Here's a hint: Time is money. The time you spend pondering over what software to use represents a substancial investment.
On your other point, my IBM PC Server 704 belongs to me personally. It even has 'PC' in it's name. However, it has four CPUs and a rack with twelve fast SCSI hard drives in it. It has dual redundant power supplies and is the size of a large two-drawer file cabinet. Only a complete idiot would claim it is a Personal Computer. Maybe the typical Powerbook user, too, but now I'm being redundant.
Also, it will be bonanza for people who want to engage in 'support lock-in' by implementing customized 'solutions' for their clients that nobody else will be able to support.
Problem is, businesses figure this stuff out eventually. They're not gonna buy your hand-rolled 'solution' if they did the same thing last time and got soaked. And they will.
They're free to go to Best Buy and purchase the software.
If they had no job because nobody would pay for software, so no shrinkwrapped boxes were shipped, so their job as a mail clerk was redundant....
Plus the 'freedom to choose' comes into play here. There are people who would like to see the social order changed so that it would be wasted effort to come out with a new software package if it was expensive to develop. So we'd all end up using tweaked and torqued versions of BRL-Cad, LaTeX, aged copies of Mozilla, etc. With no renumeration possible, nobody would go to the effort to produce software packages so there'd be no 'freedom' to purchase said packages.
I know, I know. Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice and 'open sourced' it, plus Netscape 'open sourced' their browser technology which allowed it to be hacked away at to make a pretty good browser. Plus, IBM has boy mascot called 'Linux' they use in a TeeVee commercial to demonstrate that Linux is a naive little kid who they can lecture at.
Whatever happened to Freedom just being another word for 'nothing left to lose' and hence only being the term to describe the experience of being poor and homeless?
'409 scammers' actively solicit business in a way that anybody at all with a clue would recognize as fraudulent. They are soliciting people to engage in an illegal money laundering operation. The whole appeal of the scam to the victim is a 'get rich quick' appeal that clearly involves criminal acts.
The fact of the matter remains that your side (Apple) didn't prevail in court. The myriad group of other entites, including Microsoft, who now produce GUI OSes, did NOT 'steal' it from Apple. This definition holds and remains valid, similar in many repects to the fact that the same legal system has defined Microsoft as a monopoly.
I bet you like that particular legal identifiction of an entity by the legal system.
If Apple had prevailed, they would have set the precedent that 'selfish companies can hire mean motherfucker lawyers and 0wn the world.'
The Apple GUI lawsuit was widely perceived by the hacker community at that time as being very similar to what SCO is trying to pull now. Interesting which side you're backing, even ten+ years after the fact.
In the first edition of Tanenbaum's book it was floppy diskettes and the 'out of box' standard version ran on an 8088 system. In the second edition of the book there was a cover CD and the 8088 version is considered 'old.'
It's all now freely downloadable from several websites. I had it running, with ethernet and all, on an older Pentium box here a few months ago.
If 'pedantic' behavior were the default and not the exception, people who don't know better would likely be writing better code for GCC. As it stands, that's an 'extend and embrace' feature that encourages sloppy code that will build only with GCC.
Also, since SCO was founded as a Microsoft subsidiary to produce Xenix, Microsoft's UNIX variant (yes, Microsoft did the first UNIX that ran on x86, I used to have a copy of Microsoft Xenix on an Altos 8086 box), SCO wouldn't have even been born without Microsoft.
I worked at the largest (then) 'embedded OS/2' shop from 1998 to 2001. They were STILL bound to an OS/2 platform, and people HATED it. I think they're now an embedded-NT shop. The machines said code is embedded in control pacemakers and other critical-care implanted devices, by the way.
Jobs wasn't interested in 'margin' or 'volume' back in the Sculley era. He was too busy being a weird meddler who would wander into areas of the company he didn't have a clue about, and messing it up.
He was an example of 'wiz-kid with too much power and no damn business sense' back then, and he needed to be fired to save Apple.
NeXT is an interesting parallel to Be. Both companies first produced an expensive proprietary hardware box and both then evolved into companies that produced 'ports' for various hardware platforms. Then they both became candidates for the 'next generation' MacOS after Apple's incompetent, effete fumblecoders proved they could burn many millions of dollars and not produce a damn thing anybody wanted.
I would love to find a copy of NeXTstep from the olden days when it would run on HP-9000, x86, and wasn't there a Sparc port too? I don't want it badly enough to pay the extortion prices that package gets on eBay, though.
My coolest 'proprietary IBM box' is an RS/6000 system that I got last week. I've finally installed AIX on it. It's an ancient, ancient AIX box, the 'Power PC' processor is a set of five or so big chips.
Bill obsessed about Microsoft's OS continuing to run all the software their customer base wanted it to run (virtually anything people had coded for the PC in like forever). It wasn't about 'lock in' back then, it was about 'compatability.'
Incidentally, I remember exactly why I got Windows in the first place, before I had any software to run on it: Windows had a really neat paint program!
That's the reason I first started running Windows, too. Windows 1.03 on my 8088-based XT clone with it's hercules-clone graphics card and all 640K of RAM. I ran it because of a cool vectored-drawing program called In*A*Vision put out by Micrografx, that later became Designer. Back then In*A*Vision and one or two other programs were the only reason to run Windows.
Let's not forget that when Windows came out, the Mac and the Amiga absolutely ruled the desktop GUI world.
That's a little bit like saying that the janitor 'runs the company' because he's the first person in the building, at 6:15 am each morning.
The 'desktop GUI world' was a little playland back then. Similar in a way to the way the 'Java world' was a bunch of little useless animations on Web Pages back in 1996.
I can top your '$400' thing. Last week I bought two skids of PCs for fourty bucks. There were 8 Pentium III 500's and about sixty Pentium II 350 systems in the bunch. Most had SDRAM, they all had 32-40x CDROM drives. They're all 100 MHz FSB stuff, none of the tired old first-gen P2 crap. They are actually damned fine machines, with on-board ethernet, ATI video, etc. I'm making a mint reselling them on eBay, though the temptation to string up a big cluster does loom.
All that stuff was so cheap because Microsoft's bloatware obsoleted it, so it ended up at the auction block. Who cares that I can't afford to put Windows on all those boxes. My eBay customers are responsible for that, and I bet less than one in ten will buy a 'legitimate' License for the OS they put on their new box.
You weren't around back in the seventies, I take it, to run the unpleasant proprietary stuff IBM and everybody else was producing.
IBM knew they had let the genie out of the bottle, as far as controlling the 'PC' market, about the time they decided to roll out OS/2 and the MCA hardware. They wanted the franchise back. A bit too late, though. Back then the real nerds and hackers wore anti-OS/2 buttons.
You know, of course, that you're quoting a guy who's resentful that he doesn't get invited to the discussions, right?
Not to discredit Tidgell or Samba, which I've used for close to 8 years now, but he's the one who chooses to reverse-engineer from the outside.
What Microsoft does internally is chaotic, messy, etc. But you have to understand that Microsoft's first primary objective has always been 'compatability.' You can run a certain portion of the binaries written for MS-DOS 2 still, ya know. That's one hell of a legacy.
Well, you could always work in a nice, stable field like FORTRAN code. Ranting about how Microsoft 'drives' tech trends is fairly ridiculous. There are any number of other factors driving those trends. Microsoft follows trends much more than they lead them.
Oh, yeah, I would be talking about the evil empire Apple and how they have a hold on the market.
That's not at all far off from the truth.
Apple intended for quite awhile to own the GUI market and be it's only vendor. They sued various entities and ran some of them out of the market. Because that's just how Apple does things.
When Microsoft came out with Windows, Apple sued Microsoft in the famous 'look-n-feel' lawsuits.
If Microsoft hadn't prevailed in those lawsuits, Apple would own the GUI market and be it's sole vendor.
That would suck bigtime. Microsoft plowed that ground for us. In fact the legal precedent that Microsoft set by fighting that fight for us is what allows people to 'clone' Windows GUI concepts and incorporate them into Linux/Free Software projects.
If Apple were in charge it would suck a hell of a lot more.
I wonder why Minix didn't experience the same explosive growth. (Anyone even remember it?)
Minix still exists, and there is a Minix usenet group that gets traffic. It was never intended to be anything like what Linux became. It's a pedagogical OS whose main method of distribution is a CD in the back cover of a textbook. It 'inspired' Linus to go off and do something of his own. It's wrong to act like it 'died' or in any way is a failure because it's still primarily a pedagogical OS.
Actually, Gates is a fiscal and social Liberal, and has views that hew more with the Democrats than the Republicans. Granted, he's the Warren Buffet kind of liberal, but he's no Republican by any measure of the word.
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Here's a hint: Time is money. The time you spend pondering over what software to use represents a substancial investment.
On your other point, my IBM PC Server 704 belongs to me personally. It even has 'PC' in it's name. However, it has four CPUs and a rack with twelve fast SCSI hard drives in it. It has dual redundant power supplies and is the size of a large two-drawer file cabinet. Only a complete idiot would claim it is a Personal Computer. Maybe the typical Powerbook user, too, but now I'm being redundant.
Also, it will be bonanza for people who want to engage in 'support lock-in' by implementing customized 'solutions' for their clients that nobody else will be able to support.
Problem is, businesses figure this stuff out eventually. They're not gonna buy your hand-rolled 'solution' if they did the same thing last time and got soaked. And they will.
They're free to go to Best Buy and purchase the software.
If they had no job because nobody would pay for software, so no shrinkwrapped boxes were shipped, so their job as a mail clerk was redundant....
Plus the 'freedom to choose' comes into play here. There are people who would like to see the social order changed so that it would be wasted effort to come out with a new software package if it was expensive to develop. So we'd all end up using tweaked and torqued versions of BRL-Cad, LaTeX, aged copies of Mozilla, etc. With no renumeration possible, nobody would go to the effort to produce software packages so there'd be no 'freedom' to purchase said packages.
I know, I know. Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice and 'open sourced' it, plus Netscape 'open sourced' their browser technology which allowed it to be hacked away at to make a pretty good browser. Plus, IBM has boy mascot called 'Linux' they use in a TeeVee commercial to demonstrate that Linux is a naive little kid who they can lecture at.
Whatever happened to Freedom just being another word for 'nothing left to lose' and hence only being the term to describe the experience of being poor and homeless?
Well, enough rambling.
Wow.
You're betting on the credibility of the Slashbots, then, eh?
How is a small business supposed to survive that?
Would it have helped any for them to not sell counterfeit cigarettes?
'409 scammers' actively solicit business in a way that anybody at all with a clue would recognize as fraudulent. They are soliciting people to engage in an illegal money laundering operation. The whole appeal of the scam to the victim is a 'get rich quick' appeal that clearly involves criminal acts.
Why should anybody feel sorry for them?
The fact of the matter remains that your side (Apple) didn't prevail in court. The myriad group of other entites, including Microsoft, who now produce GUI OSes, did NOT 'steal' it from Apple. This definition holds and remains valid, similar in many repects to the fact that the same legal system has defined Microsoft as a monopoly.
I bet you like that particular legal identifiction of an entity by the legal system.
If Apple had prevailed, they would have set the precedent that 'selfish companies can hire mean motherfucker lawyers and 0wn the world.'
The Apple GUI lawsuit was widely perceived by the hacker community at that time as being very similar to what SCO is trying to pull now. Interesting which side you're backing, even ten+ years after the fact.
In the first edition of Tanenbaum's book it was floppy diskettes and the 'out of box' standard version ran on an 8088 system. In the second edition of the book there was a cover CD and the 8088 version is considered 'old.'
It's all now freely downloadable from several websites. I had it running, with ethernet and all, on an older Pentium box here a few months ago.
If 'pedantic' behavior were the default and not the exception, people who don't know better would likely be writing better code for GCC. As it stands, that's an 'extend and embrace' feature that encourages sloppy code that will build only with GCC.
It's been discussed at great length in the past.
Also, since SCO was founded as a Microsoft subsidiary to produce Xenix, Microsoft's UNIX variant (yes, Microsoft did the first UNIX that ran on x86, I used to have a copy of Microsoft Xenix on an Altos 8086 box), SCO wouldn't have even been born without Microsoft.
I worked at the largest (then) 'embedded OS/2' shop from 1998 to 2001. They were STILL bound to an OS/2 platform, and people HATED it. I think they're now an embedded-NT shop. The machines said code is embedded in control pacemakers and other critical-care implanted devices, by the way.
Jobs wasn't interested in 'margin' or 'volume' back in the Sculley era. He was too busy being a weird meddler who would wander into areas of the company he didn't have a clue about, and messing it up.
He was an example of 'wiz-kid with too much power and no damn business sense' back then, and he needed to be fired to save Apple.
NeXT is an interesting parallel to Be. Both companies first produced an expensive proprietary hardware box and both then evolved into companies that produced 'ports' for various hardware platforms. Then they both became candidates for the 'next generation' MacOS after Apple's incompetent, effete fumblecoders proved they could burn many millions of dollars and not produce a damn thing anybody wanted.
I would love to find a copy of NeXTstep from the olden days when it would run on HP-9000, x86, and wasn't there a Sparc port too? I don't want it badly enough to pay the extortion prices that package gets on eBay, though.
My coolest 'proprietary IBM box' is an RS/6000 system that I got last week. I've finally installed AIX on it. It's an ancient, ancient AIX box, the 'Power PC' processor is a set of five or so big chips.
Bill obsessed about Microsoft's OS continuing to run all the software their customer base wanted it to run (virtually anything people had coded for the PC in like forever). It wasn't about 'lock in' back then, it was about 'compatability.'
Incidentally, I remember exactly why I got Windows in the first place, before I had any software to run on it: Windows had a really neat paint program!
That's the reason I first started running Windows, too. Windows 1.03 on my 8088-based XT clone with it's hercules-clone graphics card and all 640K of RAM. I ran it because of a cool vectored-drawing program called In*A*Vision put out by Micrografx, that later became Designer. Back then In*A*Vision and one or two other programs were the only reason to run Windows.
Let's not forget that when Windows came out, the Mac and the Amiga absolutely ruled the desktop GUI world.
That's a little bit like saying that the janitor 'runs the company' because he's the first person in the building, at 6:15 am each morning.
The 'desktop GUI world' was a little playland back then. Similar in a way to the way the 'Java world' was a bunch of little useless animations on Web Pages back in 1996.
The GCC doesn't even send a regular representive to the C Standards Committee meetings.
Not sure where you were going there...
I can top your '$400' thing. Last week I bought two skids of PCs for fourty bucks. There were 8 Pentium III 500's and about sixty Pentium II 350 systems in the bunch. Most had SDRAM, they all had 32-40x CDROM drives. They're all 100 MHz FSB stuff, none of the tired old first-gen P2 crap. They are actually damned fine machines, with on-board ethernet, ATI video, etc. I'm making a mint reselling them on eBay, though the temptation to string up a big cluster does loom.
All that stuff was so cheap because Microsoft's bloatware obsoleted it, so it ended up at the auction block. Who cares that I can't afford to put Windows on all those boxes. My eBay customers are responsible for that, and I bet less than one in ten will buy a 'legitimate' License for the OS they put on their new box.
You weren't around back in the seventies, I take it, to run the unpleasant proprietary stuff IBM and everybody else was producing.
IBM knew they had let the genie out of the bottle, as far as controlling the 'PC' market, about the time they decided to roll out OS/2 and the MCA hardware. They wanted the franchise back. A bit too late, though. Back then the real nerds and hackers wore anti-OS/2 buttons.
You know, of course, that you're quoting a guy who's resentful that he doesn't get invited to the discussions, right?
Not to discredit Tidgell or Samba, which I've used for close to 8 years now, but he's the one who chooses to reverse-engineer from the outside.
What Microsoft does internally is chaotic, messy, etc. But you have to understand that Microsoft's first primary objective has always been 'compatability.' You can run a certain portion of the binaries written for MS-DOS 2 still, ya know. That's one hell of a legacy.
Well, you could always work in a nice, stable field like FORTRAN code. Ranting about how Microsoft 'drives' tech trends is fairly ridiculous. There are any number of other factors driving those trends. Microsoft follows trends much more than they lead them.
Wasn't 'Cyberdog' a web browser from Apple that used OpenDoc?
I remember it as having been a pretty nice browser in it's day.
Oh, yeah, I would be talking about the evil empire Apple and how they have a hold on the market.
That's not at all far off from the truth.
Apple intended for quite awhile to own the GUI market and be it's only vendor. They sued various entities and ran some of them out of the market. Because that's just how Apple does things.
When Microsoft came out with Windows, Apple sued Microsoft in the famous 'look-n-feel' lawsuits.
If Microsoft hadn't prevailed in those lawsuits, Apple would own the GUI market and be it's sole vendor.
That would suck bigtime. Microsoft plowed that ground for us. In fact the legal precedent that Microsoft set by fighting that fight for us is what allows people to 'clone' Windows GUI concepts and incorporate them into Linux/Free Software projects.
If Apple were in charge it would suck a hell of a lot more.
I wonder why Minix didn't experience the same explosive growth. (Anyone even remember it?)
Minix still exists, and there is a Minix usenet group that gets traffic. It was never intended to be anything like what Linux became. It's a pedagogical OS whose main method of distribution is a CD in the back cover of a textbook. It 'inspired' Linus to go off and do something of his own. It's wrong to act like it 'died' or in any way is a failure because it's still primarily a pedagogical OS.
How is the POSIX standard 'enforced'?
How is the C Programming Language standard 'enforced'?
The fact that there isn't a 'C Nazi Squadron' who bust down your door at 3AM because you omitted a semicolon debunks your assertion.
Standards can be 'enforced' through a consensus process. We all agree to do things a certain way, etc.
Actually, Gates is a fiscal and social Liberal, and has views that hew more with the Democrats than the Republicans. Granted, he's the Warren Buffet kind of liberal, but he's no Republican by any measure of the word.