they tried, in a roundabout way - there was a trend a few (okay, 15ish) years ago of cheap "WinPrinters", much like WinModems which came a little later, where Windows itself would render GDI commands to a bitmap and send it to the printer in a pretty uncomplicated fashion. All the printer 'driver' needed to tell Windows was a little about the capabilities of the device - the WinPrinting core did the rest.
GDI itself is *supposed* to be device-independent, but didn't have much in the way of decent type rendering when they came up with it-TrueType support didn't appear in Windows until Windows 3.1 (until then, Adobe Type Manager was an immensely popular utility).
If they'd done it a little later, after they gained a complete monopoly and killed DOS, they would have probably got away with it, but back then too many people needed printers to work when they *weren't* running Windows for it to be feasible.
Plus, of course, the same problems that people had with WinModems - that they were cheap, nasty, and they didn't realise until a little too late that printers could render stuff a lot quicker than a 25MHz 386 with a couple of meg of RAM (and that was if you had a high-spec machine).
Mind you, they didn't die out completely when there was a real price drop in laser printers a little while ago, WinPrinters had a bit of resurgence, but they tend to support at least some other page-description language (e.g., PCL) as well. Still caused a few headaches for the CUPS guys as I recall, though.
That's what a lot of people don't seem to get: it's not anti-competitive behaviour in and of itself that falls foul of investigations and commissions and rulings, it's the combination of a monopoly position and anti-competitive behaviour in order to attempt to create new monopolies.
The problem is, though, once it's happened, and the world has moved on, what is an appropriate remedy? Forcing Microsoft to unbundle IE would have been a perfectly good remedy back when Windows 98 was released (it would have meant that there would still be some real competition in the fledgling browser space instead of years of stagnation), but it's not really appropriate now: people expect an OS (or rather, a computer) to ship with a web browser.
There are lots of potential options, but the whole XP "N" edition thing showed that some of them are quite time-sensitive in their execution if they're to be anything other than a fiasco.
Not before DoubleSpace (and later DriveSpace, the non-infringing version) were used by millions of people, though.
The fact that DoubleSpace was bundled with DOS 6 meant that nobody needed to bother buying Stacker for the couple of years before whole-drive compression became mostly unnecessary. While that certainly was what killed Stac, what we don't know is what they might have come up with if they'd stayed in businessâ"after all, Stac was an innovator, while Microsoft just ripped of the technology.
It's not silent at all. I upgraded to 5.0 today, and it popped up a dialog asking me to agree to the new updater policy with a link to read more about what it did/how it works.
actually, now that I think about it, I used to run a roomfull of 486DX2-66s with 16MB of RAM and 500MB hard disks. They ran Debian âoePotatoâ (2.2), just to give you an idea of vintage. They ran it rather *well*, at that.
Once upon a time, I ran Linux on a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM, a 40MB hard disk, and still had room for X11. Admittedly, not room for much else.
More recently, I've run it on a 586 clocked at around 66MHz with either 4 or 8MB of RAM and 32MB of storage space. And still run X11. *and* an application or two.
Windows CE ran on the same hardware, but was significantly more of a pain in the ass to work with.
Ofcom's rules state that once the subsidy period is up, the operator has to allow the device to be unlocked.
We know the iPhone can be unlocked, because it's sold unlocked (or unlockable for a fee) in other countries.
We'll find out in about 9 months when the very earliest contracts are up.
I don't know if the PAYG iPhone is network-locked (not sure what you mean about it being pulled: http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paygo ), but as it's unsubsidised, O2 are legally required to provide you with an unlocking code if it is.
The whole thing about Mac users being surprised when things don't work is probably because no error messages are shown, and they have no idea what could have caused the problem. Then they have to go to the apple store, pay one of their technicians to fix whatever caused the problem, and hope that something can be done.
Seriously, I'm curious. Have this ever actually happened to you, or are you just extrapolating from stories you might have heard? 'cos, I gotta say, it doesn't bear any relation to my experience with Macs in the past five years or so. I dunno which Macs you might have used, but mine have been perfectly capable of displaying error messages when appropriate--it's just that they don't need to very often at all.
The Genius Bar, incidentally, is free, and unless you need some actual hardware work done/out of warranty replacement parts, you ain't gonna be paying any technicians anything.
XP shipped with it. Xfree86/Xorg can run multiple displays on the same host, though it was rarely configured with an easy way to switch to a new GUI session prior to Tiger. Mind you, Apple's implementation is a lot smoother than Microsoftâ(TM)s IMO.
But, if you don't specifically mean GUIs, then Linux has had multiple VTs forever, and it wasn't the first (I have a sneaking feeling SCO Unix might have been on the x86 front).
When I used to use VMS boxes (VAXes and Alphas) over a LAT terminal server connection, I regularly used to break out to the LAT prompt, open a new session, then switch between them when the lab was too busy to use two terminals.
1. Chrome - Already removed; rookie boilerplate error. 2. Gmail - How do you think spam pre-filtering on the inbound MXes works, exactly? (think: RBLs) 3. Facebook - clearly a CYA clause 4. YouTube - CYA clause, but admittedly overly broad and could be reigned in 5. AIM - CYA clause, plus sending obscene/profane/indecent messages over electronic communications is illegal in many countries anyway, but rarely enforced except where there's a complaint about harassment or similar.
Fonts can be a bit funny (read: bad) sometimes, and although it's rare for the fonts themselves to become corrupted, some applications deal really badly with fonts being activated/deactivated while they're running (unsurprisingly enough, the Creative Suite is one of the worst offenders in this respect), despite only having a subset of fonts activated being a core OS feature since Leopard.
Although Terminal won't let you save your connections in quite the same way PuTTY does (PuTTY's a combined SSH client and terminal emulator, after all), you can just create one-line shell scripts, or shell aliases or functions for quickly establishing connections. Sticking the line "alias web1='ssh webmaster@192.168.25.43'" into your.profile would mean all you'd need to do to connect would be open a new Terminal and type 'web1'. It won't save your passwords, but in this day and age you should be using public-key authentication for everything anyway:)
The vast majority of music on iPods doesn't have an ounce of DRM anywhere near it. Only non-iTunes Plus tracks purchased from the iTunes store does, and last I looked, Apple sold fewer than a few dozen tracks (including iTunes Plus) per iPod owner on average.
Adobe and Microsoft apps are fairly renowned for being abominations on the Mac, though if you don't pay attention to Mac nerd circles you'd probably find that out the hard way. When Adobe's stuff works, it works better than it does on Windows (IME). Office, on the other hand, is such complete tripe that I'd rather use a Windows machine, or Parallels/VMware Fusion for those rare situations where only the real Microsoft deal will do.
The developer tools ship on the Leopard DVD (same with Tiger, incidentally).
I've done just fine without a font manager, though colleagues of mine use Linotype FontExplorer X, which is free (and highly-regarded).
And, uh, PuTTY over Terminal.app? Are you serious?
More to the point, Leopard is a UNIX08-certified OSâ"it doesn't get much more standard than that.
Listen⦠if you want Windows, or Linux, then that's what you should use. If you want an actual UNIX OS with a decent GUI, the ability to run Photoshop and Illustrator and some of the best third-party software on _any_ plaform, run Mac OS X.
Nothing takes âoeone engineer maybe two hoursâ to add support for. Software engineering in a professional environment just doesn't work that way.
Moreover, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora and FLAC are uncharted waters: if anybody was going to decide that, actually, maybe one of them DOES infringe on a patent or two, who better to target than Apple? Go after the one with the deepest pockets. With MP3, MP4 and Apple's own CODECs, they know pretty much exactly where they stand.
Perhaps they could dispatch Apple Legal into doing a risk assessment for it, but by the time you've got that and had the code written, integrated, tested, and so on, you've likely spent far more money than you'd make back selling the iPhone to the three people who care deeply about Ogg Vorbis support but don't care about the rest of the OS being closed.
In other words, supporting those formats makes absolutely no sense to Apple.
We use both MessageLabs and Google Apps for different domains.
Personally, I find the two pretty comparable in terms of spam filtering (Google lets less through, but has the odd false-positive, in MessageLabs' case, I-as an end-user-don't even SEE potential false-positives, which means ultimately I prefer Google).
PS. When is Slashdot going to fix UTF-8 handling of this poxy in-line comment box? Why can't I use â(TM) (apostrophe) or â" (em-dash)?
Given that the linked "comment" is a status message on Twitter, it's most definitely a tweet. No "probably"Âabout it. Half an ounce of logical thinking would have told kdawson that.
So how come, in oh-so-socialist Britain, every time they try to privatise or outsource parts of the (publicly-funded) National Health Service, there's a clear and marked pattern of drops in quality of care, overall service, manageability and an increase in cost?
The point is: medical care is a fundamental necessity in any society--modern or otherwise. Denying it because of affordability (which is ultimately your "solution") isn't just ludicrous, it's positively Dickensian. Healthcare has to be, by nature, universal, or perfectly preventable deaths occur on a wider scale than most would like to admit. Sure, you're "Free", but is the guy who lives on the street "Free"? What about the the woman down the road who's barely holding down her job in the bar and earning a pittance?
Perhaps your thinking is that people who can't afford healthcare should just become victims of natural selection, in a manner of speaking, so that only the frugal survive. Or, perhaps you think the Government can skirt the issue by providing some voucher scheme or something which provides free healthcare to those who can't afford it themselves: which, thanks to the wonders of taxation, is more unfair than just a straight healthcare tax (or "National Insurance" as it's called over here).
Britain might be "talking about" denying people access to medical care under certain conditions, but that's about all it's doing. Don't believe everything you see on Fox.
And, for the record, the NHS isn't by any means perfect--in no small part thanks to the efforts of our Glorious Government to outsource critical areas to the private sector--and for that reason alone people are perfectly free to pay a premium to avoid waiting lists, get a private room or prettier nurses in a commercial clinic; the healthcare they get should be of an approximately equal standard in either case, but people who can afford luxuries are welcome to splash out on them if they wish.
(Also, while the NHS isn't perfect, I'll take it over the US "sorry, you don't have any insurance, come back on Thursday for the free clinic and pray you don't need surgery" crap any day of the week).
It strikes me, though, that the problem isn't that computers are solving CAPTCHAs, but that they're being farmed out to be used as the CAPTCHAs on dodgy porn and cracks sites--i.e., they're still being solved by a human, just not a human visiting the site the CAPTCHA belongs to.
The solution to this, though, should be a CAPTCHA relating to some information about the site you're visiting (for example, the domain name, or the navigation bar, or somesuch). Computers don't understand the question, and transplanting the test fails because the answers will immediately be wrong.
Well, yes, it can. Xcode can be a general-purpose IDE. Personally, I've used it with mingw to build software for Windows. Granted, it doesn't ship with a cross-platform-capable InterfaceBuilder, but you could always run the XIB files through some XML transforms of some kind (in theory).
And that's without its (fairly extensive) support for developing any old C, C++, Java, Python, or Ruby app or library which targets the POSIX/BSD layer.
So yes, while there's definitely a profit motive (for a start, more developers using Macs = more profit at the most basic level), the idea that Xcode is only used for building Mac-only software is a complete red herring.
Well, yes; they've had a free ride up until now by charging flat rates and paying for backhaul per-capacity. Until recently, they were paying less for the backhaul (because it mostly was just e-mail and Web stuff) than they were charging by some margin.
"Great", they thought, "let's just keep doing this. No need to pressure BT to reduce backhaul prices or modify the charging structure."
Meanwhile, everybody with any clue in the industry was predicting that video and P2P would be the next big thing.
The ISPs deserve to lose out whichever way it goes: an ISP who didn't see this coming is in the wrong damned business.
Slashdot Mirror
they tried, in a roundabout way - there was a trend a few (okay, 15ish) years ago of cheap "WinPrinters", much like WinModems which came a little later, where Windows itself would render GDI commands to a bitmap and send it to the printer in a pretty uncomplicated fashion. All the printer 'driver' needed to tell Windows was a little about the capabilities of the device - the WinPrinting core did the rest.
GDI itself is *supposed* to be device-independent, but didn't have much in the way of decent type rendering when they came up with it-TrueType support didn't appear in Windows until Windows 3.1 (until then, Adobe Type Manager was an immensely popular utility).
If they'd done it a little later, after they gained a complete monopoly and killed DOS, they would have probably got away with it, but back then too many people needed printers to work when they *weren't* running Windows for it to be feasible.
Plus, of course, the same problems that people had with WinModems - that they were cheap, nasty, and they didn't realise until a little too late that printers could render stuff a lot quicker than a 25MHz 386 with a couple of meg of RAM (and that was if you had a high-spec machine).
Mind you, they didn't die out completely when there was a real price drop in laser printers a little while ago, WinPrinters had a bit of resurgence, but they tend to support at least some other page-description language (e.g., PCL) as well. Still caused a few headaches for the CUPS guys as I recall, though.
Anti-competitive behaviour is fine.
That's what a lot of people don't seem to get: it's not anti-competitive behaviour in and of itself that falls foul of investigations and commissions and rulings, it's the combination of a monopoly position and anti-competitive behaviour in order to attempt to create new monopolies.
The problem is, though, once it's happened, and the world has moved on, what is an appropriate remedy? Forcing Microsoft to unbundle IE would have been a perfectly good remedy back when Windows 98 was released (it would have meant that there would still be some real competition in the fledgling browser space instead of years of stagnation), but it's not really appropriate now: people expect an OS (or rather, a computer) to ship with a web browser.
There are lots of potential options, but the whole XP "N" edition thing showed that some of them are quite time-sensitive in their execution if they're to be anything other than a fiasco.
Not before DoubleSpace (and later DriveSpace, the non-infringing version) were used by millions of people, though.
The fact that DoubleSpace was bundled with DOS 6 meant that nobody needed to bother buying Stacker for the couple of years before whole-drive compression became mostly unnecessary. While that certainly was what killed Stac, what we don't know is what they might have come up with if they'd stayed in businessâ"after all, Stac was an innovator, while Microsoft just ripped of the technology.
It's not silent at all. I upgraded to 5.0 today, and it popped up a dialog asking me to agree to the new updater policy with a link to read more about what it did/how it works.
actually, now that I think about it, I used to run a roomfull of 486DX2-66s with 16MB of RAM and 500MB hard disks. They ran Debian âoePotatoâ (2.2), just to give you an idea of vintage. They ran it rather *well*, at that.
Once upon a time, I ran Linux on a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM, a 40MB hard disk, and still had room for X11. Admittedly, not room for much else.
More recently, I've run it on a 586 clocked at around 66MHz with either 4 or 8MB of RAM and 32MB of storage space. And still run X11. *and* an application or two.
Windows CE ran on the same hardware, but was significantly more of a pain in the ass to work with.
Ofcom's rules state that once the subsidy period is up, the operator has to allow the device to be unlocked.
We know the iPhone can be unlocked, because it's sold unlocked (or unlockable for a fee) in other countries.
We'll find out in about 9 months when the very earliest contracts are up.
I don't know if the PAYG iPhone is network-locked (not sure what you mean about it being pulled: http://www.o2.co.uk/iphone/paygo ), but as it's unsubsidised, O2 are legally required to provide you with an unlocking code if it is.
The whole thing about Mac users being surprised when things don't work is probably because no error messages are shown, and they have no idea what could have caused the problem. Then they have to go to the apple store, pay one of their technicians to fix whatever caused the problem, and hope that something can be done.
Seriously, I'm curious. Have this ever actually happened to you, or are you just extrapolating from stories you might have heard? 'cos, I gotta say, it doesn't bear any relation to my experience with Macs in the past five years or so. I dunno which Macs you might have used, but mine have been perfectly capable of displaying error messages when appropriate--it's just that they don't need to very often at all.
The Genius Bar, incidentally, is free, and unless you need some actual hardware work done/out of warranty replacement parts, you ain't gonna be paying any technicians anything.
XP shipped with it. Xfree86/Xorg can run multiple displays on the same host, though it was rarely configured with an easy way to switch to a new GUI session prior to Tiger. Mind you, Apple's implementation is a lot smoother than Microsoftâ(TM)s IMO.
But, if you don't specifically mean GUIs, then Linux has had multiple VTs forever, and it wasn't the first (I have a sneaking feeling SCO Unix might have been on the x86 front).
When I used to use VMS boxes (VAXes and Alphas) over a LAT terminal server connection, I regularly used to break out to the LAT prompt, open a new session, then switch between them when the lab was too busy to use two terminals.
In order:
1. Chrome - Already removed; rookie boilerplate error.
2. Gmail - How do you think spam pre-filtering on the inbound MXes works, exactly? (think: RBLs)
3. Facebook - clearly a CYA clause
4. YouTube - CYA clause, but admittedly overly broad and could be reigned in
5. AIM - CYA clause, plus sending obscene/profane/indecent messages over electronic communications is illegal in many countries anyway, but rarely enforced except where there's a complaint about harassment or similar.
s/ On Linux//;
Flash on Linux is terrible.
Flash on the Mac is an abomination.
Flash on Windows is fairly crappy, but at least when it works it's not the massive CPU hog it is on other platforms. When it works.
There are some very smart guys at Adobe, but I've yet to be convinced that they're actually allowed to do their job across most of the product range.
Fonts can be a bit funny (read: bad) sometimes, and although it's rare for the fonts themselves to become corrupted, some applications deal really badly with fonts being activated/deactivated while they're running (unsurprisingly enough, the Creative Suite is one of the worst offenders in this respect), despite only having a subset of fonts activated being a core OS feature since Leopard.
Although Terminal won't let you save your connections in quite the same way PuTTY does (PuTTY's a combined SSH client and terminal emulator, after all), you can just create one-line shell scripts, or shell aliases or functions for quickly establishing connections. Sticking the line "alias web1='ssh webmaster@192.168.25.43'" into your .profile would mean all you'd need to do to connect would be open a new Terminal and type 'web1'. It won't save your passwords, but in this day and age you should be using public-key authentication for everything anyway :)
The vast majority of music on iPods doesn't have an ounce of DRM anywhere near it. Only non-iTunes Plus tracks purchased from the iTunes store does, and last I looked, Apple sold fewer than a few dozen tracks (including iTunes Plus) per iPod owner on average.
So, er, what DRM?
Adobe and Microsoft apps are fairly renowned for being abominations on the Mac, though if you don't pay attention to Mac nerd circles you'd probably find that out the hard way. When Adobe's stuff works, it works better than it does on Windows (IME). Office, on the other hand, is such complete tripe that I'd rather use a Windows machine, or Parallels/VMware Fusion for those rare situations where only the real Microsoft deal will do.
The developer tools ship on the Leopard DVD (same with Tiger, incidentally).
I've done just fine without a font manager, though colleagues of mine use Linotype FontExplorer X, which is free (and highly-regarded).
And, uh, PuTTY over Terminal.app? Are you serious?
More to the point, Leopard is a UNIX08-certified OSâ"it doesn't get much more standard than that.
Listen⦠if you want Windows, or Linux, then that's what you should use. If you want an actual UNIX OS with a decent GUI, the ability to run Photoshop and Illustrator and some of the best third-party software on _any_ plaform, run Mac OS X.
They MIGHT use encryption if SSL was free and issued on a total wildcard basis.
A huge proportion of the web doesn't run on dedicated IPs.
Nothing takes âoeone engineer maybe two hoursâ to add support for. Software engineering in a professional environment just doesn't work that way.
Moreover, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora and FLAC are uncharted waters: if anybody was going to decide that, actually, maybe one of them DOES infringe on a patent or two, who better to target than Apple? Go after the one with the deepest pockets. With MP3, MP4 and Apple's own CODECs, they know pretty much exactly where they stand.
Perhaps they could dispatch Apple Legal into doing a risk assessment for it, but by the time you've got that and had the code written, integrated, tested, and so on, you've likely spent far more money than you'd make back selling the iPhone to the three people who care deeply about Ogg Vorbis support but don't care about the rest of the OS being closed.
In other words, supporting those formats makes absolutely no sense to Apple.
We use both MessageLabs and Google Apps for different domains.
Personally, I find the two pretty comparable in terms of spam filtering (Google lets less through, but has the odd false-positive, in MessageLabs' case, I-as an end-user-don't even SEE potential false-positives, which means ultimately I prefer Google).
PS. When is Slashdot going to fix UTF-8 handling of this poxy in-line comment box? Why can't I use â(TM) (apostrophe) or â" (em-dash)?
Given that the linked "comment" is a status message on Twitter, it's most definitely a tweet. No "probably"Âabout it. Half an ounce of logical thinking would have told kdawson that.
So how come, in oh-so-socialist Britain, every time they try to privatise or outsource parts of the (publicly-funded) National Health Service, there's a clear and marked pattern of drops in quality of care, overall service, manageability and an increase in cost?
The point is: medical care is a fundamental necessity in any society--modern or otherwise. Denying it because of affordability (which is ultimately your "solution") isn't just ludicrous, it's positively Dickensian. Healthcare has to be, by nature, universal, or perfectly preventable deaths occur on a wider scale than most would like to admit. Sure, you're "Free", but is the guy who lives on the street "Free"? What about the the woman down the road who's barely holding down her job in the bar and earning a pittance?
Perhaps your thinking is that people who can't afford healthcare should just become victims of natural selection, in a manner of speaking, so that only the frugal survive. Or, perhaps you think the Government can skirt the issue by providing some voucher scheme or something which provides free healthcare to those who can't afford it themselves: which, thanks to the wonders of taxation, is more unfair than just a straight healthcare tax (or "National Insurance" as it's called over here).
Britain might be "talking about" denying people access to medical care under certain conditions, but that's about all it's doing. Don't believe everything you see on Fox.
And, for the record, the NHS isn't by any means perfect--in no small part thanks to the efforts of our Glorious Government to outsource critical areas to the private sector--and for that reason alone people are perfectly free to pay a premium to avoid waiting lists, get a private room or prettier nurses in a commercial clinic; the healthcare they get should be of an approximately equal standard in either case, but people who can afford luxuries are welcome to splash out on them if they wish.
(Also, while the NHS isn't perfect, I'll take it over the US "sorry, you don't have any insurance, come back on Thursday for the free clinic and pray you don't need surgery" crap any day of the week).
It strikes me, though, that the problem isn't that computers are solving CAPTCHAs, but that they're being farmed out to be used as the CAPTCHAs on dodgy porn and cracks sites--i.e., they're still being solved by a human, just not a human visiting the site the CAPTCHA belongs to.
The solution to this, though, should be a CAPTCHA relating to some information about the site you're visiting (for example, the domain name, or the navigation bar, or somesuch). Computers don't understand the question, and transplanting the test fails because the answers will immediately be wrong.
While all of that may well be true, it doesn't make the âoeUI bashing from the uninformedâ inherently wrong: it just means that they all suck.
Given that it doesn't state OpenSolaris in the title, I clicked through to this hoping that support had been added to one of the BSDs.
:\
OpenSolaris finally being able to boot from ZFS is cool, but⦠has dick-all to do with BSD
Well, yes, it can. Xcode can be a general-purpose IDE. Personally, I've used it with mingw to build software for Windows. Granted, it doesn't ship with a cross-platform-capable InterfaceBuilder, but you could always run the XIB files through some XML transforms of some kind (in theory).
And that's without its (fairly extensive) support for developing any old C, C++, Java, Python, or Ruby app or library which targets the POSIX/BSD layer.
So yes, while there's definitely a profit motive (for a start, more developers using Macs = more profit at the most basic level), the idea that Xcode is only used for building Mac-only software is a complete red herring.
I don't have anything useful to say in response to this, except to state my belief that it should be âoe+5 Insightfulâ.
Well, yes; they've had a free ride up until now by charging flat rates and paying for backhaul per-capacity. Until recently, they were paying less for the backhaul (because it mostly was just e-mail and Web stuff) than they were charging by some margin.
"Great", they thought, "let's just keep doing this. No need to pressure BT to reduce backhaul prices or modify the charging structure."
Meanwhile, everybody with any clue in the industry was predicting that video and P2P would be the next big thing.
The ISPs deserve to lose out whichever way it goes: an ISP who didn't see this coming is in the wrong damned business.