So when I buy a Dell laptop I get the OS for free.
That's gonna let the air out of the sail of a lot of people demanding that Dell offer 'naked' machines they can install Linux on without paying a 'Microsoft Tax.'
Even on Solaris x86, which is hardly any kind of a cash-cow for Sun, they produce a neatly packaged, trivial to install GNU toolchain, and distribute it freely to anybody who runs Solaris. Solaris x86 is a pretty nice system, what with Gnome and all these days.
So you're saying that they lock you into their hardware, but it's 'superior' hardware that you're locked into.
IBM locked their customers into some pretty good hardware in the 60's and 70's. Thankfully for Apple, they're not a monopoly except in the few niche markets they still dominate. They'd never get away with the degree of lock-in they design into their systems if they had a bigger chunk of the market.
Consequently, there really only needs to be one App for each task, because the interface makes it all sooo easy, it's practically defined for the app creator.
You can stick all sorts of OSes on your Dell hardware.
NetBSD OpenBSD FreeBSD various Linux OSes Minix OS/2 Windows NT Windows 9x Amoeba QNX
and quite a few others.
When I want to boot NetBSD on my Macintosh (an old one, mind you) I have to boot up MacOS and run a Mac-binary that is a 'bootloader.' Because of the closed nature of the Apple hardware, it can't bootstrap directly.
Also, to bring it back to Dell, there is tons and tons of hardware I can plug into my Dell box.
There is a small subset of the existing PCI cards that can be plugged into a Macintosh that has PCI slots.
Not that that's a problem for most Apple customers. They go straight to the Apple store and wave around their plastic when they want an add-on for their Mac.
I remember when the really smart Mac enthusiasts who I knew were all excited about BeOS on their Macintosh hardware.
Apple put a stop to that. They deliberately killed BeOS on Apple hardware by leveraging their 'closed' architecture. The interesting thing is that they came somewhat close to adopting the BeOS stuff as the 'Next Generation MacOS' instead of the NeXT offering. Then you would have had Be and Apple.
But NeXT is Job's baby, so after Apple quit blowing hundreds of millions on their own 'Next Generation MacOS' they took in the NeXT OS instead.
Netscape realised that MS would dominate the browser market then pervert the HTML and HTTP standards, in turn forcing them out of the server business.
"Netscape realized that MS was muscling into the browser market, and that they wouldn't be able to continue arbitrarily introducing HTML features into Navigator to promote their proprietary Web Server technology."
Not exactly what you were saying, but that's what was going on at the time.
I heard a mention of 'Tiger' on National Public Radio on a morning program on my way into work.
They specifically mentioned two exciting new features:
1. a new file search capability.
2. a new chat client/protocol.
I said 'wow man' and made sure that I mentioned it to everybody at work. The radio program made it sound like those were the two new 'highlight' features.
Some might call it a 'feature.' It's extend-n-embrace stuff. Joe Linux thinks he wrote a cross-platform shell script, but it won't run on anything but a GNU system...
Now, if the Impeachment scandal had gotten worse, Clinton would have invaded. As it stands, he only had to create a medium-size diversion during the perjury/sex-abuse scandal, so he just bombed Iraq.
If this turkey is going to be 'freely downloadable' perhaps an annotated version should be produced and thrown into the mix for people.
There are so many distortions in Moore's work that it's really a joke when people take it seriously. An annotated version with corrections and comments should be released pronto!
Any number of excellent spoofs should be out and about before long.
I would agree to a degree, except that NeXT in it's heyday was much cooler tech than Apple/NeXT has been. The old NeXT OS was very cross platform, and could have continued in that vein. Now it's just a PPC-only captive OS.
That's a pretty amazing project, considering it embraces some of the worst parts of the C-64 (the totally shit 'kiddie-banger' keyboard, the ugly case) into the new design.
Are there mod-kits to put a Trabant body onto a Ferrari chassis?
Sure. A lot of people felt pretty comfortable buying a computer with the brand-name Packard-Bell. It harkened back to the days of the old wooden console radios plumb full of vacuum tubes, from the days of old.
On the other hand, you could get a Commodore for $200, and a disk drive for another $200, plug it up to a TV and you were set.
In 1985 I bought a used 8088 motherboard for $80, a disk drive for like $80, and stuffed it in an old Leading Edge case. Plugged it up to a CRT display salvaged from an old dumb terminal.
I thought the people with their Plastic K-Mart Commodore computers were damned fools. 64K? In 1985??
It would not be that far-fetched to make the claim that 'Apple Computer' has been a shell organization controlled and operated by a number of different 'operators' throughout it's existence. The fact of the matter is that Apple is presently is controlled by the management and technologists of 'NeXT Computer' (who happen to include a number of former Apple employees) who took it over a few years ago.
There have been multiple generations of 'heads rolling' and significant management changes since the days of the Steve-and-Steve show and the Apple ][. It's no more the same company than Commodore is.
The whole band of Apple zealots, way-back-when, didn't spend 2/3 of their free time villifying MOS Technology or Western Digital.
The newer (but now 'old') crowd did spend a lot of time villifying IBM. I remember the shock and alarm when the first Mac fanatics opened their new Mac II machines and discovered an IBM branded drive.
Remember, those guys used to refer to 'the evil other computers' as 'IBMs' with not much mention at all about Microsoft. The Apple '1984' Commercial was anti-IBM, not particularly focused at Microsoft (any more than it was anti-Ashton-Tate, etc.)
The iPod really has become a cultural phenomenon much like the Walkman was decades ago.
And like the Walkman, it first appeared on person of a small elite who everbody else found somewhat despicable (if you weren't there to see the coopting of the Punk Scene by 'New Age' flakes with walkmans on their belts, you're probably too young to remember the 1979 club scene).
And within a few years the Walkman definitely was NOT a Sony franchise anymore.
Apple's iPod has nowhere to go but down from this point on.
The 'technical' articles in 2600 are of horrendous quality. Construction articles that have to describe a 'brown black orange' resistor instead of a 10K resistor. 'Software' articles that consist of script-kiddie fodder.
I sold my whole pile of 2600 issues on eBay last year and haven't regretted it.
Slashdot Mirror
So when I buy a Dell laptop I get the OS for free.
That's gonna let the air out of the sail of a lot of people demanding that Dell offer 'naked' machines they can install Linux on without paying a 'Microsoft Tax.'
Well, Dell can sorta be considered a captive subsidiary of Microsoft.
Nobody ever credits Dell with that as a positive point, of course. heh
Maybe if you mean *.advocacy
The OS advocacy newsgroups used to be pretty similar to the kind of fights over OS software seen in these parts in the present day.
The personal attacks and publicly conducted private flamewars on the advocacy groups have somewhat overwhelmed anything else these days, though.
Even on Solaris x86, which is hardly any kind of a cash-cow for Sun, they produce a neatly packaged, trivial to install GNU toolchain, and distribute it freely to anybody who runs Solaris. Solaris x86 is a pretty nice system, what with Gnome and all these days.
So you're saying that they lock you into their hardware, but it's 'superior' hardware that you're locked into.
IBM locked their customers into some pretty good hardware in the 60's and 70's. Thankfully for Apple, they're not a monopoly except in the few niche markets they still dominate. They'd never get away with the degree of lock-in they design into their systems if they had a bigger chunk of the market.
We know.
It's so wonderful that 'you will never go back.'
Consequently, there really only needs to be one App for each task, because the interface makes it all sooo easy, it's practically defined for the app creator.
You can stick all sorts of OSes on your Dell hardware.
NetBSD
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
various Linux OSes
Minix
OS/2
Windows NT
Windows 9x
Amoeba
QNX
and quite a few others.
When I want to boot NetBSD on my Macintosh (an old one, mind you) I have to boot up MacOS and run a Mac-binary that is a 'bootloader.' Because of the closed nature of the Apple hardware, it can't bootstrap directly.
Also, to bring it back to Dell, there is tons and tons of hardware I can plug into my Dell box.
There is a small subset of the existing PCI cards that can be plugged into a Macintosh that has PCI slots.
Not that that's a problem for most Apple customers. They go straight to the Apple store and wave around their plastic when they want an add-on for their Mac.
I remember when the really smart Mac enthusiasts who I knew were all excited about BeOS on their Macintosh hardware.
Apple put a stop to that. They deliberately killed BeOS on Apple hardware by leveraging their 'closed' architecture. The interesting thing is that they came somewhat close to adopting the BeOS stuff as the 'Next Generation MacOS' instead of the NeXT offering. Then you would have had Be and Apple.
But NeXT is Job's baby, so after Apple quit blowing hundreds of millions on their own 'Next Generation MacOS' they took in the NeXT OS instead.
Netscape realised that MS would dominate the browser market then pervert the HTML and HTTP standards, in turn forcing them out of the server business.
"Netscape realized that MS was muscling into the browser market, and that they wouldn't be able to continue arbitrarily introducing HTML features into Navigator to promote their proprietary Web Server technology."
Not exactly what you were saying, but that's what was going on at the time.
I heard a mention of 'Tiger' on National Public Radio on a morning program on my way into work.
They specifically mentioned two exciting new features:
1. a new file search capability.
2. a new chat client/protocol.
I said 'wow man' and made sure that I mentioned it to everybody at work. The radio program made it sound like those were the two new 'highlight' features.
'So install Microsoft Office on the system.....'
Some might call it a 'feature.' It's extend-n-embrace stuff. Joe Linux thinks he wrote a cross-platform shell script, but it won't run on anything but a GNU system...
Right.
Now, if the Impeachment scandal had gotten worse, Clinton would have invaded. As it stands, he only had to create a medium-size diversion during the perjury/sex-abuse scandal, so he just bombed Iraq.
If this turkey is going to be 'freely downloadable' perhaps an annotated version should be produced and thrown into the mix for people.
There are so many distortions in Moore's work that it's really a joke when people take it seriously. An annotated version with corrections and comments should be released pronto!
Any number of excellent spoofs should be out and about before long.
I would agree to a degree, except that NeXT in it's heyday was much cooler tech than Apple/NeXT has been. The old NeXT OS was very cross platform, and could have continued in that vein. Now it's just a PPC-only captive OS.
That's a pretty amazing project, considering it embraces some of the worst parts of the C-64 (the totally shit 'kiddie-banger' keyboard, the ugly case) into the new design.
Are there mod-kits to put a Trabant body onto a Ferrari chassis?
Sure. A lot of people felt pretty comfortable buying a computer with the brand-name Packard-Bell. It harkened back to the days of the old wooden console radios plumb full of vacuum tubes, from the days of old.
This trick will work (somewhat) too.
On the other hand, you could get a Commodore for $200, and a disk drive for another $200, plug it up to a TV and you were set.
In 1985 I bought a used 8088 motherboard for $80, a disk drive for like $80, and stuffed it in an old Leading Edge case. Plugged it up to a CRT display salvaged from an old dumb terminal.
I thought the people with their Plastic K-Mart Commodore computers were damned fools. 64K? In 1985??
I've had the notion for awhile of tiling my bathroom walls with old ceramic 486 processors.
Maybe a pattern of alternating Intel/AMD parts in a nice pattern....
Apple doesn't fit that category.
It would not be that far-fetched to make the claim that 'Apple Computer' has been a shell organization controlled and operated by a number of different 'operators' throughout it's existence. The fact of the matter is that Apple is presently is controlled by the management and technologists of 'NeXT Computer' (who happen to include a number of former Apple employees) who took it over a few years ago.
There have been multiple generations of 'heads rolling' and significant management changes since the days of the Steve-and-Steve show and the Apple ][. It's no more the same company than Commodore is.
The whole band of Apple zealots, way-back-when, didn't spend 2/3 of their free time villifying MOS Technology or Western Digital.
The newer (but now 'old') crowd did spend a lot of time villifying IBM. I remember the shock and alarm when the first Mac fanatics opened their new Mac II machines and discovered an IBM branded drive.
Remember, those guys used to refer to 'the evil other computers' as 'IBMs' with not much mention at all about Microsoft. The Apple '1984' Commercial was anti-IBM, not particularly focused at Microsoft (any more than it was anti-Ashton-Tate, etc.)
The iPod really has become a cultural phenomenon much like the Walkman was decades ago.
And like the Walkman, it first appeared on person of a small elite who everbody else found somewhat despicable (if you weren't there to see the coopting of the Punk Scene by 'New Age' flakes with walkmans on their belts, you're probably too young to remember the 1979 club scene).
And within a few years the Walkman definitely was NOT a Sony franchise anymore.
Apple's iPod has nowhere to go but down from this point on.
No. Mondo 2000 had great cultural coverage, and Wired is a cheap knock-off. Unfortunately, M2K couldn't last in the market the grew up around Wired.
The 'technical' articles in 2600 are of horrendous quality. Construction articles that have to describe a 'brown black orange' resistor instead of a 10K resistor. 'Software' articles that consist of script-kiddie fodder.
I sold my whole pile of 2600 issues on eBay last year and haven't regretted it.
He only showed up that day at the Senate to obtain another campaign brochure bullet point. Why should they have played along with his stunt?