microsoft.
I think this Novell stunt might have just woken up the world to what they are really like. Perhaps people will start to understand why I don't like dealing with their products. Try supporting netware or groupwise for a living and see if you like them!
You can get a barebones kit to build a laptop but at considerable cost compared to a dell. Asus sells kits for instance that require you to purchase drives, ram and wireless card. I wouldn't consider that "building" completely as its partially assembled. If you look at the case designs and specs, you'll realize other PC vendors (HP's compaq division for instance) probably use these for their systems. You can get one from compaq (HP) for roughly the same price as the barebones kit including everything and a warrenty as well as a windows license.
When a dell laptop costs $599 but a home built > $1000, what makes more sense to buy? Granted I researched pricing a few months ago, but it makes no sense to build a laptop without a warranty to me. Too many things can happen to them.
In my opinion, the real crime is that the EULA doesn't allow you to run windows virtualized on that laptop. For business use, it would be great to put linux on a system and then just setup vmware with your windows copy that came with it. Microsoft's licensing terms are rough. You can't use their open licensed versions of windows on PCs that did not ship with windows. They are considered upgrade versions only. If you buy a PC with no copy of windows, and later require it you must buy a retail copy of Windows by their terms.
Version numbers are irrelevant. NetBSD released everything as 1.x for so long they are "behind" FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Big deal. There is a huge jump between 1.x and 2.x in NetBSD just as FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x have some major differences. All the BSDs share with each other. There are imports from OpenBSD and NetBSD and vice versa. There are even a few changes from DragonFly in FreeBSD and possibly others. Where you don't see code sharing is with PC/Desktop BSD since they are just distros and MidnightBSD has not evolved far enough to offer anything significant yet.
From my perspective, OpenBSD and DragonFly are the innovators right now. FreeBSD is starting to track down the problems they created with 5.x and by FreeBSD 8.x I suspect it will be a very nice system assuming they don't change threading libraries AGAIN. Last I knew 7.x is going to libthr (1:1) and they may keep (M:N) threading as a backup for some apps.
OpenBSD has some momentum, but still they don't have adequate funding. Many of their developers have been interested in other projects too. Most of the people who contact me about committing to MidnightBSD are OpenBSD developers. I'm assuming the newer developers don't share the projects view on licensing as much considering my project goals conflict with OpenBSD philosophy. I'm willing to include GPL software in addition to binutils and gcc.
I think all the BSD projects are growing at different rates, and some are side tracked right now. DF and FreeBSD will eventually find their way back.
No, many people need to use windows professionally regardless of what there personal environment is. I dual boot Windows XP and MidnightBSD on my desktop. I use windows for gaming. Having a Mac that could run all three would be great on the road. I could develop and use MidnightBSD, boot into OS X if I want to watch iTunes content or do website design and run games and do .NET development in windows.
.NET and PHP. (she's a programmer)
I'm actually more curious how Linux and BSD run but I don't think a mainstream site would publish such details. Given a windows estimate, I could get a rough idea of performance versus other systems. Any os that can run on all the systems is ok, but Windows is most likely to have adequate driver support up front for all the platforms. Linux and BSD is often behind on driver support. Take the sata to pata converter on many of the new intel 965 based motherboards. The Linux community supports one of two common devices. The other one does not work. BSD doesn't even have that yet. Granted, you can hack around it with linux by enabling generic IDE support, although this does not seem to work in FreeBSD 6.2 beta 2 or MidnightBSD which does not detect any cdroms although it sees the controller.
People who will buy this include open source fans, consultants who require multiple platforms, and business people who need windows for work. My wife's employer has been considering buying intel Macs for their next upgrade as they are starting to get requests for Mac software development as well as
The more benchmarks the better.
Funny, I think that Office 2003 is better than 2000 especially after supporting both. OpenOffice isn't that good, but there are only a few open source office productivity suites available. People like it because its one of the best pieces of software in that genre that is free. That does not make it good. Personally, I'd rather use Apple Pages or Mac Office 2004 for word processing than anything else. The real problem is that open office, word perfect and a slew of other apps tried to duplicate office 97 or 2000's appearance. Some suites are moving away from that, but I find it irritating. If it is going to look like office, it better damn well be identical. Every feature better act the same and be in the same place. If they can't do that, then make it feel unique. I'd rather use lotus smartsuite which looks like crap but works ok than to try to use something that is a wannabe MS product. I feel the same way about KDE although I have to say KDE works well. I also say this as someone trying to create a GNUstep based desktop system. My intention is to give it a unique gui eventually but at first it will suffer from what I described above. At least I admit I am doing a wannabe product,
I was excited to see the headline. I look at the site and its just comparing several models to a baseline previous MacBook Pro. What is the point in that? I want to see real benchmarks like perhaps windows running on it vs a comparable "PC" laptop from say dell, toshiba or some other vendor. I'd also like to see a benchmark compared to desktop models like iMacs, Mac Pros, etc. To put it in perspective, maybe some benchmarks from G4/G5 models as well.
:)
I want to know how apple compares to other vendors now that apples to apples comparisons are more fair. You could argue driver support if the mac loses, but its not like dell ships great drivers for their modified chipsets either. I have an iBook now and it would be nice to know how PC operating systems run on this thing. I now have a good reason to want to run BSD on one of these
Yes, they were dell systems with XP SP2. Since intel graphics use shared system memory, it wasn't too hard to cause the problem.
If you enable software buffer overflow protection, groupwise ALWAYS crashed. No other applications would misbehave that we had in our image.
Novell has been trying to replace groupwise with a .NET version for some time. They want it to run in mono on linux as well as in windows. Anything to get rid of the terrible memory leaks would be an improvement. I should explain... Groupwise 6.5 has a little issue. Once a user sent an email to everyone at the university I worked for. She did not use a list, but actually addressed everyone individually. On most computers, Groupwise consumed so much ram that it actually overwrote memory for other processes including the Intel graphics drivers. The result was strange corruptions and crashes across all machines. I worked support at the time and some of the techs initially assumed it was some new virus but it turned out just to be groupwise. Novell was in the process of rolling out groupwise 7 and therefore would not consider fixing 6.5.
I like id software games, but one could argue they also follow the pattern you outlined. How many games did they release on the quake 2 and quake 3 engines which were similar? What about the doom 3 engine? What is different between Doom 3 and Quake 4 aside from the tone and a few bad guys? How about Quake 3 vs RTCW vs ET? They added objectives to ET...
Sun...
Yes, all these companies are not doing that well today. They are not out of business either. I think Redhat makes a good point about Novell pulling out of Linux before they do. Look at the Novell track record. The real issue is why is Novell making the deal with Microsoft? Could it be that many people don't consider them relevant anymore with Netware and Groupwise? Perhaps their plans for Suse have not come to pass. I've worked for two different Universities that use Netware/Groupwise and are slowly migrating off of it for Microsoft, Sun and Apple solutions. Linux was not deployed. Granted universities tend to make terrible choices in software and hardware.
This is Novell's big attempt to get relevant again. Perhaps if we ignore it they will go away!
In Soviet Russia, patents review YOU.
Yes, and I think apple's sales numbers will improve when people get larger hard drives. At that point, they might see an increase in sales that may allow them to negotiate with other studios. Most desktops have large disks, but laptops from Apple are still rather small. Pirates of the Caribbean is roughly 1.53GB. Consider iBooks used to ship with 30-40GB of space. You can only put 26 movies on the drive and that presumes you don't care about having an OS, music or software on there. I have about 22GB of content in iTunes with 15GB purchased from the iTunes store. My drive is always around 2GB and I can't afford to buy another movie on that system. I could buy one on my desktop, but if I wanted to watch movies on my desktop I can simply buy DVDs. My iBook was an academic model G4 which did not come with a combo drive and I don't think most people like lugging around DVDs with their laptops that do have DVD drives. Sure you can always dump DVDs to disk in quicktime or divx or whatever.
I've purchased quite a few TV shows on iTunes and I'd love them to add more content. I particularly like the universal studios content as their DVDs are always defective. For any season of any show I've purchased, at least 2 episodes won't play all the way through without skipping or losing audio/video. And no, its not the 3 DVD players + 6 DVD drives on PCs/Macs in my home. Worst part is that the knight rider 2000 movie skips right at the "scotty at the ATM" sequence which is the only good thing in that whole movie! (it was included with season 1 of knight rider) You can argue take it back, but it doesn't help. Its happened with 3 seasons of knight rider and my forth is on its way. If I didn't love knight rider so much, I'd say F it. At least with iTunes I could rebuy the damn episodes from the first two seasons that didn't play right. On a side note, Paramount DVDs work great. Star Trek (seasons 1-3), TNG season 6 and seasons 1-6 of Macgyver play perfectly. On topic, I love buying Monk and other shows on iTunes and hope they get the movie content. Eventually I will buy a new laptop with some space beyond the 60GB drive I already put in it. (52 screws precludes me from upgrading it again)
Yes, and I found a faulty hard drive by reinstalling windows on the same drive. When the data corruption started again with the same drive I knew it was the drive. I had previously tried several cables. The smart status did not detect it as bad but I noticed the error rate was twice as high as a second identical drive purchased at the same time. Damn WD.
I'm happy about this news as I had decided not to buy vista after reading the EULA. This might change my mind. I still have to use windows for gaming, although WINE is improving all the time. With the evil Novell + Microsoft agreement, we might see a setback in the linux community and it will be even more important to have WINE and other tools. Its possible Mono and other software might not be available for emulation requiring people to buy windows or look for alternatives that do work.
In 100,000 years we die out and get replaced by cats.
Using XHTML does not break IE. I've been using XHTML since 2000 on most sites I create. Granted, you can't pass the correct content type, but aside from that it renders fine. Microsoft was an early adopter of CSS and an employee at Microsoft created XML.
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Wannabe Web Designers are stupid and can't figure out how to add / to a few tags and make everything lowercase. I don't see how introducing a new standard for them to learn will help.
As for the dreamweaver comment, it does generate XHTML and you can select from various doctypes in the latest version of Adobe Dreamweaver 8. (Macromedia is gone)
To solve this problem, browsers must not render HTML 4 anymore. Web Designers would have to create XHTML documents. You can't surf on the first web browser anymore anyway. kernel.org and apache.org work but nothing with xhtml. See
http://www.foolishgames.com/luke/firstbrowser.tif
I don't think anyone would actually stop rendering HTML 4 so the W3C is in a pickle. They always give up when their standards aren't adopted. HTML 3.0 was never implemented so they released 3.2 which didn't include half the features.
There are certain types of content that use more memory. Firefox 2 seems much better than 1.x for me, but I still notice high memory usage when browsing heavy javascript pages. There are extensions for leak detection in javascript code, but then again isn't javascript supposed to handle memory cleanup for you? It seems like the implementation is not working in these modern browsers or that implementing the higher DOM interactions has caused an inconsistency with the original intent of javascript.
In order to speed up reload times, they keep pages you've left in memory. That is part of the problem. There should be a clear limit on how much memory will be used for a page that you've already left. If it is very large, reload it from disk cache. If it uses flash or java, don't cache it in memory when you leave.
I don't know what the intended behavior is, but this is the perceived behavior I've noticed in Firefox 1.x. On my system, Firefox uses less memory when starting vs IE7 but quickly surpasses it in use.
There are training issues with Vista as well. It does not look just like XP. Some users freak out when the "screens" are different. If someone picked a windows like environment such as KDE, end users might believe its the new Windows version. They still have to learn new screens either way. Remember the new MS Office version also has a face lift. IE7 is now different looking.. the transition from IE6 to firefox, IE7 or another browser is the same. This is the time to do it. Microsoft has set everyone up to switch. They felt they had to change the UI to get people to upgrade and it might just cost them a few percent market share in the long run.
Yes, but when making policy issues its difficult to draw the line. Sometimes its hard to represent the majority with corner cases and other times its not. Sometimes shades of gray help a situation. Pro-life people have trouble when they say that abortion is not ok in cases of rape. Most people think rape victims shouldn't have to have a forced upon baby.
Accepting shades of gray can change your life, but you have to be careful you don't dwell on it. In high school I was a psycho Christian and now my wife is a witch. And no, I didn't convert although I'm not welcome in most Christian churches now.
Forget reading.. you can go to newegg.com or many other sites and order an OEM System Builder version of Windows XP. I'm sure the same will happen with vista. I recently built a new PC and bought OEM XP Home SP2 for it. Works great and came with a beta 2 copy of vista which was useless to me since I had RC1 anyway.
.NET development. The rest of the time I use MidnightBSD or Mac OS X.
:)
And before anyone asks, I use XP for gaming and
As for XP installation, it took me two tries to get it just right. The first install assigned C: to my old sata drive formatted with NTFS and so the OS installed on F:\ which caused several hardware and software problems. My Microsoft fingerprint reader keyboard software didn't work properly for instance. In the end, I ended up reinstalling after I formatted the old sata disk to put MidnightBSD on the system and Windows conveniently changed F: to C: which caused windows not to boot properly. They should really use %systemroot% or something.
After my last install I have everything working properly except for a few issues with Creative's Audigy driver not detecting mic and line in and some known bugs with Nvidia's Geforce driver and Enemy Territory's command map screen. 52 windows update + IE7 + Windows Media Player 10.
I tried vista on this machine before XP came. Aside from problems with the nvidia driver and OpenGL, I found it to be tolerable. The new start menu layout sucks but I said the same thing about XP at first. I might get used to it. Its not revolutionary by any means. In fact, it felt like KDE in a way. It almost looks like windows but behaves a little different. Disclaimer: I'm not a big KDE fan
I can report that Microsoft almost caught up to Mac OS 10.4. The bar has been raised a little for open source projects and I'm sure many of them will meet or exceed it soon. MidnightBSD might take awhile though
On a side note, anyone interested in using FreeBSD or MidnightBSD on a Intel DP965LT motherboard might want to know there are problems with SATA/IDE support. FreeBSD 6.2 beta2 can boot up on it but fails to detect the cdrom during install. MidnightBSD does not detect chipset yet, but the latest snapshot can get into sysinstall and fails just as FreeBSD does. Vista and XP can both work with the motherboard and I haven't tried linux but the latest kernel added ICH8 support.
Read about xenix. Microsoft has tried to enter various markets over the years. They even have a supercomputer version of Windows. Microsoft claims to have a mulituser system. NT and later version have terminal services and other functionality that arguably makes them mulituser albeit weak.
The marketshare argument is not bogus. I was talking about desktops where most viruses are intended to hit. There have been a few linux/apache viruses in the past and there are security problems in apache history as well. IIS has the same number of security problems as apache provided you don't try to count ASP holes or Windows vulnerabilities. ASP equates to PHP and while it comes with the webserver, its still a different area. If you group apache + php which arguably you could do since we have mod_php and I know you're thinking asp is a dll, then we have at least equal vulnerabilities over the years.
Apple doesn't give a shit about their customers with older systems. Even machines 2 os versions back can't get security patches anymore. Microsoft is cutting off 9x now but they extended it several times. If you own a Mac, you must upgrade and stay current if you care about security. I do feel apple hardware is worth the price of admission though.
I'm sick of the Microsoft can't break corporate America argument. How many times have new versions of windows forced people to rebuy software? Do you think Office 97 will run on vista? Even it if does, I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't support it. At the minimum you have to have the previous version of office or the latest during most windows upgrade cycles and you have to rebuy your utility software. (backup, antivirus, etc)
More on the market share. Remember Apache runs on many operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X client and server, *BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc. Now try it with a desktop product with 70% market share and see if it gets targeted. Adobe Flash comes to mind. Ask myspace about versions prior to flash 9. Remember flash has a large install base but its very simple compared to an entire operating system.
"This isn't about what browser is best, it's about this little clique who feels superior to IE users while ignoring the fact that Opera is a better product overall."
This isn't about what browser is best, it's about this little clique who feels superior to IE users while ignoring the fact that Firefox is a better product overall.
See I can insert any browser into that statement and it still sounds like trolling. Opera fanboys can have their browser. Go for it. I even included Opera in MidnightBSD mports. Please realize not everyone feels that Opera is the best browser or that it is bug free. To this day I'm haunted by opera 3.5 and 4.0 with the reversed z-index. That was the day I gave up on Opera. Granted they are up to Opera 9 now and that issue was resolved a long time ago. I just have this knee jerk reaction whenever someone brings up Opera to scream. I'm sure you feel the same way about Firefox. Currently, Firefox is my second favorite browser and first favorite on Windows, BSD and Linux. I also have IE7 installed in Windows and find it to be a huge improvement.
You have to realize that Firefox was advertised and pushed to end users. At my university, everyone is told to use opera in all the labs regardless of operating system. Its the new netscape. Some of us hate netscape, but I personally loved it until 6.0 was released with gecko. Until firefox came out, I didn't like mozilla very much. I used it for email and that was about it. There are little problems with Firefox just like there were problems with netscape 1-4, but it will keep getting better until they hit a point where a rewrite is in order. I suspect Microsoft is nearing that point with IE. IE4 was a big overhaul and just as they have to rewrite windows every so many years, they will need to do the same with IE.
One good thing I'll say about opera is that its adaptive. The company finds ways to bolt on new technology. Regardless how you feel about the implementation, you must give them credit for that.
IE was discontinued years ago. If you wish to make browser comparisons use Safari. Apple makes a browser for their platform just as Microsoft makes Windows Internet Explorer (as they call it now). In fact, if I were comparing KDE based systems, I would compare Konquerer to Firefox. IE is dead on the Mac. Thank God.
Mac OS X is not that secure. I'm an OS X admin and student by day and a BSD developer who has a Mac, NeXT, and several PCs. I can tell you that all operating systems have similar problems. Even on a mac, users will often type their password to install crap. They don't know when to do it and when no to. The reason apple has less virus problems is because the marketshare isn't there for people to bother. If OS X or linux ever took say 25% marketshare, I bet we'd start seeing many viruses. Microsoft makes mistakes, but its not like the days of Windows 95 or System 7. Remember, Apple didn't even have a multiuser operating system until A/UX and no one used that. Later, they BOUGHT OS X and added their gui changes on it. I don't think apple learned security overnight, they bought it. Even Microsoft used to sell UNIX (XENIX).
.Mac path with onecare backup and currently have surveys about .Mac style backup features. I love that option on OSX and its the only reason I have a .Mac account. Syncing and backup are very handy. That would be a nice feature in an OSS OS. In fact, I'll have to consider it for MidnightBSD down the road.
I've tried vista and its not that bad. There are issues with it and I do think Apple and the open source community will have answers to it. Mostly vista reminds me of KDE with a few things borrowed from Apple. We might see an even playing ground between everyone next year. Consumers will have real choice then. You may see the Mac viruses next year too.
As for Symantec and McAfee, I think their recent products are bloated and don't do their key task well. I don't want a third party firewall. I don't mind windows firewall or OS X/BSD's ipfw. Its good enough for a desktop. I do like some of the third party backup solutions. Backup software might be a big business again. In reality, regardess of what av software you use, backups are key. Hardware failure can happen to anyone. Microsoft is moving down the
Well if we can't audit the code, perhaps we could alternate who runs diebold. Republican, Democrat, etc... Of course when we got to a small party like the american nazis I don't think anyone would like that system. (insert Republican joke here) Every party would get an easy chance to rig the elections then. What do you say?
Apple added Objective C++ support to OS X years ago. There are some issues, but there are ways to integrate the code. Consult ADC for more information.