That's why I said "if you're happy with a GMA950". The problem is that Intel's integrated GPU's suck monkeyballs but are "good enough" for daily computing tasks.
Good drivers doesn't change the fact that Intel CPU's are a joke performance-wise.
Well on the Linux front, ATI is no better than NVidia. You can pretty much only sidestep buying NVidia gear for Linux if you're happy with an onboard GMA950 or something.
ATI just recently got around to taking Linux drivers seriously and most of theirs suck too. Nvidia are really the only video card vendor with working Linux drivers for most of their cards. Unfortunately this support is limited to crappy Wintel machines and only comes in the form of lame binary blobs.
I'm pretty certain HW Vendors are deliberately hampering the rate of Linux adoption on the desktop. They won't give us specs to write drivers nor will they bother most of the time except for Windows. Most vendors plain don't support OSX either but Apple has some decent video drivers. Most PC HW vendors would be happy to see Linux curl up and die so people quit asking about it and they don't have to spend any money to support it.
So Linux doesn't have window compositing, 3D rendering packages or games that utilize OpenGL? You sir, are retarded.
And if you count total number of Linux installs, it passed Windows. Think of all the Linux-based Android phones (which also use OpenGL) and wireless routers.
There is no shortage of American IT monkeys and coders. There's a huge mass of them still unemployed. And a huge mass of them who just plain switched careers because we're sick of the bullshit and tired of being treated like burnable disposable commodities that are an unfortunate necessary evil (and often accused of not generating revenue). In general I've noticed secretaries tend to be genuinely valued more than life long IT experience and talent. So yeah..... not in IT anymore.
We must have different definitions of "works". Yes, you can start programs. If that's your definition of "works" then so be it. Unity is NOTHING like the OSX UI. If you think it is, you're not using the OSX UI to it's full potential in any way, shape or form.
GNOME and KDE are tolerable but I'm with most of the Slashdot crowd when I say I've tried to like Unity and it plain sucks. It's about as useful as AtEase was on the old 68k Macs in computer labs. For your grandma that just needs a Firefox and Email button, it may suffice..... for people that use computers for a living it's an obnoxious hindrance that gets in the way and slows down REAL WORK.
There is a common consensus in the CS community that pointers as opposed to references, pointer arithmetics, direct type conversion ("memory overlays") etc. are unsafe, and a language that makes it easy to use them is "inherently unsafe". (That doesn't have anything to do with actual programming practise. Obviously, you can write "safe" programs in any language, even in machine code, as long as you're very careful.) As a comparison, take Ada, Eifel, Java, Haskell -- these are all much safer.
As for "modern": Perhaps you haven't seen any modern programming languages yet? Because otherwise you should know what I mean. Relatively modern features are e.g. automatic type inference, automatic parallelism, contracts, a concurrent garbage collector -- things like that.
Java is a slow pig and the rest of your examples have little real-world usage for desktop/handheld applications, at least client-side. There's lots of unoptimized wonderfully safe academic languages lacking decent libraries for people to create applications that integrate well with the rest of the system. LISP is awesome but I wouldn't want to try to write a modern game or productivity app in a reasonable amount of time with it.
Obj-C at least gives you a lot more options as far as libraries with a lot less reinventing of the wheel than any of your examples.
Businesses that don't exist to give customers products they want instead of forcing products they'll barely tolerate down their throats do not necessarily have a right to exist.
Not saying I pirate all software. I don't even really play many games since everything moved to steam, wants to rummage through my system to make sure I'm not stealing it, calls home to get "permission" to run even though I bought it.
Believe me, I have SHELVES of PC and game console games I've bought. Never again. I buy the kids some used PS2 and Wii games and that's about it. They'll learn when they start imploding.
No, I just want to exercise my LEGAL F**KING RIGHTS GRANTED TO ME BY COPYRIGHT LAW, not their twisted version of what I'm allowed to do with a product I've purchased.
I'm not that picky. They've alienated one of the few customers that used to evangelize as well as buy massive loads of their crap.
The only reason why the FOSS culture and the free desktop (as in the free OS) have gone such a long way since the early days of slackware is because there were people who wanted to get their hands dirty and muck about for days on a toy OS in order to get somewhere (usually the goal was understanding, more than achieving an actual OS).
I just wanted to run UNIX on a low-end machine without paying a gazillion dollars, bang out some terrible code and experiment with all the wondrous world beyond the '$' prompt. I wanted a DEC, Sun or SGI machine but they were out of reach. I wanted root dammit. I was a broke teenager. In the end I got that little machine to do some amazing things. The effort and learning involved was also responsible for developing skills that earned me lots of paychecks.
LOL I remember early versions of Slackware in 1994 (maybe 95?) requiring intense muckery just to get it to f**kin boot much less get drives partitioned and ready to go.
I remember installing NetBSD 1.2 on some architechtures requiring booting a kernel with a dismal little ramdisk (or sometimes via the network requiring tftp and NFS) and hand unpacking the archives that comprised your root filesystem AFTER you pulled your hair out understanding the funky disk partitioning scheme along with various quirks for that architecture. Then manually hand-editing half of the/etc directory with vi to configure the system. Then getting pissed and realizing you had to create files like/etc/mygate to set a default gateway on boot. After 2 days of setting it by hand with ifconfig. Then finally figuring out how to properly make the HD bootable so you can quit f**king netbooting just to get a bootloader prompt. When dual-head meant plugging in another VT220 until X worked.
OH! And no adduser scripts..... you had to create your own users by hand, including their home directories, populating it with login scripts, editing files in/etc to define user and group, changing permissions and finally.......finally.....setting a password and logging in to test and see where you made a typo.
I don't have much FOND nostalgia of the early free UNIX landscape. It was a learning experience and you felt triumphant getting a working system running and doing something useful and it would stay that way for AGES......was so lightweight and fast........ but it was grueling hell getting to that mountaintop.
In the end, sometimes a little initial hell is worth the real-world game-changing progress that ensues. Most of you would have thought that we were stupid going through that much effort now but if we didn't, you think Linux or BSD would be here today? You drive progress as much as developers. Submit bug reports.
But a Mac, or an Indigo with a color display or accelerated 3d hardware cost as much as two cars.
I agree on the Indigo but that sort of 3D hardware inspired the cheap GPU's we enjoy now. Everything started as multi-million-dollar exotic hardware at one point.
Later PowerPC Macs had support for PCI 3DFX and early Radeon cards just like the PC's of the era.
As for the price of an earlier 68K color Mac, the Mac IIfx was godawful expensive but a Mac LC-series machine wasn't so bad and could be had reasonably cheap not too much later. I had a IIci for a long time.
Almost no one could afford a high end Mac
You could buy a LC or Performa at comparable prices to a cheap PC. A well-equipped monster Mac IIfx or Quadra 950 was on par with an SGI workstation price-wise.
and graphical workstations were in CS departments and professors hogged them.
I'll give you that one but older workstations were frequently available fairly cheap on the used market. Do what every other starving student does. Scrounge.
Yesterday I set up a quad core machine with 12 GB or RAM and I will virtualise the heck out of it to have fun and learn things meanwhile. To do this then would have cost around the high end of 5 figures. Today it's less than Eur 1000.
And it would be the same had Windows never existed. Everyone else used SIMMs too. Even the later Amiga and Atari machines. So would PC's running OS/2 or whatever. Multiprocessor desktops have been around forever. Multicore was the next logical step. Cheaper, more efficient, affordable multicore CPU's after that.
Do I think it's cool I can build a hackintosh for $300? Yeah. Was it worth the price in actual progress for a stupid race to the bottom leaving a tyrannical little software house leading the industry? No.
Nobody forces you to like what the masses like. Use your freedom. What if the ignoramuses buy shiny crap? It allows innovation to happen,
Really what innovation? All I see lately is shiny locked-down devices becoming popular that are easy for computer-illiterate folks to use but far less efficient than a real computer to get real work done. The masses are choking out the market for devices that changed my life in a useful way and attempting to replace them with far less useful poke-and-drool toys with crippled interfaces.
How much longer do you think a general purpose expandable desktop will be inexpensive when they aren't selling because most idiots prefer an iPad?
just not at the ivory towers of our youth, but at mundane places where wage slaves with three degrees crank out products. Some of them are very good. This machine will stop when its(1) fuel runs out.
(1) Notice how its is used(2). (2) Educating slashdotters at no charge!
Did you seriously try to give me a lesson on proper use of parenthesis and footnotes in an unofficial Slashdot post? Really? Do these carry the same weight as an edited published work to you?
The trash-80 was doomed from the start. The Atari 8-bit and C64 languished until the mid-90's due to a devoted user base. The ST and later TT/Falcon had quite a few professional applications in DTP and MIDI work. They found niches for a while and persisted until they got axed. The Amiga was popular for 3D modeling and video editing work. In pure numbers the PC outnumbered them but they remained dominant in quite a few niches for years afterward because the PC well......sucked. Even with more raw clock speed the PC......sucked. Only very recently has the PC sucked a lot less due to absorbing a lot of the features that made machines like the DEC, SGI and Amiga machines cool.
I don't care about growth. Retards will buy anything you can convince them they need. I care about real, honest-to-god innovation and engineering. MS has brought very little new to the table. Without MS the PC still would have had a dominant business foothold thanks to Novell, IBM OS/2 and various UNIX versions and wait......*GASP*..... LINUX which predates WinNT even. MacOS has been network-capable since the Mac Plus IIRC. Berkeley and Sun on the UNIX side contributed a lot to small-scale IT as well. The IT boom was already in full swing and growing fast before MS even got on the boat. Even infant Linux was around for the party on a small scale.
MS was the axe-wielding disruptive psycho latecomer in server-side business IT that seemed really good at sweet-talking execs.
Ethernet's been with us since the 70's thanks to DEC (RIP), Xerox and Intel. Localtalk's been around since I was a little kid. Small offices have been hooking computers together for ages. Ever even SEEN coax ethernet? You really think that crap came from the post-Win95 era? I helped run a bit of it though twisted pair wasn't far around the corner. Believe me, people saw value in personal computers before Windows existed. Especially in cubicle farms. Get off my lawn. Ever even HEARD of Digital Research and CP/M, DR/DOS and GEM (also used on ST)? They could have easily carried MS's torch had Gates never been born.
You missed my underlying point. I'm not arguing who had the best product. I agree, it wasn't Microsoft. We got to this point in consumer technological advancement primarily because of Microsofts marketing.
Wrong. You missed my point. We advanced a LOT QUICKER before they arrived and dominated the industry through force.
We already had great inexpensive machines that were advancing quite fast. The difference is your great grandmother didn't and we didn't give a shit. To be fair to the elderly though, my WW2-vet granddad had an ST and then a Mac. Long before Win95.
The best products and services won't amount to a hill of beans without marketing. That alone changed the world. Forever.
That's is why people hate MS. It's the truth that never should have been. To the parent, it pains them too much to admit it. It's where idealism and reality clash head on.
Most of the groundwork for the "technological advancement" you see today existed in the early 80's. Marketing only made the Walmart crowd care and drove x86 PC prices and quality down. We were better off without them. It changed the world for the worse, not the better and has held TRUE advancement back a decade or two.
3D accelerated graphics existed before Windows. Web browsers existed on machines more capable than the PC in 1992. Gopher before that. Hi-rez displays and 24-bit color existed before Windows. Broadcast quality hardware-accelerated video playback existed before Win95. Advanced sound chips existed before Windows. Touch screens existed before Windows. Pen-based input has existed since 1952 on mainframes. Preemptive multitasking existed before Windows. GUI's have existed in various forms since the 70's.
MS also wasn't the first to combine this functionality but when everyone else did it, their machines were written off as scientific workstations, gaming toys or "just for creative types". You don't seem to realize the Amiga didn't die in 1990. Neither did the Atari ST/TT/Falcon. They were just forced out of the general US market because people were content buying a more expensive and less capable Packard Bell.
The only advancement that happened was the PC sucking up everyone else's hard work and research as they languished with MS claiming they invented something. You're right that MS won, you're wrong thinking we gained from it. We lost. Big time.
Hmmm I mistook your post for sarcasm.....sorry. My fault.
I know it sucks but can you roll back Samba to a version that worked for you until they fix it? What about Login scripts attached to GPO's in the domain to connect to IPP printers based on what OU the machine belongs to? Should be doable though a pain.
The problem is most other vendors go out of their way to work with most other vendors. MS doesn't. I always have a Windows Server box somewhere just to manage the Windows machines because MS goes out of their way to NOT be COMPLETELY interoperable. They actively PUNISH you for using non-MS products. Try setting up clients to netboot from a FreeBSD box using their DHCP server for example. Can be done. Pain in the ass and non-obvious.
MS does things like this so as competitors gain steam they can attempt to pull the rug out from under them by no longer supporting their "obsolete" platform while touting their products as "killers" or the only sane and logical "replacement".
They'll sell a bunch more copies of SQL Server and you'll start to see the Linux driver stagnate until it's near useless. They will then blame it on new drivers implementing features impossible on Linux and customers should migrate to the much superior Windows Server 2010 since it'll have those features they used on Linux anyway along with genuine microsoft support!
As an example look how pathetic.NET is on anything but Windows these days.
With THEIR software. Only a priority for those suckered into MS's VM solution. The rest of us don't give a crap and would rather see HyperV burn. MS helping themselves is no surprise. I'm actually quite surprised they haven't intentionally crippled Linux performance on their VM compared to Server 2008. Wouldn't be a surprising tactic. They've tried to break things before and blame it on the rest of the world being "crippled".
I am no fan of Redmond, but I have managed to make a lot of money supporting their products.
Me too but anybody can make bundles of cash supporting a buggy mess. You don't even have to be good at it. Just have to know more than the customer does or make them think as such. The sad thing is most people in this field REFUSE to learn other products because they lack the prior knowledge and don't see it as important. It's not MS so it doesn't matter. They'd be lost trying to configure a machine without something like Wizards and MMC holding their hand. An IT pro should NOT need a Wizard.
Jaguar mechanics make lots of money too for fixing those overpriced pieces of s**t. Often.
Bullshit. MacOS existed LONG before Windows was anything more than a glorified DOS shell. The internet was in full swing on UNIX boxes and Macs before crappy Windows machines flooded the net via AOL. Most PC users were late to the party and saddled with a shitty IP stack (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and buggy software. And DOS wasn't even REALLY "their" innovation. They bought a half-assed CP/M clone from some guy named Tim Patterson and claimed they had an OS the whole time to IBM.
We existed just fine before Win95. We had slick GUI-based machines like the Atari ST, the Amiga, and the Macintosh that were ALL superior to MS's offerings. And not in a small way.....we're talking LEAPS AND BOUNDS more advanced. And all were capable of online connectivity. All had more capable graphics and sound than PC's of the same time period.
The ONLY thing MS brought to the table was "Good Ol' Boy" predatory business tactics, manipulation and extortion. They INVENTED absolutely NOTHING and forced an industry into shoving unreliable cheap PC clones down our throats with their software bundled. I hope Gates and Ballmer choke on their breakfast. F**k them.
Seems to work fine in OSX. Not sure what you're talking about. IPP printers can be autoinstalled as well as SMB. Can even participate in a Windows Domain and be managed by the domain if you want including scripted mapping of printers and shares. Linux can enjoy most of the same goodies with a little effort.
Quit acting like Microsoft invented LDAP and autoconfiguration. Been around a long time. If it doesn't work in your environment, ditch the retard MCSE and hire a real network admin that knows what he's doing with a broad scope on more than one platform.
Seriously, when was the last time you legally bought or sold a used PC game?
Been a while.... almost impossible to do and leave the game intact and unaltered. So now I just refuse to pay for PC games. If it's good it'll get cracked. The Nintendo Wii was likely my last console purchase. I have refused the PS3 and XBox 360 because of this insanity and "pay-to-play" paid content bullshit. I won't buy one for myself OR my 3 children. And after explaining why to my son.....*gasp* he understands.
I depend on the used game market for affordable games. If they can't lock down a book and keep me from selling it intact, then they can't do it with my fucking software. Without it, I'm not buying. I'm not going to put up with being treated like a criminal and I'm not going to let them believe that playing games I paid for is a privilege that they have the right to control.
My kids whining for Sony's overpriced shit is not going to make me capitulate and give up my rights. F**K YOU SONY. There's plenty of used PS2 games out there and I have a feeling we'll see a wave of 3D-enabled multicore ARM-based low-cost game machines soon WITHOUT the bullshit.
I call bullshit on your semi-informed opinion:-P I have to support tablets as well but most of the time people are willing to realize they are content CONSUMPTION devices.
Define touch typing. I type at 65wpm+ on a real keyboard. Typing on an iPad is only slightly less painful and maybe a hair more fun than typing on an Atari 400 or even a Sinclair ZX81. If you can exceed 30wpm on an iPad or iPhone keyboard, more power to you. You're going to have flat fingertips in old age. To suggest a touch-screen is a viable replacement for a real tactile keyboard is funny at best.
And show me a FULL-FEATURED version of photoshop, not something for simple tweaking on the go. And a FULL-FEATURED version of MS Office that integrates well with some mutant sharepoint-based nightmare on some remote Windows 2000 server.
AutoCAD used to run on sub-50MHz machines. Lightwave ran on a 68K Amiga. Cubase ran on the Atari ST. The UI for any of these apps (except maybe Cubase) just plain wouldn't work in a tablet. Face it, some people need pointer precision and buttons to efficiently work. These things were added because PEOPLE NEEDED THEM not just because engineers were stupid and like wasting money on tactile switches.
I'm not against a tablet for looking at wikipedia while watching a movie or checking up on slashdot. I'm against people thinking they are a remote replacement for a machine designed for content creation. What tech circles are you referring to, the stock room at Best Buy?
Bullshit. They don't understand the tablets either and you know it. They also run into walls with the limitations pretty quickly. And it's not limitations in the hardware. It's artificially imposed software limitations put there so people can pretend the last 30 years of UI design and computer science didn't happen making them further removed from understanding why they can't do something they've been able to do for generations.
Like I said, teeny boppers on Facebook love them. People who want to be cool like their kids love them. Business pros and people who are used to computers actually being an efficient way to get things done hate them.
I never made money on computer illiterate home end users, I make money doing real IT work where users are at least expected to be able to do basic tasks without handholding. Not working for the geek squad. My job is safe douche.
The only people who no longer need to know computers are the ones who never used them professionally anyway and really, those are customers I don't want.
Until tablets are capable of running full versions of apps like Photoshop, AutoCAD, Office, Lightwave, etc you are entirely full of shit. Too bad your self worth seems to be based around being a smug hipster ahead of the "old fogies" based on your devotion to your overpriced toy computer with a crippled interface.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but the mobile devices are certainly a cash cow if they can get in there.
Intel GPU's.....sorry....typo....Intel CPU's are actually pretty kick-ass these days.
That's why I said "if you're happy with a GMA950". The problem is that Intel's integrated GPU's suck monkeyballs but are "good enough" for daily computing tasks.
Good drivers doesn't change the fact that Intel CPU's are a joke performance-wise.
Well on the Linux front, ATI is no better than NVidia. You can pretty much only sidestep buying NVidia gear for Linux if you're happy with an onboard GMA950 or something.
ATI just recently got around to taking Linux drivers seriously and most of theirs suck too. Nvidia are really the only video card vendor with working Linux drivers for most of their cards. Unfortunately this support is limited to crappy Wintel machines and only comes in the form of lame binary blobs.
I'm pretty certain HW Vendors are deliberately hampering the rate of Linux adoption on the desktop. They won't give us specs to write drivers nor will they bother most of the time except for Windows. Most vendors plain don't support OSX either but Apple has some decent video drivers. Most PC HW vendors would be happy to see Linux curl up and die so people quit asking about it and they don't have to spend any money to support it.
So Linux doesn't have window compositing, 3D rendering packages or games that utilize OpenGL? You sir, are retarded.
And if you count total number of Linux installs, it passed Windows. Think of all the Linux-based Android phones (which also use OpenGL) and wireless routers.
There is no shortage of American IT monkeys and coders. There's a huge mass of them still unemployed. And a huge mass of them who just plain switched careers because we're sick of the bullshit and tired of being treated like burnable disposable commodities that are an unfortunate necessary evil (and often accused of not generating revenue). In general I've noticed secretaries tend to be genuinely valued more than life long IT experience and talent. So yeah..... not in IT anymore.
We must have different definitions of "works". Yes, you can start programs. If that's your definition of "works" then so be it. Unity is NOTHING like the OSX UI. If you think it is, you're not using the OSX UI to it's full potential in any way, shape or form.
GNOME and KDE are tolerable but I'm with most of the Slashdot crowd when I say I've tried to like Unity and it plain sucks. It's about as useful as AtEase was on the old 68k Macs in computer labs. For your grandma that just needs a Firefox and Email button, it may suffice..... for people that use computers for a living it's an obnoxious hindrance that gets in the way and slows down REAL WORK.
There is a common consensus in the CS community that pointers as opposed to references, pointer arithmetics, direct type conversion ("memory overlays") etc. are unsafe, and a language that makes it easy to use them is "inherently unsafe". (That doesn't have anything to do with actual programming practise. Obviously, you can write "safe" programs in any language, even in machine code, as long as you're very careful.) As a comparison, take Ada, Eifel, Java, Haskell -- these are all much safer.
As for "modern": Perhaps you haven't seen any modern programming languages yet? Because otherwise you should know what I mean. Relatively modern features are e.g. automatic type inference, automatic parallelism, contracts, a concurrent garbage collector -- things like that.
Java is a slow pig and the rest of your examples have little real-world usage for desktop/handheld applications, at least client-side. There's lots of unoptimized wonderfully safe academic languages lacking decent libraries for people to create applications that integrate well with the rest of the system. LISP is awesome but I wouldn't want to try to write a modern game or productivity app in a reasonable amount of time with it.
Obj-C at least gives you a lot more options as far as libraries with a lot less reinventing of the wheel than any of your examples.
Businesses that don't exist to give customers products they want instead of forcing products they'll barely tolerate down their throats do not necessarily have a right to exist.
Not saying I pirate all software. I don't even really play many games since everything moved to steam, wants to rummage through my system to make sure I'm not stealing it, calls home to get "permission" to run even though I bought it.
Believe me, I have SHELVES of PC and game console games I've bought. Never again. I buy the kids some used PS2 and Wii games and that's about it. They'll learn when they start imploding.
No, I just want to exercise my LEGAL F**KING RIGHTS GRANTED TO ME BY COPYRIGHT LAW, not their twisted version of what I'm allowed to do with a product I've purchased.
I'm not that picky. They've alienated one of the few customers that used to evangelize as well as buy massive loads of their crap.
Seems a little barren at the moment. I can see several important microprocessors missing from the early days that would be fun to compare.....
MOS/WDC 6502/65C02/65816 - How could they *NOT* have a freaking 6502 in there?! Pretty sure the 6502 outsold the 8080!
MicroPDP-11 - J11?
MicroVAX - CVAX, NVAX, PVAX, etc
RCA 1802 - Still a couple floating around a few million miles away. Probably still working.
At least Alpha and SPARC are in there. This is definitely a cool effort. Will likely end up pretty complete one day.
The only reason why the FOSS culture and the free desktop (as in the free OS) have gone such a long way since the early days of slackware is because there were people who wanted to get their hands dirty and muck about for days on a toy OS in order to get somewhere (usually the goal was understanding, more than achieving an actual OS).
I just wanted to run UNIX on a low-end machine without paying a gazillion dollars, bang out some terrible code and experiment with all the wondrous world beyond the '$' prompt. I wanted a DEC, Sun or SGI machine but they were out of reach. I wanted root dammit. I was a broke teenager. In the end I got that little machine to do some amazing things. The effort and learning involved was also responsible for developing skills that earned me lots of paychecks.
LOL I remember early versions of Slackware in 1994 (maybe 95?) requiring intense muckery just to get it to f**kin boot much less get drives partitioned and ready to go.
I remember installing NetBSD 1.2 on some architechtures requiring booting a kernel with a dismal little ramdisk (or sometimes via the network requiring tftp and NFS) and hand unpacking the archives that comprised your root filesystem AFTER you pulled your hair out understanding the funky disk partitioning scheme along with various quirks for that architecture. Then manually hand-editing half of the /etc directory with vi to configure the system. Then getting pissed and realizing you had to create files like /etc/mygate to set a default gateway on boot. After 2 days of setting it by hand with ifconfig. Then finally figuring out how to properly make the HD bootable so you can quit f**king netbooting just to get a bootloader prompt. When dual-head meant plugging in another VT220 until X worked.
OH! And no adduser scripts..... you had to create your own users by hand, including their home directories, populating it with login scripts, editing files in /etc to define user and group, changing permissions and finally.......finally.....setting a password and logging in to test and see where you made a typo.
I don't have much FOND nostalgia of the early free UNIX landscape. It was a learning experience and you felt triumphant getting a working system running and doing something useful and it would stay that way for AGES......was so lightweight and fast........ but it was grueling hell getting to that mountaintop.
In the end, sometimes a little initial hell is worth the real-world game-changing progress that ensues. Most of you would have thought that we were stupid going through that much effort now but if we didn't, you think Linux or BSD would be here today? You drive progress as much as developers. Submit bug reports.
But a Mac, or an Indigo with a color display or accelerated 3d hardware cost as much as two cars.
I agree on the Indigo but that sort of 3D hardware inspired the cheap GPU's we enjoy now. Everything started as multi-million-dollar exotic hardware at one point.
Later PowerPC Macs had support for PCI 3DFX and early Radeon cards just like the PC's of the era.
As for the price of an earlier 68K color Mac, the Mac IIfx was godawful expensive but a Mac LC-series machine wasn't so bad and could be had reasonably cheap not too much later. I had a IIci for a long time.
Almost no one could afford a high end Mac
You could buy a LC or Performa at comparable prices to a cheap PC. A well-equipped monster Mac IIfx or Quadra 950 was on par with an SGI workstation price-wise.
and graphical workstations were in CS departments and professors hogged them.
I'll give you that one but older workstations were frequently available fairly cheap on the used market. Do what every other starving student does. Scrounge.
Yesterday I set up a quad core machine with 12 GB or RAM and I will virtualise the heck out of it to have fun and learn things meanwhile. To do this then would have cost around the high end of 5 figures. Today it's less than Eur 1000.
And it would be the same had Windows never existed. Everyone else used SIMMs too. Even the later Amiga and Atari machines. So would PC's running OS/2 or whatever. Multiprocessor desktops have been around forever. Multicore was the next logical step. Cheaper, more efficient, affordable multicore CPU's after that.
Do I think it's cool I can build a hackintosh for $300? Yeah. Was it worth the price in actual progress for a stupid race to the bottom leaving a tyrannical little software house leading the industry? No.
Nobody forces you to like what the masses like. Use your freedom. What if the ignoramuses buy shiny crap? It allows innovation to happen,
Really what innovation? All I see lately is shiny locked-down devices becoming popular that are easy for computer-illiterate folks to use but far less efficient than a real computer to get real work done. The masses are choking out the market for devices that changed my life in a useful way and attempting to replace them with far less useful poke-and-drool toys with crippled interfaces.
How much longer do you think a general purpose expandable desktop will be inexpensive when they aren't selling because most idiots prefer an iPad?
just not at the ivory towers of our youth, but at mundane places where wage slaves with three degrees crank out products. Some of them are very good. This machine will stop when its(1) fuel runs out.
(1) Notice how its is used(2).
(2) Educating slashdotters at no charge!
Did you seriously try to give me a lesson on proper use of parenthesis and footnotes in an unofficial Slashdot post? Really? Do these carry the same weight as an edited published work to you?
The trash-80 was doomed from the start. The Atari 8-bit and C64 languished until the mid-90's due to a devoted user base. The ST and later TT/Falcon had quite a few professional applications in DTP and MIDI work. They found niches for a while and persisted until they got axed. The Amiga was popular for 3D modeling and video editing work. In pure numbers the PC outnumbered them but they remained dominant in quite a few niches for years afterward because the PC well......sucked. Even with more raw clock speed the PC......sucked. Only very recently has the PC sucked a lot less due to absorbing a lot of the features that made machines like the DEC, SGI and Amiga machines cool.
I don't care about growth. Retards will buy anything you can convince them they need. I care about real, honest-to-god innovation and engineering. MS has brought very little new to the table. Without MS the PC still would have had a dominant business foothold thanks to Novell, IBM OS/2 and various UNIX versions and wait......*GASP*..... LINUX which predates WinNT even. MacOS has been network-capable since the Mac Plus IIRC. Berkeley and Sun on the UNIX side contributed a lot to small-scale IT as well. The IT boom was already in full swing and growing fast before MS even got on the boat. Even infant Linux was around for the party on a small scale.
MS was the axe-wielding disruptive psycho latecomer in server-side business IT that seemed really good at sweet-talking execs.
Ethernet's been with us since the 70's thanks to DEC (RIP), Xerox and Intel. Localtalk's been around since I was a little kid. Small offices have been hooking computers together for ages. Ever even SEEN coax ethernet? You really think that crap came from the post-Win95 era? I helped run a bit of it though twisted pair wasn't far around the corner. Believe me, people saw value in personal computers before Windows existed. Especially in cubicle farms. Get off my lawn. Ever even HEARD of Digital Research and CP/M, DR/DOS and GEM (also used on ST)? They could have easily carried MS's torch had Gates never been born.
You missed my underlying point. I'm not arguing who had the best product. I agree, it wasn't Microsoft. We got to this point in consumer technological advancement primarily because of Microsofts marketing.
Wrong. You missed my point. We advanced a LOT QUICKER before they arrived and dominated the industry through force.
We already had great inexpensive machines that were advancing quite fast. The difference is your great grandmother didn't and we didn't give a shit. To be fair to the elderly though, my WW2-vet granddad had an ST and then a Mac. Long before Win95.
The best products and services won't amount to a hill of beans without marketing. That alone changed the world. Forever.
That's is why people hate MS. It's the truth that never should have been. To the parent, it pains them too much to admit it. It's where idealism and reality clash head on.
Most of the groundwork for the "technological advancement" you see today existed in the early 80's. Marketing only made the Walmart crowd care and drove x86 PC prices and quality down. We were better off without them. It changed the world for the worse, not the better and has held TRUE advancement back a decade or two.
3D accelerated graphics existed before Windows. Web browsers existed on machines more capable than the PC in 1992. Gopher before that. Hi-rez displays and 24-bit color existed before Windows. Broadcast quality hardware-accelerated video playback existed before Win95. Advanced sound chips existed before Windows. Touch screens existed before Windows. Pen-based input has existed since 1952 on mainframes. Preemptive multitasking existed before Windows. GUI's have existed in various forms since the 70's.
MS also wasn't the first to combine this functionality but when everyone else did it, their machines were written off as scientific workstations, gaming toys or "just for creative types". You don't seem to realize the Amiga didn't die in 1990. Neither did the Atari ST/TT/Falcon. They were just forced out of the general US market because people were content buying a more expensive and less capable Packard Bell.
The only advancement that happened was the PC sucking up everyone else's hard work and research as they languished with MS claiming they invented something. You're right that MS won, you're wrong thinking we gained from it. We lost. Big time.
Hmmm I mistook your post for sarcasm.....sorry. My fault.
I know it sucks but can you roll back Samba to a version that worked for you until they fix it? What about Login scripts attached to GPO's in the domain to connect to IPP printers based on what OU the machine belongs to? Should be doable though a pain.
The problem is most other vendors go out of their way to work with most other vendors. MS doesn't. I always have a Windows Server box somewhere just to manage the Windows machines because MS goes out of their way to NOT be COMPLETELY interoperable. They actively PUNISH you for using non-MS products. Try setting up clients to netboot from a FreeBSD box using their DHCP server for example. Can be done. Pain in the ass and non-obvious.
MS does things like this so as competitors gain steam they can attempt to pull the rug out from under them by no longer supporting their "obsolete" platform while touting their products as "killers" or the only sane and logical "replacement".
They'll sell a bunch more copies of SQL Server and you'll start to see the Linux driver stagnate until it's near useless. They will then blame it on new drivers implementing features impossible on Linux and customers should migrate to the much superior Windows Server 2010 since it'll have those features they used on Linux anyway along with genuine microsoft support!
As an example look how pathetic .NET is on anything but Windows these days.
If it increases interoperability
With THEIR software. Only a priority for those suckered into MS's VM solution. The rest of us don't give a crap and would rather see HyperV burn. MS helping themselves is no surprise. I'm actually quite surprised they haven't intentionally crippled Linux performance on their VM compared to Server 2008. Wouldn't be a surprising tactic. They've tried to break things before and blame it on the rest of the world being "crippled".
I am no fan of Redmond, but I have managed to make a lot of money supporting their products.
Me too but anybody can make bundles of cash supporting a buggy mess. You don't even have to be good at it. Just have to know more than the customer does or make them think as such. The sad thing is most people in this field REFUSE to learn other products because they lack the prior knowledge and don't see it as important. It's not MS so it doesn't matter. They'd be lost trying to configure a machine without something like Wizards and MMC holding their hand. An IT pro should NOT need a Wizard.
Jaguar mechanics make lots of money too for fixing those overpriced pieces of s**t. Often.
Bullshit. MacOS existed LONG before Windows was anything more than a glorified DOS shell. The internet was in full swing on UNIX boxes and Macs before crappy Windows machines flooded the net via AOL. Most PC users were late to the party and saddled with a shitty IP stack (remember Trumpet Winsock?) and buggy software. And DOS wasn't even REALLY "their" innovation. They bought a half-assed CP/M clone from some guy named Tim Patterson and claimed they had an OS the whole time to IBM.
We existed just fine before Win95. We had slick GUI-based machines like the Atari ST, the Amiga, and the Macintosh that were ALL superior to MS's offerings. And not in a small way.....we're talking LEAPS AND BOUNDS more advanced. And all were capable of online connectivity. All had more capable graphics and sound than PC's of the same time period.
The ONLY thing MS brought to the table was "Good Ol' Boy" predatory business tactics, manipulation and extortion. They INVENTED absolutely NOTHING and forced an industry into shoving unreliable cheap PC clones down our throats with their software bundled. I hope Gates and Ballmer choke on their breakfast. F**k them.
Seems to work fine in OSX. Not sure what you're talking about. IPP printers can be autoinstalled as well as SMB. Can even participate in a Windows Domain and be managed by the domain if you want including scripted mapping of printers and shares. Linux can enjoy most of the same goodies with a little effort.
Quit acting like Microsoft invented LDAP and autoconfiguration. Been around a long time. If it doesn't work in your environment, ditch the retard MCSE and hire a real network admin that knows what he's doing with a broad scope on more than one platform.
Seriously, when was the last time you legally bought or sold a used PC game?
Been a while.... almost impossible to do and leave the game intact and unaltered. So now I just refuse to pay for PC games. If it's good it'll get cracked. The Nintendo Wii was likely my last console purchase. I have refused the PS3 and XBox 360 because of this insanity and "pay-to-play" paid content bullshit. I won't buy one for myself OR my 3 children. And after explaining why to my son.....*gasp* he understands.
I depend on the used game market for affordable games. If they can't lock down a book and keep me from selling it intact, then they can't do it with my fucking software. Without it, I'm not buying. I'm not going to put up with being treated like a criminal and I'm not going to let them believe that playing games I paid for is a privilege that they have the right to control.
My kids whining for Sony's overpriced shit is not going to make me capitulate and give up my rights. F**K YOU SONY. There's plenty of used PS2 games out there and I have a feeling we'll see a wave of 3D-enabled multicore ARM-based low-cost game machines soon WITHOUT the bullshit.
I call bullshit on your semi-informed opinion :-P I have to support tablets as well but most of the time people are willing to realize they are content CONSUMPTION devices.
Define touch typing. I type at 65wpm+ on a real keyboard. Typing on an iPad is only slightly less painful and maybe a hair more fun than typing on an Atari 400 or even a Sinclair ZX81. If you can exceed 30wpm on an iPad or iPhone keyboard, more power to you. You're going to have flat fingertips in old age. To suggest a touch-screen is a viable replacement for a real tactile keyboard is funny at best.
And show me a FULL-FEATURED version of photoshop, not something for simple tweaking on the go. And a FULL-FEATURED version of MS Office that integrates well with some mutant sharepoint-based nightmare on some remote Windows 2000 server.
AutoCAD used to run on sub-50MHz machines. Lightwave ran on a 68K Amiga. Cubase ran on the Atari ST. The UI for any of these apps (except maybe Cubase) just plain wouldn't work in a tablet. Face it, some people need pointer precision and buttons to efficiently work. These things were added because PEOPLE NEEDED THEM not just because engineers were stupid and like wasting money on tactile switches.
I'm not against a tablet for looking at wikipedia while watching a movie or checking up on slashdot. I'm against people thinking they are a remote replacement for a machine designed for content creation. What tech circles are you referring to, the stock room at Best Buy?
Bullshit. They don't understand the tablets either and you know it. They also run into walls with the limitations pretty quickly. And it's not limitations in the hardware. It's artificially imposed software limitations put there so people can pretend the last 30 years of UI design and computer science didn't happen making them further removed from understanding why they can't do something they've been able to do for generations.
Like I said, teeny boppers on Facebook love them. People who want to be cool like their kids love them. Business pros and people who are used to computers actually being an efficient way to get things done hate them.
I never made money on computer illiterate home end users, I make money doing real IT work where users are at least expected to be able to do basic tasks without handholding. Not working for the geek squad. My job is safe douche.
The only people who no longer need to know computers are the ones who never used them professionally anyway and really, those are customers I don't want.
Until tablets are capable of running full versions of apps like Photoshop, AutoCAD, Office, Lightwave, etc you are entirely full of shit. Too bad your self worth seems to be based around being a smug hipster ahead of the "old fogies" based on your devotion to your overpriced toy computer with a crippled interface.