IIS has always performed well, and Microsoft knows that benchmarks sell licenses.
In fact, I used to have arguments that went like this all the time: IIS User: IIS is faster and easier to use! Me: Apache is more stable, more secure by default, and easier to extend. IU: But I can handle 20 bazillion hits a nanosecond, your site can't scale. Me: Whatever. IU: Ha, I bet you can barely saturate a T1! etc
Microsoft is obsessed with performance because performance benchmarks give "tangible" proof of goodness. They are not obsessed with security, because features are more important. Or were; who knows what it's like there now.
I have read a number of things about IIS6: mostly that it is a from-scratch rewrite, with a particular eye on security. Also you can assume it'll perform pretty well.
So, as much as I would like to see the world dump IIS in general, a lot of shops out there will probably just wait and move to IIS6 when.NET Server (or whatever it's called this week) comes out.
They know how much is riding on this release. If IIS6 isn't tight, fast, and secure, then people will start jumping ship.
Insufficient stopping power in the.410; you're better off with a 12 gauge and triple-ought buck (use 2 3/4" shells, not 3" magnums).
Personally, a Smith and Wesson 'Mountain Revolver' in.44 Magnum (loaded with.44 Special Silvertips) would be my choice, but I have relatively large hands and am a very experienced shooter. The bore size on that alone should be enough to make anyone rethink fucking with me.
Um... How does: "NonStop-UX, the operating system for Compaq's fault-tolerant Integrity S-series servers, is the industry's most reliable implementation of UNIX System V." come out as not based on Unix? Did I read it wrong?
I believe you'll find that this is what's called "damage control". For some reason, the domain got parked on a FreeBSD box, and when MS (and Unisys) found out that they not looked like complete asses, they switched it, post-haste.
I think he didn't exactly mean it THAT way. More like, "A lot of the stuff I write about UI is common sense, and a number of people in several development communities are either starting to realize it, or hearing about this ideas I promote, and it's having an impact."
He has said in a few places (somewhere on the Fog Creek discussions) words to that effect.
First, how long do you expect the Dell to be useable? The last time I checked, people tend to replace their PC every couple of years, especially power users (who will replace components as soon as the newest iteration comes out). If that iMac lasts you a year longer than the Dell, is it (the Dell) still a better deal? I am using a Blue-And-White G3, 450Mhz, and it plays RTCW like a PRO. The same cannot be said for a Pentium system that came out at the same time. The only modification to the B&W is a Radeon. The average PC power-user will want to replace their GeForce with a GeForce4, and probably get some new sound. Oh, and RAM, because you can't run WXP in less than 256MB (or so it advises, correct?). I'll admit thowing RAM at OSX (and OS9 FTM) helps but it is usable at 128MB.
Second, some of those facts are misleading. Have you ever sat an iMac on your desk? The 19" CRT is about the same size as the bleedin' iMac! Plus the PC, plus the cables, etc etc etc. Most PC users don't really care about things like design and form factor; I don't blame them. My point is, though, that things like that have a way of 'sneaking up' on you. I thought the 'Luxor, Jr.' was pretty god-awful, until I actually sat down and played with the neck thingee. I almost bought one right there. It's just an opinion thing; YMMV.
And I must disagree, strongly, that many posters here don't hate Apple. I'd say at least 25% of the/. population strongly hates them, if only for Apple's wrong-headed strongarming of the themes community, their odd inability to treat developers with any real respect, or merely becuse they're a monolithic proprietary vendor. Many would not accept anything less than the complete freeing of OSX before buying a Mac. That's their perogative.
I see a number of people going on about the usual Mac stuff - hardware's too expensive, etc.
Well, OK, fine: what if they listened? What would you do, seriously, if they released netinfo in a pre-compiled format (RPM and DEB), so that you could use it on your Linux server? What if they offered Quicktime for sale as a closed app that ran under GNOME/KDE? What if they started sponsoring GNUStep, making their Cocoa apps easily portable between traditional Unixes and OSX?
Everyone would still hate them, of course, No one will ever get over the hardware thing, or the button thing (I should note that spymac.com have been saying that the Next Big Thing(tm) from apple will be a 2-button mouse as default). A small percentage of people will pay for Quicktime, I'm sure, but it'll be like Carmack's comments on Quake 3 - it was fun and all, but it didn't exactly sell like the community promised us it would.
My point is, even if they're 100% on the level about wanting to listen (I believe they need to listen, and stop thinking about their locked-in market of Mac fans) people will always find something to hate about them, and that's really the problem. Most people made up their mind about Apple and the MacOS in 1989. Nothing Apple can do will get these people on their side.
As I see it, this is missing 2 things, neither of which Sun can really control.
The first is performance. Sun can take some steps to make this better, but games are about raw power. In order to do so, they'd have to really get their asses in gear. It might be easy to make the back-end deal with distributed processing and RMI and all that stuff, but the front end needs to haul ass.
The second problerm is MINDSHARE. In my experience, the vast majority of programmers (and probably games guys even more so) don't care about cross-platform, because THERE IS ONLY ONE DESKTOP PLATFORM. Some of them expressed interest in OSX (with Java, OpenGL, and all that) but really, they only see Windows + DirectX.
(Most of them don't even care about portables, phones, or Playstations for that matter)
Sun needs to overcome the midnshare thing, and get to work on the speed thing, before it even has a chance on the front end.
>So the idea of write once, run everywhere, of course requires that a set of gfx libs are implemented on every platform.
Once upon a time, there was such a lib - OpenGL (and its free version, Mesa). However to counter this, a company (whose name you know) introduced a proprietary, platform-specfic graphics lib. It started off lame, and is now supposedly pretty decent. (This is how this company generally performs).
Anyway, such options exist, but mindshare has gone away from them, in favor of convenience - who needs cross-platform apps on the desktop, when there is only one desktop of consequence, anyway?
We went the other route: 100% Mac on the desktop. Immune to the overwhelming majority of virii (about the same as Linux, I think), we can Netboot from OSX Server, and the engineers get OSX for its Unix-y goodness.
I too am doing the OSX thing,and often I am a little distressed at the amount of shareware on OSX that is free on Linux.
I do take issue with the latter portion of the remark - things like DragThing are quite polished and stable, and remarkably cheap (the Windows market would easily have it at a much higher price, I suspect).
There are people out there creating free apps that challenge the shareware market. I really wish more shareware authors would give out source, if only to accept patches from interested developers, but I think the rampant piracy of the shareware world makes that unattractive. How long before someone released a version with protections completely removed? The authors don't want that.
>Do they have a right to make certain no one is playing the shareware game, unless they have paid an arbitrary sum?
They have the right to do whatever they feel the market will bear. Microsoft charges for Office, Oracle for their DB, and whomever else for their wares. (Warez?)
>Can the author be certain, that the pirated copy they are trying to prevent, isn't just a legit copy that was loaned to another person?
It's shareware. Just download a copy. There is no need to "loan" a copy. In many cases, it is 100% functional until it expires. Compare this to Word, which has to be paid for up front, even if it turns out you'll do better with a less capable (read: bloated) word processor.
The problem with "Wanted: Java Programmers" is that you have to have a product and a vision. By buying up AD, they already HAVE a product and vision, and can strike out from there (or cancel it if they don't like it). They have a client list, a product, people with knowledge of the product, everything. That puts them in a much better state than an ad in the local paper.
It looks ot me like Red Hat wanted some Java programmers in its payroll. Since Sun is now starting to talk Linux more, and a lot of people think that there is a 'showdown' brewing between Java/J2EE and.NET, Red Hat is afraid of being marginalized between the two. Now they have a Java toolkit and the programmers to use it.
By shouting 'AAAAAA' 256 times, then mumbling some shell code, it gets executed with Admin privs. Service Pack 5.30e+10 is expected to resolve the problem.
Are there any plans underway to give Perl acces to Aqua, like with Perl/Tk or GTKPerl? I'd really like to be able to write perl scripts with simple, non-XFree86 GUIs on OSX, the way I can use various toolboxes on Unix to create GUIs.
I discussed this at length in a rather old post... Basically, the Marines have as part of their duty guarding things like Embassies. So when the mob comes to torch the place, you don't want to just open up on them with your SAW gunnners and grenadiers. Tear gas (CS gas, really) isn't easily controlled; a good wind and its more or less gone. Other methods (riot guns for example) may provoke a more violent response (they hear BANG! and see people go down; the Americans are killing everyone!) and generally speaking, don't work against crowds (one shot one bad guy). Night sticks put you in harms way BIG TIME. So the Marines are looking for ways to supplement their arsenal because the only other option is to just kill the bad guys.
It seems to me from reading the timeline, and a little plain observation, that Microsoft has had a singular tactic since day one: appease where strategically possible, otherwise, stall. They will argue the dumbest point to death. It seems from time to time they file motions only to force their opponent to respond.
I'm sure this is, on some scale, pretty much standard legal maneuvering. What bothers me is that since MS has so much money, they can basically just keep stalling, delaying, and appealing until the cows come home. Since this isn't a murder trial there's less impetus, it seems, to hurry up and wrap things up - after all, it's not like Bill and Steve are weaing orange denim.
Does anyone know of any information about this legal stalling? Is there any precedent, or even any grounds, to say "please stop mucking about and get on with the fucking case"?
.. the screams of a million geeks, "LIKE WE GIVE A FUCK."
It was like a million voices suddenly cried out, and then clinked their glasses in celebration, if you will.
Does anyone know offhand of how IBM and Ma Bell handled themselves in their antitrust affairs? Did their head honchos act like such dorks?
I guess my final statement is, big deal. Other than Word I don't use MS products, anyway. I could get a copy of Acrobat and create my resume as PDF (from some source input, maybe LaTeX?) which it seems more and more want, anyway.
... they're always saying "content holders"? Or content providers?
Nothing is going to change until the content producers -the artists - rebel. Nothing short of a mutiny by the bands and filmmakers will get the industry to change.
There have been attempts. The Offspring come to mind, with their pro-Napster stance. (Question: are the still pro-p2p? Are they still a BAND?) But their rebellion was too early, and they were "just a punk band" so I guess few listened.
Until you have Ms. Spears do a press conference stating that she is not going to sign with [whomever] when her contract gets renewed, because [whomever] only produces copy-protected CDs that her lil' girlfriends can't listen to on their Nomads or iPods, and other artists follow suit, there willbe no change. I hate to say it but this is one fight where drastic change is going to need a little violence, if only in the legal sense.
It is my understanding that currently the OSX printing subsystem is based on Carbon and the OS9 printing system... does this mean that future versions of the printing system will move over to the Unix side of the fence? Will they wrap CUPS with Cocoa? How is this going to work, exactly?
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IIS has always performed well, and Microsoft knows that benchmarks sell licenses.
In fact, I used to have arguments that went like this all the time:
IIS User: IIS is faster and easier to use!
Me: Apache is more stable, more secure by default, and easier to extend.
IU: But I can handle 20 bazillion hits a nanosecond, your site can't scale.
Me: Whatever.
IU: Ha, I bet you can barely saturate a T1! etc
Microsoft is obsessed with performance because performance benchmarks give "tangible" proof of goodness. They are not obsessed with security, because features are more important. Or were; who knows what it's like there now.
I have read a number of things about IIS6: mostly that it is a from-scratch rewrite, with a particular eye on security. Also you can assume it'll perform pretty well.
.NET Server (or whatever it's called this week) comes out.
So, as much as I would like to see the world dump IIS in general, a lot of shops out there will probably just wait and move to IIS6 when
They know how much is riding on this release. If IIS6 isn't tight, fast, and secure, then people will start jumping ship.
Insufficient stopping power in the .410; you're better off with a 12 gauge and triple-ought buck (use 2 3/4" shells, not 3" magnums).
.44 Magnum (loaded with .44 Special Silvertips) would be my choice, but I have relatively large hands and am a very experienced shooter. The bore size on that alone should be enough to make anyone rethink fucking with me.
Personally, a Smith and Wesson 'Mountain Revolver' in
Um... How does:
"NonStop-UX, the operating system for Compaq's fault-tolerant Integrity S-series servers, is the industry's most reliable implementation of UNIX System V."
come out as not based on Unix? Did I read it wrong?
I believe you'll find that this is what's called "damage control". For some reason, the domain got parked on a FreeBSD box, and when MS (and Unisys) found out that they not looked like complete asses, they switched it, post-haste.
Yes, it's a dead giveaway it is owned by C|Net.
I think he didn't exactly mean it THAT way. More like, "A lot of the stuff I write about UI is common sense, and a number of people in several development communities are either starting to realize it, or hearing about this ideas I promote, and it's having an impact."
He has said in a few places (somewhere on the Fog Creek discussions) words to that effect.
RH has always used /etc/rc.d/init.d. At least they now provide links... It's one less thing for me to have to remember. I for one applaud it.
First, how long do you expect the Dell to be useable? The last time I checked, people tend to replace their PC every couple of years, especially power users (who will replace components as soon as the newest iteration comes out). If that iMac lasts you a year longer than the Dell, is it (the Dell) still a better deal? I am using a Blue-And-White G3, 450Mhz, and it plays RTCW like a PRO. The same cannot be said for a Pentium system that came out at the same time. The only modification to the B&W is a Radeon. The average PC power-user will want to replace their GeForce with a GeForce4, and probably get some new sound. Oh, and RAM, because you can't run WXP in less than 256MB (or so it advises, correct?). I'll admit thowing RAM at OSX (and OS9 FTM) helps but it is usable at 128MB.
/. population strongly hates them, if only for Apple's wrong-headed strongarming of the themes community, their odd inability to treat developers with any real respect, or merely becuse they're a monolithic proprietary vendor. Many would not accept anything less than the complete freeing of OSX before buying a Mac. That's their perogative.
Second, some of those facts are misleading. Have you ever sat an iMac on your desk? The 19" CRT is about the same size as the bleedin' iMac! Plus the PC, plus the cables, etc etc etc. Most PC users don't really care about things like design and form factor; I don't blame them. My point is, though, that things like that have a way of 'sneaking up' on you. I thought the 'Luxor, Jr.' was pretty god-awful, until I actually sat down and played with the neck thingee. I almost bought one right there. It's just an opinion thing; YMMV.
And I must disagree, strongly, that many posters here don't hate Apple. I'd say at least 25% of the
I see a number of people going on about the usual Mac stuff - hardware's too expensive, etc.
Well, OK, fine: what if they listened? What would you do, seriously, if they released netinfo in a pre-compiled format (RPM and DEB), so that you could use it on your Linux server? What if they offered Quicktime for sale as a closed app that ran under GNOME/KDE? What if they started sponsoring GNUStep, making their Cocoa apps easily portable between traditional Unixes and OSX?
Everyone would still hate them, of course, No one will ever get over the hardware thing, or the button thing (I should note that spymac.com have been saying that the Next Big Thing(tm) from apple will be a 2-button mouse as default). A small percentage of people will pay for Quicktime, I'm sure, but it'll be like Carmack's comments on Quake 3 - it was fun and all, but it didn't exactly sell like the community promised us it would.
My point is, even if they're 100% on the level about wanting to listen (I believe they need to listen, and stop thinking about their locked-in market of Mac fans) people will always find something to hate about them, and that's really the problem. Most people made up their mind about Apple and the MacOS in 1989. Nothing Apple can do will get these people on their side.
As I see it, this is missing 2 things, neither of which Sun can really control.
The first is performance. Sun can take some steps to make this better, but games are about raw power. In order to do so, they'd have to really get their asses in gear. It might be easy to make the back-end deal with distributed processing and RMI and all that stuff, but the front end needs to haul ass.
The second problerm is MINDSHARE. In my experience, the vast majority of programmers (and probably games guys even more so) don't care about cross-platform, because THERE IS ONLY ONE DESKTOP PLATFORM. Some of them expressed interest in OSX (with Java, OpenGL, and all that) but really, they only see Windows + DirectX.
(Most of them don't even care about portables, phones, or Playstations for that matter)
Sun needs to overcome the midnshare thing, and get to work on the speed thing, before it even has a chance on the front end.
>So the idea of write once, run everywhere, of course requires that a set of gfx libs are implemented on every platform.
Once upon a time, there was such a lib - OpenGL (and its free version, Mesa). However to counter this, a company (whose name you know) introduced a proprietary, platform-specfic graphics lib. It started off lame, and is now supposedly pretty decent. (This is how this company generally performs).
Anyway, such options exist, but mindshare has gone away from them, in favor of convenience - who needs cross-platform apps on the desktop, when there is only one desktop of consequence, anyway?
Perhaps this will be rolled out in the latest version of the Cat Detector Van in use by the Ministry Of 'Ousinge. I've never seen such aerials!
(this is what happens when you buy all the Flying Circus eps on DVD....)
We went the other route: 100% Mac on the desktop. Immune to the overwhelming majority of virii (about the same as Linux, I think), we can Netboot from OSX Server, and the engineers get OSX for its Unix-y goodness.
I too am doing the OSX thing,and often I am a little distressed at the amount of shareware on OSX that is free on Linux.
I do take issue with the latter portion of the remark - things like DragThing are quite polished and stable, and remarkably cheap (the Windows market would easily have it at a much higher price, I suspect).
There are people out there creating free apps that challenge the shareware market. I really wish more shareware authors would give out source, if only to accept patches from interested developers, but I think the rampant piracy of the shareware world makes that unattractive. How long before someone released a version with protections completely removed? The authors don't want that.
>Do they have a right to make certain no one is playing the shareware game, unless they have paid an arbitrary sum?
They have the right to do whatever they feel the market will bear. Microsoft charges for Office, Oracle for their DB, and whomever else for their wares. (Warez?)
>Can the author be certain, that the pirated copy they are trying to prevent, isn't just a legit copy that was loaned to another person?
It's shareware. Just download a copy. There is no need to "loan" a copy. In many cases, it is 100% functional until it expires. Compare this to Word, which has to be paid for up front, even if it turns out you'll do better with a less capable (read: bloated) word processor.
The problem with "Wanted: Java Programmers" is that you have to have a product and a vision. By buying up AD, they already HAVE a product and vision, and can strike out from there (or cancel it if they don't like it). They have a client list, a product, people with knowledge of the product, everything. That puts them in a much better state than an ad in the local paper.
It looks ot me like Red Hat wanted some Java programmers in its payroll. Since Sun is now starting to talk Linux more, and a lot of people think that there is a 'showdown' brewing between Java/J2EE and .NET, Red Hat is afraid of being marginalized between the two. Now they have a Java toolkit and the programmers to use it.
By shouting 'AAAAAA' 256 times, then mumbling some shell code, it gets executed with Admin privs. Service Pack 5.30e+10 is expected to resolve the problem.
Are there any plans underway to give Perl acces to Aqua, like with Perl/Tk or GTKPerl? I'd really like to be able to write perl scripts with simple, non-XFree86 GUIs on OSX, the way I can use various toolboxes on Unix to create GUIs.
I discussed this at length in a rather old post... Basically, the Marines have as part of their duty guarding things like Embassies. So when the mob comes to torch the place, you don't want to just open up on them with your SAW gunnners and grenadiers. Tear gas (CS gas, really) isn't easily controlled; a good wind and its more or less gone. Other methods (riot guns for example) may provoke a more violent response (they hear BANG! and see people go down; the Americans are killing everyone!) and generally speaking, don't work against crowds (one shot one bad guy). Night sticks put you in harms way BIG TIME. So the Marines are looking for ways to supplement their arsenal because the only other option is to just kill the bad guys.
It seems to me from reading the timeline, and a little plain observation, that Microsoft has had a singular tactic since day one: appease where strategically possible, otherwise, stall. They will argue the dumbest point to death. It seems from time to time they file motions only to force their opponent to respond.
I'm sure this is, on some scale, pretty much standard legal maneuvering. What bothers me is that since MS has so much money, they can basically just keep stalling, delaying, and appealing until the cows come home. Since this isn't a murder trial there's less impetus, it seems, to hurry up and wrap things up - after all, it's not like Bill and Steve are weaing orange denim.
Does anyone know of any information about this legal stalling? Is there any precedent, or even any grounds, to say "please stop mucking about and get on with the fucking case"?
.. the screams of a million geeks, "LIKE WE GIVE A FUCK."
It was like a million voices suddenly cried out, and then clinked their glasses in celebration, if you will.
Does anyone know offhand of how IBM and Ma Bell handled themselves in their antitrust affairs? Did their head honchos act like such dorks?
I guess my final statement is, big deal. Other than Word I don't use MS products, anyway. I could get a copy of Acrobat and create my resume as PDF (from some source input, maybe LaTeX?) which it seems more and more want, anyway.
... they're always saying "content holders"? Or content providers?
Nothing is going to change until the content producers -the artists - rebel. Nothing short of a mutiny by the bands and filmmakers will get the industry to change.
There have been attempts. The Offspring come to mind, with their pro-Napster stance. (Question: are the still pro-p2p? Are they still a BAND?) But their rebellion was too early, and they were "just a punk band" so I guess few listened.
Until you have Ms. Spears do a press conference stating that she is not going to sign with [whomever] when her contract gets renewed, because [whomever] only produces copy-protected CDs that her lil' girlfriends can't listen to on their Nomads or iPods, and other artists follow suit, there willbe no change. I hate to say it but this is one fight where drastic change is going to need a little violence, if only in the legal sense.
It is my understanding that currently the OSX printing subsystem is based on Carbon and the OS9 printing system... does this mean that future versions of the printing system will move over to the Unix side of the fence? Will they wrap CUPS with Cocoa? How is this going to work, exactly?