Well MS doesn't have the cash available to outright buy Denmark, but they are a bigger economy. According to wikipedia, the 2003 GDP of Denmark was either $170B or $212B, depending on how you measure it. According to Yahoo finance, MS has a market cap today of $282B, so even with some growth of the Danish economy over the past few years, MS is still larger.
I always understood that region codes were there not so much to gouge people (although I'm sure that is a bonus) but because of the staggered release schedule of films.
I guess they only make x prints of a film for movie theatres, and then ship them around the world, first in the US, then Europe, then Asia, etc. This is to avoid the cost of making a copy of the film for every theatre in the world.
What can happen is that movies are available on video/DVD in the US before they have even played in theatres elsewhere. They want to prevent people from buying (or worse, renting) the DVD instead of going to the theatres.
Keep in mind that NDS eDirectory is not an Operating system. It runs on NT and Win2k, Solaris and Netware. I'm sure a Linux port isn't too far away. So the choices are not as black and white as you make out. You can be a geek and run Solaris but choose NDS as your directory instead of NIS or something. I'm sure that Active Directory will never run on anything but Windows.
I disagree with the statement : "I think the main hinderance that prevents UI designers from contributing to OSS projects is that the designer needs to be a good coder."
UI designers do not need to be programmers at all. Why should they? In fact there should be a wall between the designers and the coders. Designers should be able to design a great interface, with crayons or whatever, and then hand it to a programmer and say 'make this work.'
Why does the OSS community suck at this type of work? Because this type of specialization is frowned upon. The community is basically a giant pool of C/C++ hackers. The typical attitude is, if you see a problem, fix it. In this case, the people that see problems and perhaps have solutions can fix the design but not the code, so it doesn't get done. Basically because people don't want to code other people's designs. That smacks too much of work, not independent creativity.
As pointed out, finding someone who is both a creative coder and a creative UI designer is very difficult. Finding two people, one a gifted coder and the other a talented designer, is not nearly as tough. The problem is, and this is what the article should have been about, is that the OSS community has yet to develop a means for these two people to communicate.
This is a real issue that should be addressed, not worrying over which widget set is better. Clearly Open Source has not produced a good, new interface. We still rely on companies like Apple to do all the design work and then rip them off. Who knows, in a year or so maybe Gnome and KDE will have finally finished copying the Windows 95 interface. We should be looking ahead though, coming up with interfaces that are better than closed source products. In order to do that some sort of system has to be developed to allow coders and designers to collaborate on projects together.
Actually they _do_ list the modifications that they made to each system, including the kernel patches for Red Hat. The page is here.
As it turns out Netware only had 4 parameters changed. Win2K had a bunch of registry editing and patches. At least they point out that "Registry hacking ranks right up there with kernel modifications, neither for the inexperienced system administrator."
In my experience it is very tough to get taken seriously as a professional by others because the whole world has a bad attitude about programmers. I'm the database admin for a pretty good sized architectural firm so I can see this first hand. Here are people that produce incredibly detailed drawings and multivolume specicifications for even the smallest project. Why? Because every drawing has to be sealed by a state-approved architect and that architect is liable for those drawings.
So these people should be used to a very meticulous way of designing things - but when it comes to a computer project it might as well be something sketched on a napkin. It is assumed that computer people don't need to have something designed and specified ahead of time. And computer people don't care because you can always quit and find a new job and who cares if the thing has bugs.
I guess the argument could be made that architects and engineers and professionals like that design things that can have life or death consequences. But these days how can you separate computers from any job? The engineer designing a new car is relying on crash simulation software designed by some untrained programmer somewhere. If the simulation produces bogus results, the car is designed and kills people, who is responsible, the car engineer or the software engineer? What if a shoddy print driver in Autocad prints out incorrect symbols on a blueprint and the roof falls in? I think to say that computer programs don't matter is simplifying things too much.
It's basically the same concept - why waste silicon when I can do the same thing in software? And I won't publish my interfaces and only support the most common systems. This is basically what Transmeta is doing by only making code morphing for x86. It's just like the Winmodem manufacturers only providing drivers for Windows. They leave Linux users out - and people complain.
Why? The argument usually goes like "Hey, I have some component here that in theory I could be using but they won't write drivers for me or release the specs so I can do it myself." The counter argument is to go buy a "real" modem with everything implemented in silicon. Pretty soon people will be complaining, "Hey, I bought this laptop and it won't let me run LinuxPPC, even though it is clearly capable of doing so, if they wrote a code morpher or released the VLIW specs so I could do it myself." A similar counterargument is: go buy a real processor that supports all this in silicon.
They finally fixed it in Windows 98 Second Edition. NT is ok. Not that I want to bash MS or anything, I just hate to see them get credit for developing an open standard when they don't even comply with it themselves.
The way to fix computer security is to make OS vendors strictly liable for security breaches made possible by OS vulnerabilities.... Yes, it will add a liability cost to every OS purchase. OS vendors would need liability reserves and reinsurance.
So where would this leave Linux/BSD/etc? This would kill it's introduction into the enterprise. Right now there is the problem of 'who do I call if shit goes wrong?', which is a big concern to management types. RedHat and Linuxcare and others are taking care of that, but who would you sue? Would Red Hat be liable for all the code in their distribution, even if they didn't write it? What about Debian, which isn't run by a company? Would each individual Linux coder be responsible for his own code? That would really discourage people from contributing if they could be sued down the road for a misplaced ";".
I can see this being a real detriment to Linux if a manager can say "Hey, if shit happens I can sue Microsoft and recoup my losses. If we use Linux, we can't sue anyone. Case closed."
As everyone no doubt knows, graphics drivers are kept out of the kernel in Linux because of fears of lessened stability (among other things, no doubt, but that is a major thing). I wonder how the Apple people solved this.
Apple pretty much controls the hardware (how many choices of graphics cards come with an iMac?) so they can write a few really good drivers for their own hardware and integrate it really well with the whole system. They don't have to worry about stability issues with some $10 SVGA card.
The whole point of the Mac interface has always been a consistent look and feel. User customization is not consistent with this concept. One advantage of the Mac is that I can sit down in front of any one and the desktop looks and works pretty much the same as any other Mac. Try moving between two Unix stations and doing that.
Sometimes having an Interface Nazi forcing one standard is a Good Thing. Linux/BSD/etc are never going to win on the desktop as long as they have so many window managers.
Who was it that decided that programming or whatever is a 24/7 priority? I laugh when I see comparisons to doctors. Getting the next version of Netscape or Quake out the door is not saving lives.
I understand that someplace like Amazon loses money if their servers go down for 30 seconds at 3 am. So I'm sure they have a lot of people on staff to handle that. But what about the sysadmin for a small office who is forced to carry a pager? Managers see that big companies have staff on call and press the same thing on everyone. And somehow they convince the geeks that pagers and cell phones are status symbols.
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Well MS doesn't have the cash available to outright buy Denmark, but they are a bigger economy. According to wikipedia, the 2003 GDP of Denmark was either $170B or $212B, depending on how you measure it. According to Yahoo finance, MS has a market cap today of $282B, so even with some growth of the Danish economy over the past few years, MS is still larger.
I guess they only make x prints of a film for movie theatres, and then ship them around the world, first in the US, then Europe, then Asia, etc. This is to avoid the cost of making a copy of the film for every theatre in the world.
What can happen is that movies are available on video/DVD in the US before they have even played in theatres elsewhere. They want to prevent people from buying (or worse, renting) the DVD instead of going to the theatres.
Keep in mind that NDS eDirectory is not an Operating system. It runs on NT and Win2k, Solaris and Netware. I'm sure a Linux port isn't too far away. So the choices are not as black and white as you make out. You can be a geek and run Solaris but choose NDS as your directory instead of NIS or something. I'm sure that Active Directory will never run on anything but Windows.
UI designers do not need to be programmers at all. Why should they? In fact there should be a wall between the designers and the coders. Designers should be able to design a great interface, with crayons or whatever, and then hand it to a programmer and say 'make this work.'
Why does the OSS community suck at this type of work? Because this type of specialization is frowned upon. The community is basically a giant pool of C/C++ hackers. The typical attitude is, if you see a problem, fix it. In this case, the people that see problems and perhaps have solutions can fix the design but not the code, so it doesn't get done. Basically because people don't want to code other people's designs. That smacks too much of work, not independent creativity.
As pointed out, finding someone who is both a creative coder and a creative UI designer is very difficult. Finding two people, one a gifted coder and the other a talented designer, is not nearly as tough. The problem is, and this is what the article should have been about, is that the OSS community has yet to develop a means for these two people to communicate.
This is a real issue that should be addressed, not worrying over which widget set is better. Clearly Open Source has not produced a good, new interface. We still rely on companies like Apple to do all the design work and then rip them off. Who knows, in a year or so maybe Gnome and KDE will have finally finished copying the Windows 95 interface. We should be looking ahead though, coming up with interfaces that are better than closed source products. In order to do that some sort of system has to be developed to allow coders and designers to collaborate on projects together.
As it turns out Netware only had 4 parameters changed. Win2K had a bunch of registry editing and patches. At least they point out that "Registry hacking ranks right up there with kernel modifications, neither for the inexperienced system administrator."
So these people should be used to a very meticulous way of designing things - but when it comes to a computer project it might as well be something sketched on a napkin. It is assumed that computer people don't need to have something designed and specified ahead of time. And computer people don't care because you can always quit and find a new job and who cares if the thing has bugs.
I guess the argument could be made that architects and engineers and professionals like that design things that can have life or death consequences. But these days how can you separate computers from any job? The engineer designing a new car is relying on crash simulation software designed by some untrained programmer somewhere. If the simulation produces bogus results, the car is designed and kills people, who is responsible, the car engineer or the software engineer? What if a shoddy print driver in Autocad prints out incorrect symbols on a blueprint and the roof falls in? I think to say that computer programs don't matter is simplifying things too much.
Why? The argument usually goes like "Hey, I have some component here that in theory I could be using but they won't write drivers for me or release the specs so I can do it myself." The counter argument is to go buy a "real" modem with everything implemented in silicon. Pretty soon people will be complaining, "Hey, I bought this laptop and it won't let me run LinuxPPC, even though it is clearly capable of doing so, if they wrote a code morpher or released the VLIW specs so I could do it myself." A similar counterargument is: go buy a real processor that supports all this in silicon.
Also check out the article in the MS knowledge base "Wind ows 95/98 DHCP Client Modified for RFC2131 Retransmission Compliance" which states that "This issue can occur because the DHCP client-retry mechanism in Windows 95 and Windows 98 is not in compliance with RFC 2131."
They finally fixed it in Windows 98 Second Edition. NT is ok. Not that I want to bash MS or anything, I just hate to see them get credit for developing an open standard when they don't even comply with it themselves.
I think by Internet applications they mean their web services, like MSN, Expedia, Slate, etc...
So where would this leave Linux/BSD/etc? This would kill it's introduction into the enterprise. Right now there is the problem of 'who do I call if shit goes wrong?', which is a big concern to management types. RedHat and Linuxcare and others are taking care of that, but who would you sue? Would Red Hat be liable for all the code in their distribution, even if they didn't write it? What about Debian, which isn't run by a company? Would each individual Linux coder be responsible for his own code? That would really discourage people from contributing if they could be sued down the road for a misplaced ";".
I can see this being a real detriment to Linux if a manager can say "Hey, if shit happens I can sue Microsoft and recoup my losses. If we use Linux, we can't sue anyone. Case closed."
Apple pretty much controls the hardware (how many choices of graphics cards come with an iMac?) so they can write a few really good drivers for their own hardware and integrate it really well with the whole system. They don't have to worry about stability issues with some $10 SVGA card.
Sometimes having an Interface Nazi forcing one standard is a Good Thing. Linux/BSD/etc are never going to win on the desktop as long as they have so many window managers.
I understand that someplace like Amazon loses money if their servers go down for 30 seconds at 3 am. So I'm sure they have a lot of people on staff to handle that. But what about the sysadmin for a small office who is forced to carry a pager? Managers see that big companies have staff on call and press the same thing on everyone. And somehow they convince the geeks that pagers and cell phones are status symbols.