"In other words, you are saying that it should be fine for hardware companies to use your GPL-licensed code, saving a lot of development cost, but prevent their customers from modifying it and run it on the same device?"
Yes. They are free to modify the code but the hardware is not subject to the GPL.
"This violates the spirit of free software, in that the device manufacturer does not pass on its freedoms granted by the GPL to their customers."
No it does not. The freedom to modify the code remains intact. You may use the code in any way you wish, including creating a competing product.
"And if I license my code under the GPL, I choose this license exactly to give the users those freedoms, and I would not want some device manufacturer to use my code but not pass on their freedoms granted by the GPL."
You are incorrect to assume they've done otherwise. You want to project the limitations of the software license onto other parts of the product not associated with it.
"In my view, the DRM provisions in the GPLv3 exist to close a loophole in the GPLv2, not to extend the reach of the license."
You may prefer to view it as a loophole, but closing it involves extending the reach of the license. No hardware manufacturer is EVER obligated to sell products capable of running any arbitrary GPL'ed code. Name one manufacturer that advertised that the used Linux in order to enable their customers to modify the products function? A Linksys router? They made changes to their product to discourage it.
"It is there to protect my intention of user freedoms when I release software licensed under the GPL. If I did not care about those freedoms, I would use another license, like the BSD license. And if I wanted the modifications released, but did not care about the users, I could still use the GPLv2."
And included in your intentions is any hardware that is bundled with the GPL'ed software even though abolutely no GPL'ed work went into that design or construction of that hardware.
You're free to release any work you contribute under any license of your choice, but there's no reason to pretend that your new license isn't more restrictive in the name of freedom than previous ones.
I think that ppl should be free to modify their OS to their heart's content. I also think that copyright holders should also be free to deny those users access to their content, just as those "freedom lovers" use their copyright to strongarm others and extend the reach of their license. Cuts both ways, and if you want to champion extra restrictions to a license that makes future software undesirable then more power to you.
"You are telling others to do research, when you don't even know or recognize what Linus did?
You sound like 'Bill Gates', with your arrogance & ignorance!!"
Where did I tell anyone to do anything? Yes, I know what Linus does and has done (for the most part).
Bill Gates, never known as an especially good programmer, was/is one of the world's great entrepreneurs, and through his hands-on style most likely pooped out more contributions to code than you'll ever imagine. While I'm no fan of MS I'm not stupid. Bill G wrote the original Basic interpreter than was included in DOS from the beginning. That in itself is as original as Linus's poor Unix kernel clone.
"If it wasn't for Linus, we either would not have Unix on x86, or we'd be waiting for someone to come up with the OS so the masses could use it."
You're kidding, right? Unix on x86 far predates Linux. I was personally a release manager and key developer for one such distribution in the late 80's (SVR3.2 and SVR4). Efforts such as XFree86 had their origins before Linux. Today we have many Unix-like systems on x96 besides Linux. Ever heard of SCO?
"As far as Gates acheivements.. just because someone is the best at being a lier, fraud, thief and foool, doesn't make them great or good.
His money is from other peoples misery."
This doesn't justify a response. You know nothing of the history of the PC (or much of your three R's).
"The only reason it is taking Unix and it's varients sooo long to catch on, is because it was orignally designed for the worlds fon network and universities, and therefore was for scientist and nerds.
Linux and other Unices are for those who 'want it', and we are really not thaht interested whether lazy people see the benefits in learning it."
I wager I was using Unix before you were born, yet you refer to yourself as part of the "we" elite of computer OS users. Get over it.
"-- Safely entrenched at the bottom of 'Terrible Karma' I have just used up the second of my 'two' posts that I am 'aloud' on/. each day, because of my Karma rating. This inspite of/. management telling us that we should not be concerned about it. Soooo now I am off to make even BIGGER fools of/. management, by using proxies, other 'accounts' and other sorded ways to post:]"
Judging by your marginal knowledge and questionable literacy, I'd say two posts for you is generous.
Linus Torvalds deserves greater recognition for his achievements than Bill Gates? Linux was the figurehead for a large group of (mostly) volunteers that created a low quality version of something we already had. Not the stuff legends are made of.
Linking Torvalds with Edison is disgusting as Linus only invented things in his own mind. Not saying he hasn't achieved---just nothing new. Bill Gates achieved at an unprecedented level even if you don't like it or don't respect his approaches. What did Linus give us that we wouldn't have had otherwise? Bill Gates changed the landscape of computing.
You might also benefit from looking up the definition of hypocrite. Knowing and Doing, while frequently related, are not the same and being a hypocrite has nothing to do with that.
"And once TCM is on everyone's PC, your *effective* freedom to change the code on your own computer goes out the window, because if you change it then your box will be flagged as untrusted and your downloads from many sites and playbacks of media will begin to fail."
Your freedom to change the code still exists, as does the freedom of the copyright holders to deny you access to their product if they so wish. You've been brainwashed into thinking they have an obligation to serve you---perhaps even free of charge.
You may consider this "new computing product" not very desirable but, as they say in free software land, you're always free to create your own. It goes both ways.
"I for one do not want code that *I* have written to be locked up in a device where changes can't be made and run on that device by the user."
It's not the code that's locked up, it's the device. The code you've contributed is still freely available to be used, modified, redistributed, etc. The device, however, is not covered by the GPL (v2) and your belief that you are entitled to modify its function is misguided. The license for the software doesn't extend to the hardware that's sold to you.
Somehow users have come to believe that devices with GPL'ed firmware are somehow offering them the inherent right to modify the product. That isn't so. RMS wants to change this by extending the reach of the GPL beyond the scope of the software that is licensed.
If you want to be able to modify a product you purchase make sure you have the right to beforehand. It's totally justifiable that programmers will reject the additional limitations that v3 brings.
"mp3.com... They got sued for transcoding user's CD's into MP3's for them, while making a little money off of it."
That is completely incorrect. mp3.com never touched a user's CD. Instead, they ripped their own and made them available to download with restrictions. That's entirely different and nothing like your claim.
Your reply is merely an opinion unrelated to your original claim and one I have no interest in commenting on.
Incidently, here's the part of the article that states what the author believes VisiOn's problem was:
"The press continued to laud the product, going so far as to claim it represented the end of operating systems, whatever that was supposed to mean. The end-users were less impressed, however, not only due to the high cost of the required hardware, but also the general slowness of the system. In market where computers were generally used for only one or two tasks, the whole r'aison de etre for VisiOn was seriously diluted.
Only a month later, Apple Computer released the Macintosh with much fanfare. Although the Mac was seriously lacking software, notably a spreadsheet, it was faster, cheaper, included a graphical file manager (the Finder), and simply looked much better. Although it didn't compete directly with VisiOn, which was really a "PC product", it nevertheless demonstrated that a GUI could indeed be fast and easy to use, both of which VisiOn failed to deliver.
Adding to the release's problems was Bill Gates, who took a page from VisiCorp's book and announced that their own product, Microsoft Windows, would be available in May 1984. This muddied the waters significantly, notably when he further claimed it would have a similar feature set, didn't require a hard disk, and cost only $250. Ironically, Windows was released with an even longer delay than VisiOn, only shipping in late 1985, and was lacking the features that forced VisiOn to demand a hard drive.
Sales of VisiOn were apparently very slow. In February 1985, VisiCorp responded by lowering the price of the basic OS to $99, knowing that anyone purchasing it would also need to buy the applications. These were bunded, all three for $990. This improved the situation somewhat, but sales were still far below projections, and it was certaining not helping the company stave off the problems due to Lotus 1-2-3."
See, the problem with VisiOn was that it sucked and no one bought it. The notion that MS would have the ability to squash a competitor would have been laughable at that time.
Curious that the author doesn't agree with you on the mac's useful software bundle on day one either. For a home computer a spreadsheet was hardly required but it was killer for business users. Windows, on the other hand, ran DOS apps just fine, meaning arguably it was a better GUI from day one than the mac was. Not that I liked Windows because I didn't, but there is more than one way to look at a situation and the fact is that Windows won out, macs never made inroads to business, and Lotus 123 put VisiCalc on the scrapheap. VisiCorp was a victim of Lotus, not MS.
"Basically, you don't know what you're talking about, but you like to air it out anyway."
Back at you. Difference is I have no agenda.
The point is that neither one was a serious competitor. TopView went all of nowhere, and GEM was mainly focused on non-PC and alternative DOS platforms."
VisiOn wasn't a serious competitor either. If you don't think the other two were then fine. The fact was that no one was really interested in ANY of them enough to spend money. GEM was shortlived on an alternate platform that was overshadowed by Amiga at the time. It was not bad.
Odd that you have problems with GEM and Topview yet you yap about an even more obscure product in VisiOn.
"Whereas the Mac and VisiOn had applications that people wanted to run. Windows had Windows calculator and notepad because it was only intended to hold the competitors out of the market."
Mac was successful and VisiOn was not. You would attribute that to MS's bullying tactics but that would be bullshit. MS was not then what it is today. MS at the time had a policy of not bundling apps with the OS in order to encourage 3rd party support. That's why windows only had notepad.
Mac succeeded because Apple had dominant market share, name recognition, a desirable product and an acceptable price. Lisa failed even though it had all those except price.
VisiOn did not have the clout of Apple and was priced like a Lisa. It had no better 3rd party support than Windows. If people wanted to wait for a non-existant product from MS rather than buy something as compelling as you say, then VisiCorp did something terribly wrong. MS was not a monopoly at the time.
"What you mean is that they "continued to run WordStar" because there were no better options once the GUI dust had settled. Consumers were intially very excited about DOS GUIs. The introduction of Windows 1.0 killed the concept in its infancy. If you were "alive at the time" and using a PC as you claim, you would have been aware of all the buzz DOS GUIs were generating."
Business computing has momentum and people stay with what they know because they have work to do. Any word processor competitor at that time, for example, needed WS emulation or it was at a serious disadvantage. Momentum explains why we have x86 today even though it had superior competitors in the early days. You apparently fail to grasp this.
Yes, I was alive at the time and, no, I wasn't aware of it. I guess working as a product developer at a major PC manufacturer during that time didn't give me enough exposure. People ran DOS and used Netware. They figured that GUI's would be useful one day. Came true around 1995:). Sorry, but the flash that worked for Apple took a long time to be adopted on the PC, not because of incompetence, but because the PC market was and is very conservative.
Odd that your argument seems to be that a shitty product delivered late from a me-too company destroyed GUI's for all but Mac for many years to come. Who would believe that but you and other history-revisionists?
"In a day in age when both PC's AND Macs cost $2000-$3000? Nonsense. "
Your own article estimated the cost to run that product at $7500 (without it being clear that the PC itself was part of that cost). No business would pay that kind of money for employees to run a GUI version of software that could be had for much less. Yes, WS cost $495 retail, but it could be had much cheaper and it didn't require enormous hardware upgrades to use it. It didn't even require a graphics adapter (of which, at the time of introduction, was CGA or Hercules). No one running DOS and WS was paying anywhere near $7500 for a seat. You are completely in denial over that.
"You also seem to have ignored the paragraph proceeding the one you quoted:"
I didn't ignore it, I just didn't need to argue the obvious that Windows was cheaper. My point was that the product you feel was so victimized would have, and most certainly did, fail on its own short
PPC as originally devised by IBM was intended to match x86 in performance at lower cost (because of smaller die sizes). As time went on, process improvements eliminated that theoretical advantage while PPC died on the vine at Motorola. Meanwhile, IBM made PPC into a successful embedded family using an architecture quite different from the ones originally devised for general purpose CPU's (603, 604, 620). x86 has had embedded processors but that has never been a focus. Any development advantages are debatable. x86 has the industry's finest and most important toolsets though possibly not for embedded.
PPC is very successful in the high performance embedded market but that wasn't the point of the original poster. Intel's embedded line is XScale, not x86.
Topview and GEM were alternatives to Windows and therefore competitors. The fact that Topview was text mode didn't mean it wasn't a windowing environment. PC users used text mode for apps at that time.
If you're going to go back to pre-windows 1.0 why bother? There were no apps whatsoever and no one wanted it on PCs. The reason Windows didn't get adoption until 3.1 (as you say) was it took til that time for anyone to want to run anything that required it. The "the first round of GUI wars" as you call it was irrelevant. People ran Wordstar.
I'd argue that Windows/386 was pretty useful and it was pre-win3.1. Protected memory, preemption, "virtual everything" as they officially advertised it.
Interesting that you recall all this and yet get MS's history so wrong. Back in the pre-Win95 days PC's ran an incredible variety of applications and environments. It really took til Win95 and NT for MS to monopolize the OS market.
From your link:
"VisiOn was released in December 1983, by some measure only a few months late. The basic operating system, known as VisiOn Applications Manager, sold for $495, and a required mouse for $295. Three applications were also released, the VisiOn Calc spreadsheet for $395, VisiOn Graph for $250 and the VisiOn Word word processor for $375. The cost for a complete package was thus $1765.
However, the major cost in installing VisiOn was the machine needed to run it. VisiOn demanded at lease 2.2 MB of hard drive space, meaning that the smallest common drive available was a 5 MB unit. Combined with the controller, this drove the cost of a complete VisiOn install to about $7500."
I'd say the price alone doomed it, not anything MS did. Apple couldn't sell the Lisa either.
BTW, when a nonrecoverable read error occurs the controller will simply retry it. Another is unlikely to occur for another terabyte or so. That guy is shameless liar. These rare failures are a nonissue.
"Apple was one of the first companies to use SIMMs, then DIMMs, in their desktop machines."
The first computer to use SIMMs, and the company that invented it, was the Dell System 316 with it's SRAM modules. Dell then defined a DRAM module (for the follow-on 320) and submitted it to the industry as a standard at IBM's request. I worked at Dell at the time with the engineers who did that work. Who knows how long Apple took to adopt the work of others but they get no credit for it especially since their memory controllers didn't even use parity! Apple has finally caught up with memory technology by switching to Intel.
"Apple was the first company to push both USB and Firewire on a large scale; it took another year before you started consistently seeing USB on PCs..."
Not true. USB was a standard entirely developed and pushed by Intel and it took a tremendous amount of testing to get the degree of compatility that would be required to formally introduce it. Intel had shipped USB support in it's chipsets long before formal introduction and many PC's had USB ports, including almost all Dell's, prior to launch. Apple just opportunistically stole USB's thunder and contributed nothing but rhetoric to the standard. I would wager that Dell did 10 times the development on USB as Apple did. I was there for that as well and it was disgusting. USB development took 3 years.
"Apple was slow to move to IDE from SCSI, however, please remember that for the first few years of IDE's existence, it was not really plug-and-play, what with hard-to-explain-and-unrelated-to-reality CHS settings in the BIOS, which was followed by various artificial limits to drive size caused by said BIOSes, until LBA came along and finally cleaned most of that up."
Apple doesn't use BIOS'es and has no compatibility issues to concern itself with, so these IDE issues you speak of (which didn't cause PC vendors to avoid it) are all moot. Furthermore, CHS values absolutely had meaning in reality, they were simply virtualized away. Originally, the ATA taskfile mapped to the physical layout of the disk. Nothing more real than that!
Incidently, the original ideas for IDE came out of a group of guys some of which would eventually work at Dell. I remember testing the very first IDE drive, a Quantum 20MB clunker. Conner was an IDE-only drive startup heavily sponsored and partly owned by Compaq. Another PC technology that found it's way into macs. The only founding systems company on the Serial ATA working group is Dell. Where is Apple there?
Who cares about Apple's monitor connector design. It's gone now and good riddance.
MS's marketshare was not gained through IBM. It's first foot-in-the-door was.
MS may have used ruthless business tactics but it also competed in the market. MS was not without competition in the early days after all.
I won't argue the point of value because MS wasn't responsible for it. Clones, in combination with DOS, offered the value.
In the early days, IBM's DOS (PC-DOS) was actually the requirement, not MS-DOS. TI, for example had an MS-DOS machine that couldn't run PC-DOS and it was a failure. Machines had to be PC-DOS compatible because DOS services alone weren't adequate to run popular apps. I mention this because companies like Compaq didn't need MS-DOS to succeed and their customers frequently didn't buy it even when it was offered.
Wordperfect lost the market due to their own ineptitude. It was MS Word that first attempted GUI WYSIWYG editing. Once that occurred WP was in the rearview mirror. MS won that market on its own merit even though Word was not the best when it first was introduced.
The same could be said for many MS products. At the time MSC was introduced, Lattice was king and MSC 1.0 was actually a rebranded Lattice compiler. The next major version was developed internally and MS eventually won the market with a superior product.
Please don't mention Gateway. They were never a major player but rather a Dell wannabe created by Computer Shopper. They've never led anything.
Many don't believe OS/2 was a superior OS. As a OS driver developer at the time, personal friends with OS development team members, and viewer of plenty of early IBM-authored OS/2 code, I never had any respect for it. MS had good reasons for abandoning OS/2. IBM was incompetent.
"Microsoft ended up where they were because the hardware was a superior value proposition, and they worked it so that they were the only software that could get sold on that hardware. Microsoft worked hard to keep competitors out of their distribution chains."
I agree completely, but that doesn't mean that MS didn't earn anything.
I also have to disagree with you totally on your conclusions. MS takes a lead role in defining the ongoing architecture of the PC with yearly specs and is solely responsible for a number of PC innovations, most notable of which is the pervasive use of plug-n-play. If you combine MS and Intel you have the bulk of all the effort that goes into platform innovation and that's mostly what a mac looks like these days. What would a mac be without PCI, AGP, PCIe, USB, PNP monitors, USB peripherals, etc? You can thank Intel AND MS for these technologies.
MS rode IBM's coattails with DOS but had to compete with IBM and DR for windowing environments. Meanwhile, Apple was blowing it's large market share by keeping its platform proprietary. IBM's largest contribution to the dominance of the platform was documenting it and creating an umbrella for clones. Arguably it was Compaq (and others later) that established the PC. IBM lost its leadership influence when microchannel lost out to EISA.
Once MS defeated Topview and GEM it teamed with IBM on OS/2 while continuing to develop Windows. Eventually the desktop would become a fight between OS/2 and Windows. On the server side, MS had no presence prior to NT 3.1 and the market was dominated by Netware and Banyan Vines. MS took on those platforms and won over time as well. It wasn't until Win95 and the defeat of OS/2 that MS became dominant.
Similarly, on the apps side, MS competed successfully over time with both Word and Excel. Neither of those apps benefitted from IBM's marketshare and MS didn't win those markets by default.
It seems no one here at/. is able to give MS any credit at all. Sure they're famous for their sleaze but plenty of others had the opportunity to earn the market but lost. Apple and IBM both blew it and Steve Jobs is as responsible as any for the failure. I remember when the Amiga first came out how it absolutely bitchslapped the mac in every way. Prior to the Amiga all Apple could figure out how to offer was a mac classic and it still took Apple another 15 years to deliver preemption and protected memory.
Apple has only itself to blame for getting it's ass handed to it by MS.
of course they do, and nothing demonstrates that better than the iPod and the Shuffle. The Shuffle was marketed as being better because it did away with superflous features like a display! The iPods have never had quite enough controls to do the job. Then there's the mice that don't have enough buttons followed by one that did but didn't work well because it needed to pretend it didn't have those buttons. Macs have never had mechanical media eject buttons. The Powermacs have enormous stylized cases but virtually no expandibility. The list goes on and on...
"So if the PS3 sells, and if a lot of the buyers also have HDTV, and the buyers haven't already chosen their format and bought a decent player, then blu-ray will win."...and HD-DVD on the XBox360 is a failure and typical PS3 buyers are also HD video buyers and HD video buyers are also game console buyers.
There's a large segment of the market that will have interest in HD disc players but will not have interest in game consoles. Likewise, game console users are not necessarily HD movie purchasers. Depends...
You're entitled to your opinions, even when they're formed with essentially no information. If a large market existed for these devices it would be likely that products would be available to those customers. Fact is that many people have no problem taking laptops with them for all sorts of trips. That's what they're made for and I've taken them all over the world just like millions of others have.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm no fan of PocketPC's or Origami. I just see no evidence to suggest that these nonexistent machines are easier to use that a machine that has barely hit the market. PocketPC's weren't part of your original discussion but they suck.
By power I meant CPU power but also the power to run applications that people desire. That means having an OS that hosts those apps, a screen that's usuable, enough memory to work properly, and connectivity that's required. Frankly, these systems are unlikely to meet any of those requirements for the typical user of a laptop today. Yes they are cheap but largely because they're being offered by a non-profit group for the sake of educationing children. Let that machine be commercialized and see how it competes at a price it would normally require.
OQO, Sony UX180, and UMPC are examples of machines made to meet the (believed) demand of highly mobile devices that can run windows apps. If buyers didn't indicate a desire for these machines they wouldn't be developed. You don't have to like them or agree with the rationale.
I wouldn't and I doubt many would. They will be low powered and with lousy screens. Anyone "who sits in a coffee shop browsing the web, or in a lecture hall taking notes, or in cramped economy class with just a clip tray, or is on a weekend away with hand luggage" can afford far better and would not settle for anything so meager. How's the wifi on that machine? So much for Starbucks.
"they cost a fraction of his Origami concept boxes and just as usable."
how do you know that? cheaper yes. more usable? who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
"In other words, you are saying that it should be fine for hardware companies to use your GPL-licensed code, saving a lot of development cost, but prevent their customers from modifying it and run it on the same device?"
Yes. They are free to modify the code but the hardware is not subject to the GPL.
"This violates the spirit of free software, in that the device manufacturer does not pass on its freedoms granted by the GPL to their customers."
No it does not. The freedom to modify the code remains intact. You may use the code in any way you wish, including creating a competing product.
"And if I license my code under the GPL, I choose this license exactly to give the users those freedoms, and I would not want some device manufacturer to use my code but not pass on their freedoms granted by the GPL."
You are incorrect to assume they've done otherwise. You want to project the limitations of the software license onto other parts of the product not associated with it.
"In my view, the DRM provisions in the GPLv3 exist to close a loophole in the GPLv2, not to extend the reach of the license."
You may prefer to view it as a loophole, but closing it involves extending the reach of the license. No hardware manufacturer is EVER obligated to sell products capable of running any arbitrary GPL'ed code. Name one manufacturer that advertised that the used Linux in order to enable their customers to modify the products function? A Linksys router? They made changes to their product to discourage it.
"It is there to protect my intention of user freedoms when I release software licensed under the GPL. If I did not care about those freedoms, I would use another license, like the BSD license. And if I wanted the modifications released, but did not care about the users, I could still use the GPLv2."
And included in your intentions is any hardware that is bundled with the GPL'ed software even though abolutely no GPL'ed work went into that design or construction of that hardware.
You're free to release any work you contribute under any license of your choice, but there's no reason to pretend that your new license isn't more restrictive in the name of freedom than previous ones.
I think that ppl should be free to modify their OS to their heart's content. I also think that copyright holders should also be free to deny those users access to their content, just as those "freedom lovers" use their copyright to strongarm others and extend the reach of their license. Cuts both ways, and if you want to champion extra restrictions to a license that makes future software undesirable then more power to you.
"You are telling others to do research, when you don't even know or recognize what Linus did?
/. each day, because of my Karma rating. This inspite of /. management telling us that we should not be concerned about it. Soooo now I am off to make even BIGGER fools of /. management, by using proxies, other 'accounts' and other sorded ways to post :]"
You sound like 'Bill Gates', with your arrogance & ignorance!!"
Where did I tell anyone to do anything? Yes, I know what Linus does and has done (for the most part).
Bill Gates, never known as an especially good programmer, was/is one of the world's great entrepreneurs, and through his hands-on style most likely pooped out more contributions to code than you'll ever imagine. While I'm no fan of MS I'm not stupid. Bill G wrote the original Basic interpreter than was included in DOS from the beginning. That in itself is as original as Linus's poor Unix kernel clone.
"If it wasn't for Linus, we either would not have Unix on x86, or we'd be waiting for someone to come up with the OS so the masses could use it."
You're kidding, right? Unix on x86 far predates Linux. I was personally a release manager and key developer for one such distribution in the late 80's (SVR3.2 and SVR4). Efforts such as XFree86 had their origins before Linux. Today we have many Unix-like systems on x96 besides Linux. Ever heard of SCO?
"As far as Gates acheivements.. just because someone is the best at being a lier, fraud, thief and foool, doesn't make them great or good.
His money is from other peoples misery."
This doesn't justify a response. You know nothing of the history of the PC (or much of your three R's).
"The only reason it is taking Unix and it's varients sooo long to catch on, is because it was orignally designed for the worlds fon network and universities, and therefore was for scientist and nerds.
Linux and other Unices are for those who 'want it', and we are really not thaht interested whether lazy people see the benefits in learning it."
I wager I was using Unix before you were born, yet you refer to yourself as part of the "we" elite of computer OS users. Get over it.
"-- Safely entrenched at the bottom of 'Terrible Karma' I have just used up the second of my 'two' posts that I am 'aloud' on
Judging by your marginal knowledge and questionable literacy, I'd say two posts for you is generous.
Linus Torvalds deserves greater recognition for his achievements than Bill Gates? Linux was the figurehead for a large group of (mostly) volunteers that created a low quality version of something we already had. Not the stuff legends are made of.
Linking Torvalds with Edison is disgusting as Linus only invented things in his own mind. Not saying he hasn't achieved---just nothing new. Bill Gates achieved at an unprecedented level even if you don't like it or don't respect his approaches. What did Linus give us that we wouldn't have had otherwise? Bill Gates changed the landscape of computing.
You might also benefit from looking up the definition of hypocrite. Knowing and Doing, while frequently related, are not the same and being a hypocrite has nothing to do with that.
"And once TCM is on everyone's PC, your *effective* freedom to change the code on your own computer goes out the window, because if you change it then your box will be flagged as untrusted and your downloads from many sites and playbacks of media will begin to fail."
Your freedom to change the code still exists, as does the freedom of the copyright holders to deny you access to their product if they so wish. You've been brainwashed into thinking they have an obligation to serve you---perhaps even free of charge.
You may consider this "new computing product" not very desirable but, as they say in free software land, you're always free to create your own. It goes both ways.
"I for one do not want code that *I* have written to be locked up in a device where changes can't be made and run on that device by the user."
It's not the code that's locked up, it's the device. The code you've contributed is still freely available to be used, modified, redistributed, etc. The device, however, is not covered by the GPL (v2) and your belief that you are entitled to modify its function is misguided. The license for the software doesn't extend to the hardware that's sold to you.
Somehow users have come to believe that devices with GPL'ed firmware are somehow offering them the inherent right to modify the product. That isn't so. RMS wants to change this by extending the reach of the GPL beyond the scope of the software that is licensed.
If you want to be able to modify a product you purchase make sure you have the right to beforehand. It's totally justifiable that programmers will reject the additional limitations that v3 brings.
This was the statement you made:
"mp3.com... They got sued for transcoding user's CD's into MP3's for them, while making a little money off of it."
That is completely incorrect. mp3.com never touched a user's CD. Instead, they ripped their own and made them available to download with restrictions. That's entirely different and nothing like your claim.
Your reply is merely an opinion unrelated to your original claim and one I have no interest in commenting on.
No they didn't. mp3.com never touched a user's CD.
ahhh, democracy in action! rock the vote!
the bigger the crowd the dumber the crowd.
"Who in their right mind would use Wiki as a 'source' document?"
/.'ers do and, no, they aren't in their right mind.
lot's of
"but your two deluded to notice"
ah, very good.
Incidently, here's the part of the article that states what the author believes VisiOn's problem was:
"The press continued to laud the product, going so far as to claim it represented the end of operating systems, whatever that was supposed to mean. The end-users were less impressed, however, not only due to the high cost of the required hardware, but also the general slowness of the system. In market where computers were generally used for only one or two tasks, the whole r'aison de etre for VisiOn was seriously diluted.
Only a month later, Apple Computer released the Macintosh with much fanfare. Although the Mac was seriously lacking software, notably a spreadsheet, it was faster, cheaper, included a graphical file manager (the Finder), and simply looked much better. Although it didn't compete directly with VisiOn, which was really a "PC product", it nevertheless demonstrated that a GUI could indeed be fast and easy to use, both of which VisiOn failed to deliver.
Adding to the release's problems was Bill Gates, who took a page from VisiCorp's book and announced that their own product, Microsoft Windows, would be available in May 1984. This muddied the waters significantly, notably when he further claimed it would have a similar feature set, didn't require a hard disk, and cost only $250. Ironically, Windows was released with an even longer delay than VisiOn, only shipping in late 1985, and was lacking the features that forced VisiOn to demand a hard drive.
Sales of VisiOn were apparently very slow. In February 1985, VisiCorp responded by lowering the price of the basic OS to $99, knowing that anyone purchasing it would also need to buy the applications. These were bunded, all three for $990. This improved the situation somewhat, but sales were still far below projections, and it was certaining not helping the company stave off the problems due to Lotus 1-2-3."
See, the problem with VisiOn was that it sucked and no one bought it. The notion that MS would have the ability to squash a competitor would have been laughable at that time.
Curious that the author doesn't agree with you on the mac's useful software bundle on day one either. For a home computer a spreadsheet was hardly required but it was killer for business users. Windows, on the other hand, ran DOS apps just fine, meaning arguably it was a better GUI from day one than the mac was. Not that I liked Windows because I didn't, but there is more than one way to look at a situation and the fact is that Windows won out, macs never made inroads to business, and Lotus 123 put VisiCalc on the scrapheap. VisiCorp was a victim of Lotus, not MS.
"Basically, you don't know what you're talking about, but you like to air it out anyway."
:). Sorry, but the flash that worked for Apple took a long time to be adopted on the PC, not because of incompetence, but because the PC market was and is very conservative.
Back at you. Difference is I have no agenda.
The point is that neither one was a serious competitor. TopView went all of nowhere, and GEM was mainly focused on non-PC and alternative DOS platforms."
VisiOn wasn't a serious competitor either. If you don't think the other two were then fine. The fact was that no one was really interested in ANY of them enough to spend money. GEM was shortlived on an alternate platform that was overshadowed by Amiga at the time. It was not bad.
Odd that you have problems with GEM and Topview yet you yap about an even more obscure product in VisiOn.
"Whereas the Mac and VisiOn had applications that people wanted to run. Windows had Windows calculator and notepad because it was only intended to hold the competitors out of the market."
Mac was successful and VisiOn was not. You would attribute that to MS's bullying tactics but that would be bullshit. MS was not then what it is today. MS at the time had a policy of not bundling apps with the OS in order to encourage 3rd party support. That's why windows only had notepad.
Mac succeeded because Apple had dominant market share, name recognition, a desirable product and an acceptable price. Lisa failed even though it had all those except price.
VisiOn did not have the clout of Apple and was priced like a Lisa. It had no better 3rd party support than Windows. If people wanted to wait for a non-existant product from MS rather than buy something as compelling as you say, then VisiCorp did something terribly wrong. MS was not a monopoly at the time.
"What you mean is that they "continued to run WordStar" because there were no better options once the GUI dust had settled. Consumers were intially very excited about DOS GUIs. The introduction of Windows 1.0 killed the concept in its infancy. If you were "alive at the time" and using a PC as you claim, you would have been aware of all the buzz DOS GUIs were generating."
Business computing has momentum and people stay with what they know because they have work to do. Any word processor competitor at that time, for example, needed WS emulation or it was at a serious disadvantage. Momentum explains why we have x86 today even though it had superior competitors in the early days. You apparently fail to grasp this.
Yes, I was alive at the time and, no, I wasn't aware of it. I guess working as a product developer at a major PC manufacturer during that time didn't give me enough exposure. People ran DOS and used Netware. They figured that GUI's would be useful one day. Came true around 1995
Odd that your argument seems to be that a shitty product delivered late from a me-too company destroyed GUI's for all but Mac for many years to come. Who would believe that but you and other history-revisionists?
"In a day in age when both PC's AND Macs cost $2000-$3000? Nonsense. "
Your own article estimated the cost to run that product at $7500 (without it being clear that the PC itself was part of that cost). No business would pay that kind of money for employees to run a GUI version of software that could be had for much less. Yes, WS cost $495 retail, but it could be had much cheaper and it didn't require enormous hardware upgrades to use it. It didn't even require a graphics adapter (of which, at the time of introduction, was CGA or Hercules). No one running DOS and WS was paying anywhere near $7500 for a seat. You are completely in denial over that.
"You also seem to have ignored the paragraph proceeding the one you quoted:"
I didn't ignore it, I just didn't need to argue the obvious that Windows was cheaper. My point was that the product you feel was so victimized would have, and most certainly did, fail on its own short
PPC as originally devised by IBM was intended to match x86 in performance at lower cost (because of smaller die sizes). As time went on, process improvements eliminated that theoretical advantage while PPC died on the vine at Motorola. Meanwhile, IBM made PPC into a successful embedded family using an architecture quite different from the ones originally devised for general purpose CPU's (603, 604, 620). x86 has had embedded processors but that has never been a focus. Any development advantages are debatable. x86 has the industry's finest and most important toolsets though possibly not for embedded.
PPC is very successful in the high performance embedded market but that wasn't the point of the original poster. Intel's embedded line is XScale, not x86.
Topview and GEM were alternatives to Windows and therefore competitors. The fact that Topview was text mode didn't mean it wasn't a windowing environment. PC users used text mode for apps at that time.
If you're going to go back to pre-windows 1.0 why bother? There were no apps whatsoever and no one wanted it on PCs. The reason Windows didn't get adoption until 3.1 (as you say) was it took til that time for anyone to want to run anything that required it. The "the first round of GUI wars" as you call it was irrelevant. People ran Wordstar.
I'd argue that Windows/386 was pretty useful and it was pre-win3.1. Protected memory, preemption, "virtual everything" as they officially advertised it.
Interesting that you recall all this and yet get MS's history so wrong. Back in the pre-Win95 days PC's ran an incredible variety of applications and environments. It really took til Win95 and NT for MS to monopolize the OS market.
From your link:
"VisiOn was released in December 1983, by some measure only a few months late. The basic operating system, known as VisiOn Applications Manager, sold for $495, and a required mouse for $295. Three applications were also released, the VisiOn Calc spreadsheet for $395, VisiOn Graph for $250 and the VisiOn Word word processor for $375. The cost for a complete package was thus $1765.
However, the major cost in installing VisiOn was the machine needed to run it. VisiOn demanded at lease 2.2 MB of hard drive space, meaning that the smallest common drive available was a 5 MB unit. Combined with the controller, this drove the cost of a complete VisiOn install to about $7500."
I'd say the price alone doomed it, not anything MS did. Apple couldn't sell the Lisa either.
Haha yeah. Never buy Iomega.
BTW, when a nonrecoverable read error occurs the controller will simply retry it. Another is unlikely to occur for another terabyte or so. That guy is shameless liar. These rare failures are a nonissue.
"Apple was one of the first companies to use SIMMs, then DIMMs, in their desktop machines."
The first computer to use SIMMs, and the company that invented it, was the Dell System 316 with it's SRAM modules. Dell then defined a DRAM module (for the follow-on 320) and submitted it to the industry as a standard at IBM's request. I worked at Dell at the time with the engineers who did that work. Who knows how long Apple took to adopt the work of others but they get no credit for it especially since their memory controllers didn't even use parity! Apple has finally caught up with memory technology by switching to Intel.
"Apple was the first company to push both USB and Firewire on a large scale; it took another year before you started consistently seeing USB on PCs..."
Not true. USB was a standard entirely developed and pushed by Intel and it took a tremendous amount of testing to get the degree of compatility that would be required to formally introduce it. Intel had shipped USB support in it's chipsets long before formal introduction and many PC's had USB ports, including almost all Dell's, prior to launch. Apple just opportunistically stole USB's thunder and contributed nothing but rhetoric to the standard. I would wager that Dell did 10 times the development on USB as Apple did. I was there for that as well and it was disgusting. USB development took 3 years.
"Apple was slow to move to IDE from SCSI, however, please remember that for the first few years of IDE's existence, it was not really plug-and-play, what with hard-to-explain-and-unrelated-to-reality CHS settings in the BIOS, which was followed by various artificial limits to drive size caused by said BIOSes, until LBA came along and finally cleaned most of that up."
Apple doesn't use BIOS'es and has no compatibility issues to concern itself with, so these IDE issues you speak of (which didn't cause PC vendors to avoid it) are all moot. Furthermore, CHS values absolutely had meaning in reality, they were simply virtualized away. Originally, the ATA taskfile mapped to the physical layout of the disk. Nothing more real than that!
Incidently, the original ideas for IDE came out of a group of guys some of which would eventually work at Dell. I remember testing the very first IDE drive, a Quantum 20MB clunker. Conner was an IDE-only drive startup heavily sponsored and partly owned by Compaq. Another PC technology that found it's way into macs. The only founding systems company on the Serial ATA working group is Dell. Where is Apple there?
Who cares about Apple's monitor connector design. It's gone now and good riddance.
MS's marketshare was not gained through IBM. It's first foot-in-the-door was.
MS may have used ruthless business tactics but it also competed in the market. MS was not without competition in the early days after all.
I won't argue the point of value because MS wasn't responsible for it. Clones, in combination with DOS, offered the value.
In the early days, IBM's DOS (PC-DOS) was actually the requirement, not MS-DOS. TI, for example had an MS-DOS machine that couldn't run PC-DOS and it was a failure. Machines had to be PC-DOS compatible because DOS services alone weren't adequate to run popular apps. I mention this because companies like Compaq didn't need MS-DOS to succeed and their customers frequently didn't buy it even when it was offered.
Wordperfect lost the market due to their own ineptitude. It was MS Word that first attempted GUI WYSIWYG editing. Once that occurred WP was in the rearview mirror. MS won that market on its own merit even though Word was not the best when it first was introduced.
The same could be said for many MS products. At the time MSC was introduced, Lattice was king and MSC 1.0 was actually a rebranded Lattice compiler. The next major version was developed internally and MS eventually won the market with a superior product.
Please don't mention Gateway. They were never a major player but rather a Dell wannabe created by Computer Shopper. They've never led anything.
Many don't believe OS/2 was a superior OS. As a OS driver developer at the time, personal friends with OS development team members, and viewer of plenty of early IBM-authored OS/2 code, I never had any respect for it. MS had good reasons for abandoning OS/2. IBM was incompetent.
"Microsoft ended up where they were because the hardware was a superior value proposition, and they worked it so that they were the only software that could get sold on that hardware. Microsoft worked hard to keep competitors out of their distribution chains."
I agree completely, but that doesn't mean that MS didn't earn anything.
I also have to disagree with you totally on your conclusions. MS takes a lead role in defining the ongoing architecture of the PC with yearly specs and is solely responsible for a number of PC innovations, most notable of which is the pervasive use of plug-n-play. If you combine MS and Intel you have the bulk of all the effort that goes into platform innovation and that's mostly what a mac looks like these days. What would a mac be without PCI, AGP, PCIe, USB, PNP monitors, USB peripherals, etc? You can thank Intel AND MS for these technologies.
Were you even alive during those years?
/. is able to give MS any credit at all. Sure they're famous for their sleaze but plenty of others had the opportunity to earn the market but lost. Apple and IBM both blew it and Steve Jobs is as responsible as any for the failure. I remember when the Amiga first came out how it absolutely bitchslapped the mac in every way. Prior to the Amiga all Apple could figure out how to offer was a mac classic and it still took Apple another 15 years to deliver preemption and protected memory.
MS rode IBM's coattails with DOS but had to compete with IBM and DR for windowing environments. Meanwhile, Apple was blowing it's large market share by keeping its platform proprietary. IBM's largest contribution to the dominance of the platform was documenting it and creating an umbrella for clones. Arguably it was Compaq (and others later) that established the PC. IBM lost its leadership influence when microchannel lost out to EISA.
Once MS defeated Topview and GEM it teamed with IBM on OS/2 while continuing to develop Windows. Eventually the desktop would become a fight between OS/2 and Windows. On the server side, MS had no presence prior to NT 3.1 and the market was dominated by Netware and Banyan Vines. MS took on those platforms and won over time as well. It wasn't until Win95 and the defeat of OS/2 that MS became dominant.
Similarly, on the apps side, MS competed successfully over time with both Word and Excel. Neither of those apps benefitted from IBM's marketshare and MS didn't win those markets by default.
It seems no one here at
Apple has only itself to blame for getting it's ass handed to it by MS.
of course they do, and nothing demonstrates that better than the iPod and the Shuffle. The Shuffle was marketed as being better because it did away with superflous features like a display! The iPods have never had quite enough controls to do the job. Then there's the mice that don't have enough buttons followed by one that did but didn't work well because it needed to pretend it didn't have those buttons. Macs have never had mechanical media eject buttons. The Powermacs have enormous stylized cases but virtually no expandibility. The list goes on and on...
yep. the CDMA carriers, on the other hand, aren't necassarily as good as the GSM ones and I really like my SIM card :(
x86 is and always was superior to PPC. Most knew it immediately. Apple took a little longer.
"So if the PS3 sells, and if a lot of the buyers also have HDTV, and the buyers haven't already chosen their format and bought a decent player, then blu-ray will win." ...and HD-DVD on the XBox360 is a failure and typical PS3 buyers are also HD video buyers and HD video buyers are also game console buyers.
There's a large segment of the market that will have interest in HD disc players but will not have interest in game consoles. Likewise, game console users are not necessarily HD movie purchasers. Depends...
You're entitled to your opinions, even when they're formed with essentially no information. If a large market existed for these devices it would be likely that products would be available to those customers. Fact is that many people have no problem taking laptops with them for all sorts of trips. That's what they're made for and I've taken them all over the world just like millions of others have.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm no fan of PocketPC's or Origami. I just see no evidence to suggest that these nonexistent machines are easier to use that a machine that has barely hit the market. PocketPC's weren't part of your original discussion but they suck.
By power I meant CPU power but also the power to run applications that people desire. That means having an OS that hosts those apps, a screen that's usuable, enough memory to work properly, and connectivity that's required. Frankly, these systems are unlikely to meet any of those requirements for the typical user of a laptop today. Yes they are cheap but largely because they're being offered by a non-profit group for the sake of educationing children. Let that machine be commercialized and see how it competes at a price it would normally require.
OQO, Sony UX180, and UMPC are examples of machines made to meet the (believed) demand of highly mobile devices that can run windows apps. If buyers didn't indicate a desire for these machines they wouldn't be developed. You don't have to like them or agree with the rationale.
I wouldn't and I doubt many would. They will be low powered and with lousy screens. Anyone "who sits in a coffee shop browsing the web, or in a lecture hall taking notes, or in cramped economy class with just a clip tray, or is on a weekend away with hand luggage" can afford far better and would not settle for anything so meager. How's the wifi on that machine? So much for Starbucks.
"they cost a fraction of his Origami concept boxes and just as usable."
how do you know that? cheaper yes. more usable? who knows.
Enjoy your Timex/Synclair on the plane.
why can't you pay $1000 for it and have $900 subsidize computers for kids?
it's a charity and they have enough work already without giving you a special break when you aren't in need.