I paid for Pegasus Mail and for VGA Planets. There were both shareware and both authors made a living from selling it as far as I'm aware.
Both are still around even although I think a few years ago David Harris wanted to quit, but then enough users responded to that message for him to continue: http://www.pmail.com/ http://www.vgaplanets.com/
As for Trumpet Winsock. I never even knew it was shareware. I just followed the instructions that came with a floppy from my university on how to get online on my 286 with windows 3.1 and a 14k4 modem. (Please note this was so I could use telnet and FTP, www handn't been invented yet, and gopher only ran on the 386s, 486s and SGI Indy's we had available for students at the university.
Yeah, or as I used to work in electricity production/sales, it was about predicting what your clients were going to do based on historical record, with the right adjustments for Daylight savings, leap seconds, leap days etc.
Daylight savings isn't just about saving energy. It's also about safety. Especially in places where it's dark during morning rush hour (most of northern europe), it has been demonstrated that you have a lot less accidents if you shift the times so that less people commute to work in the dark. Especially trials in Scotland during the seventies have shown this effect and are the main argument in the UK and other places, even if the savings in energy do play a role as well.
Oh, there are many stories. Personally I work in astronomy. Given the budget cuts that have been coming down the line in science in the wake of the credit crisis, a lot of institutions have started focussing more on their "core business" and several problems have arisen where the maintainer of a widely used (1000+ users across the globe) package was let go at their local institute because all this work was contributing to the wider community for free, and the local institute (often just a dozen to a few dozen people) could not afford it any more.
There are also stories similar to this one, where the main developer/maintainer of a package gets old and retires. Even at my own institute we have retired oldtimers who still maintain critical software. Usually the code is in FORTRAN IV or 66, if you're lucky it's in FORTRAN 77 or K&R C.
But yeah, I used to work for an electricity company, and then things do get complicated, as you have to take into account Daylight Savings, leap seconds and what not if you're trying to predict what customers will do based on data of their past consumption.
Then why did Creative and friends have such a hard time competing with the iPod? Where are the Rio's of 2011?
I think the reason Apple does so well, is because they really focus on what users want. not just a few geeks. Something you can use without every reading the manual.
People don't care about features, and not about quality, as long as it's "good enough", does what they want, looks nice and can be used for the task at hand with as little hassle as possible.
The last thing is key. People are goal oriented. Most people get into their car to get to some place, not because they want to fiddle with their engine settings or see if today it might be fun to use the wheel to change gears and a joystick to steer. Apple is a master at designing things so it's easy to do the things you want in the most efficient way.
It would be interesting to hear our definition of a "useful computing device".
I personally find my Macbook Pro, even though it's 4 years old, one of the most useful computing devices I could think of. Another one would be my iPhone.
So much that I find it hard to come up with a use that isn't covered by those two devices, unless it's heavy duty number crunching or high volume data handling, but my company has a IBM BlueGene/P, several Linux clusters and high end servers for that.
As a user and consumer I have a hard time coming up with something useful I can't do with my MBP and iPhone. Maybe you can enlighten me?
I'm not sure what you mean by producers? programmers will just use existing tools from unix/linux for the most part.
What makes Apple nice is that it gives you most of the advantages of Linux, but a nicer GUI, very good hardware, and MS Office and some other stuff that doesn't exist on the free OS'ses.
Nowadays a lot of development needs to be mobile. Either conferences, having to go to customers, working while commuting, working from home, presentations at meetings, flexible workspaces, etc. Apple happens to make some of the nicest laptops in the world, and has a Unix OS, so you don't have to pay the MS tax, remove Windows and then hope you can get Linux working.
Where I work used to be largely a unix and linux shop, now it's all Apple, with Linux on the servers/clusters/supercomputers/embedded hardware. Except for accounting, HR and such, they use Windows. But with MS Office for Mac we can read their stuff and communicate.
But the R&D and operations departments are almost entirely Apple, with a few Dells and Lenovo's running Linux.
All the managers here I work are no longer carrying around their laptops and power chords. They have ipads now.
But in general Apple doesn't make devices for work applications. Just look at it's business support options and how limited they are. Unlike MicroSoft, Dell, HP, etc. it makes what consumers want, not what OEM and large business want.
And it's very good at figuring out what users want and then finding the technology to make it happen. It doesn't invent the technology, but it puts it to very innovative use.
And most people are indeed lazy, in the sense that they want to get things done and not worry about first having to read a manual. It's why RTFM is such a bad answer.
A really nice advantage of the move to x86 has been that it has become much easier to port all kinds of FOSS programs to the Mac, especially since it comes with X.
With the Unix underpinnings and the x86 hardware, a lot of stuff written for Unix or Linux will work with very little tweaking.
This has had a big effect on the available software for the Mac. Something I think people underestimate. What I've seen, is that is has allowed Apple to basically consume the whole market for desktop unix. It wasn't very big, but it expanded their core base of users beyond the creative/pubishing markets into an area that had a lot of existing software that was easy to port and people skilled in writing software. Where Linux ended most Unices on the server end of things, OSX on Intel was a major blow to the other Unices on desktops/workstations, including Linux for the desktop.
I think the really important thing that Apple does differently, is put the user in the center.
A lot of companies either try to open up new markets for existing products, have some new cool hardware they try to sell, or mainly cater to the OEMs and large business needs.
Apple specifically seems to start with the question of what does the user want?
Sometimes this means they end up with something that is very expensive, as usually the user wants a lot.
But the key point is that they start with a desire, and then try and find the technology and software to fill that desire. And they try not to compromise along the way because something "can't be done" or is "to expensive".
And they must have some very good industrial designers and user interface experts, usually things that tech oriented companies lack.
This coupled with Steve Jobs' taste and minimalist approach is what leads to the unique Apple style of products and why the users they design for buy their products, if they can afford them.
What does amaze me, is how they are sometimes so much ahead of the competition, both in thinking and in execution. I still remember when they made the new iMac and only supported USB and everyone laughed at them for not supporting PS/2, RS232, Centronics, floppies, Zipdrives and all the other ports and peripherals that we use to have. In retrospect the message was "Steve is back, the future is simple and minimalist and user centric". Even more then ten years later their competition seems to have a hard time adapting. Over the past decade they have been such a game changer, not just the major stories like the iPod, iPhone, iTunes and iPad, but also in a lot of smaller things, though the innovation in OSX, multi-touch, magnetic power cord connection, and early adoption of technologies like USB, DVI, displayport, LCDs for desktops. I'm struggling to come up with innovations from most of their competitors. What has MS done in the last 10 years? Google has done some real innovation on search, maps, google earth. TomTom, Wikipedia, Amazon, the various social media, those have been game changers. But a lot of the existing tech companies have only been regurgitating the same old stuff in slightly new looks. Anybody knows any other big innovations that have happened since the last years of the nineties?
I'm no climate scientist, but as I understand it, there is a lot of data that is showing the climate changing. As I understand well above the 95% confidence level.
The real issue is how much of that is man made. There it's more of an indirect relation, in the sense that the climate has been heating up at a rate that seems to be higher then ever before, since we started putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in large quantities. There are also clues that there is a cause and effect relationship between the two, but as I understand that's less clear.
The actual climate change can be measured. The increase in greenhouse gasses can be measured. The link between them is a theory dependant on our imperfect understanding and ability to model the climate of the entire world. But there are many other influences as well, like solar cycles, volcanism besides the man made greenhouse emission.
In the end it boils down to if you want to find out if the theory is correct by waiting to see it happen, or if you dislike the future the theory predicts so much that you want to act now in the hope that if the theory is correct, the worst case scenarios can be avoided.
A pure experimental scientist would do nothing and see if his theory is right. But some of those guys also use themselves as a guinea pig to test how much G-forces the human body can withstand (John Stapp). Sometimes it's not pleasant to see your predictions come true and you might want to try and avoid being able to prove your theory.
Yeah, but how many people still have the older technology that you would need. My last modem die about 3 years ago. I still have a tape deck so I could record audio.
USB sticks?
If you disable the internet, phones (wired and wireless) and limit the travel people can do, I think you can still get quite a good lockdown. But it would cripple your economy and you'd become a North-Korea like state.
Oh, but you couln't do that with IE4 in 2000. I remember having to do a fresh install of Windows NT around that time and it came with IE4 and I couldn't upgrade to IE5 because microsoft's site didn't work in IE4.
Well, going back to Windows 3.11 is going back to something designed in the 1980's.
Many things happened before Windows XP that would have given you a better experience. Heck, my dad still runs Windows 2000 without much problems.
I'd guess that you could get quite a bit of juice out of Win95 OSR2 or Win98 SE. I had machines running Windows 98SE until 4 years ago.
With Windows 3.11, I'd go with Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator 3 Gold, Pegasus Mail, Word 6, Excel 5, WordPerfect 6.1, Myst, eXceed 4 X server.
ssh is going to be a tough cookie. The world was still ruled by rsh and telnet in those days. Ssh wasn't invented until 1995 according to Wikipedia, it's just too new to have seen much use on Windows 3.11.
Now put it in a package that weighs 6.6 lbs (3kg) and has 7 hours of battery life.
I think overall your post just proves that a Windows laptop with similar specs is in the same price range.
I think some stuff on your Toshiba is nicer, some stuff on the MBP 17" is nicer.
But in the I would go with the MBP because I have to bring my laptop to different places all the time and then the weight and battery life are the key factors.
And since switching from a Lenovo Thinkpad to an MBP 3 years ago, I've become addicted to OSX.
Yeah. I'm not a big fan of the movie, but it was refreshingly different enough from your average hero movie to be entertaining to watch. The end saved the movie. "I triggered it 35 minutes ago". That is what saved the whole movie for me.
What if they would for example put out a contract on Linus Thorvalds. Say 1 million to kill him? How illegal are the illegal practices that you would be happy with?
I can assure you that 1 million + legal fees if it was discovered, is cheap compared to the value that Linus has.
If you're fine with that, maybe you can suggest which other OSS developers should be on the hitlist?
Latin isn't changing much any more, as it's what is called a "dead language" nowadays, but it has changed a lot over time. The Latin of a few hundred years B.C. is not the same as that spoken and written a thousand or even two thousand years later.
Slashdot Mirror
I paid for Pegasus Mail and for VGA Planets. There were both shareware and both authors made a living from selling it as far as I'm aware.
Both are still around even although I think a few years ago David Harris wanted to quit, but then enough users responded to that message for him to continue:
http://www.pmail.com/
http://www.vgaplanets.com/
As for Trumpet Winsock. I never even knew it was shareware. I just followed the instructions that came with a floppy from my university on how to get online on my 286 with windows 3.1 and a 14k4 modem. (Please note this was so I could use telnet and FTP, www handn't been invented yet, and gopher only ran on the 386s, 486s and SGI Indy's we had available for students at the university.
I think it's a more general problem for the Digital Age.
It's not just FaceBook, but a lot of other sites as well. Sourceforge, Flickr, YouTube might be closer to a lot of Slashdotters.
But even if you download and keep a local copy that you back-up. In the longer run the problem becomes reading the old file formats.
A lot of the older stuff I have is in CorelDraw, WordPerfect or older versions on MS Office format. Or even more obscure things.
This question is much bigger than FaceBook. it's about how we keep the things that we don't have on paper any more and keep being able to access them.
Yeah, or as I used to work in electricity production/sales, it was about predicting what your clients were going to do based on historical record, with the right adjustments for Daylight savings, leap seconds, leap days etc.
Daylight savings isn't just about saving energy. It's also about safety. Especially in places where it's dark during morning rush hour (most of northern europe), it has been demonstrated that you have a lot less accidents if you shift the times so that less people commute to work in the dark. Especially trials in Scotland during the seventies have shown this effect and are the main argument in the UK and other places, even if the savings in energy do play a role as well.
The astronomers use Julian Day time keeping. easy and unique time references for all of recorded history.
Use Julian Day for everything, then convert to whatever representation people want at the user interface end.
It's what the astronomers do.
Oh, there are many stories. Personally I work in astronomy. Given the budget cuts that have been coming down the line in science in the wake of the credit crisis, a lot of institutions have started focussing more on their "core business" and several problems have arisen where the maintainer of a widely used (1000+ users across the globe) package was let go at their local institute because all this work was contributing to the wider community for free, and the local institute (often just a dozen to a few dozen people) could not afford it any more.
There are also stories similar to this one, where the main developer/maintainer of a package gets old and retires. Even at my own institute we have retired oldtimers who still maintain critical software. Usually the code is in FORTRAN IV or 66, if you're lucky it's in FORTRAN 77 or K&R C.
It's why Astronomers work in Julian Day notation. (sometimes Modified Julain Day, but it's basically the same).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day
But yeah, I used to work for an electricity company, and then things do get complicated, as you have to take into account Daylight Savings, leap seconds and what not if you're trying to predict what customers will do based on data of their past consumption.
Then why did Creative and friends have such a hard time competing with the iPod? Where are the Rio's of 2011?
I think the reason Apple does so well, is because they really focus on what users want. not just a few geeks. Something you can use without every reading the manual.
People don't care about features, and not about quality, as long as it's "good enough", does what they want, looks nice and can be used for the task at hand with as little hassle as possible.
The last thing is key. People are goal oriented. Most people get into their car to get to some place, not because they want to fiddle with their engine settings or see if today it might be fun to use the wheel to change gears and a joystick to steer. Apple is a master at designing things so it's easy to do the things you want in the most efficient way.
It would be interesting to hear our definition of a "useful computing device".
I personally find my Macbook Pro, even though it's 4 years old, one of the most useful computing devices I could think of. Another one would be my iPhone.
So much that I find it hard to come up with a use that isn't covered by those two devices, unless it's heavy duty number crunching or high volume data handling, but my company has a IBM BlueGene/P, several Linux clusters and high end servers for that.
As a user and consumer I have a hard time coming up with something useful I can't do with my MBP and iPhone. Maybe you can enlighten me?
I'm not sure what you mean by producers? programmers will just use existing tools from unix/linux for the most part.
What makes Apple nice is that it gives you most of the advantages of Linux, but a nicer GUI, very good hardware, and MS Office and some other stuff that doesn't exist on the free OS'ses.
Nowadays a lot of development needs to be mobile. Either conferences, having to go to customers, working while commuting, working from home, presentations at meetings, flexible workspaces, etc. Apple happens to make some of the nicest laptops in the world, and has a Unix OS, so you don't have to pay the MS tax, remove Windows and then hope you can get Linux working.
Where I work used to be largely a unix and linux shop, now it's all Apple, with Linux on the servers/clusters/supercomputers/embedded hardware. Except for accounting, HR and such, they use Windows. But with MS Office for Mac we can read their stuff and communicate.
But the R&D and operations departments are almost entirely Apple, with a few Dells and Lenovo's running Linux.
All the managers here I work are no longer carrying around their laptops and power chords. They have ipads now.
But in general Apple doesn't make devices for work applications. Just look at it's business support options and how limited they are.
Unlike MicroSoft, Dell, HP, etc. it makes what consumers want, not what OEM and large business want.
And it's very good at figuring out what users want and then finding the technology to make it happen. It doesn't invent the technology, but it puts it to very innovative use.
And most people are indeed lazy, in the sense that they want to get things done and not worry about first having to read a manual. It's why RTFM is such a bad answer.
Apple doesn't invent, it innovates. It takes existing technologies and uses them in an innovative way.
A really nice advantage of the move to x86 has been that it has become much easier to port all kinds of FOSS programs to the Mac, especially since it comes with X.
With the Unix underpinnings and the x86 hardware, a lot of stuff written for Unix or Linux will work with very little tweaking.
This has had a big effect on the available software for the Mac. Something I think people underestimate. What I've seen, is that is has allowed Apple to basically consume the whole market for desktop unix. It wasn't very big, but it expanded their core base of users beyond the creative/pubishing markets into an area that had a lot of existing software that was easy to port and people skilled in writing software. Where Linux ended most Unices on the server end of things, OSX on Intel was a major blow to the other Unices on desktops/workstations, including Linux for the desktop.
I think the really important thing that Apple does differently, is put the user in the center.
A lot of companies either try to open up new markets for existing products, have some new cool hardware they try to sell, or mainly cater to the OEMs and large business needs.
Apple specifically seems to start with the question of what does the user want?
Sometimes this means they end up with something that is very expensive, as usually the user wants a lot.
But the key point is that they start with a desire, and then try and find the technology and software to fill that desire. And they try not to compromise along the way because something "can't be done" or is "to expensive".
And they must have some very good industrial designers and user interface experts, usually things that tech oriented companies lack.
This coupled with Steve Jobs' taste and minimalist approach is what leads to the unique Apple style of products and why the users they design for buy their products, if they can afford them.
What does amaze me, is how they are sometimes so much ahead of the competition, both in thinking and in execution. I still remember when they made the new iMac and only supported USB and everyone laughed at them for not supporting PS/2, RS232, Centronics, floppies, Zipdrives and all the other ports and peripherals that we use to have. In retrospect the message was "Steve is back, the future is simple and minimalist and user centric". Even more then ten years later their competition seems to have a hard time adapting. Over the past decade they have been such a game changer, not just the major stories like the iPod, iPhone, iTunes and iPad, but also in a lot of smaller things, though the innovation in OSX, multi-touch, magnetic power cord connection, and early adoption of technologies like USB, DVI, displayport, LCDs for desktops. I'm struggling to come up with innovations from most of their competitors. What has MS done in the last 10 years? Google has done some real innovation on search, maps, google earth. TomTom, Wikipedia, Amazon, the various social media, those have been game changers. But a lot of the existing tech companies have only been regurgitating the same old stuff in slightly new looks. Anybody knows any other big innovations that have happened since the last years of the nineties?
I'm no climate scientist, but as I understand it, there is a lot of data that is showing the climate changing. As I understand well above the 95% confidence level.
The real issue is how much of that is man made. There it's more of an indirect relation, in the sense that the climate has been heating up at a rate that seems to be higher then ever before, since we started putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in large quantities. There are also clues that there is a cause and effect relationship between the two, but as I understand that's less clear.
The actual climate change can be measured. The increase in greenhouse gasses can be measured. The link between them is a theory dependant on our imperfect understanding and ability to model the climate of the entire world. But there are many other influences as well, like solar cycles, volcanism besides the man made greenhouse emission.
In the end it boils down to if you want to find out if the theory is correct by waiting to see it happen, or if you dislike the future the theory predicts so much that you want to act now in the hope that if the theory is correct, the worst case scenarios can be avoided.
A pure experimental scientist would do nothing and see if his theory is right. But some of those guys also use themselves as a guinea pig to test how much G-forces the human body can withstand (John Stapp).
Sometimes it's not pleasant to see your predictions come true and you might want to try and avoid being able to prove your theory.
Yeah, but how many people still have the older technology that you would need. My last modem die about 3 years ago. I still have a tape deck so I could record audio.
USB sticks?
If you disable the internet, phones (wired and wireless) and limit the travel people can do, I think you can still get quite a good lockdown. But it would cripple your economy and you'd become a North-Korea like state.
Ow! I just got hit by a truckload of old memories. (glows)(hums)(invisible)
Thanks for posting.
Oh, but you couln't do that with IE4 in 2000. I remember having to do a fresh install of Windows NT around that time and it came with IE4 and I couldn't upgrade to IE5 because microsoft's site didn't work in IE4.
Well, going back to Windows 3.11 is going back to something designed in the 1980's.
Many things happened before Windows XP that would have given you a better experience. Heck, my dad still runs Windows 2000 without much problems.
I'd guess that you could get quite a bit of juice out of Win95 OSR2 or Win98 SE. I had machines running Windows 98SE until 4 years ago.
With Windows 3.11, I'd go with Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator 3 Gold, Pegasus Mail, Word 6, Excel 5, WordPerfect 6.1, Myst, eXceed 4 X server.
ssh is going to be a tough cookie. The world was still ruled by rsh and telnet in those days. Ssh wasn't invented until 1995 according to Wikipedia, it's just too new to have seen much use on Windows 3.11.
Now put it in a package that weighs 6.6 lbs (3kg) and has 7 hours of battery life.
I think overall your post just proves that a Windows laptop with similar specs is in the same price range.
I think some stuff on your Toshiba is nicer, some stuff on the MBP 17" is nicer.
But in the I would go with the MBP because I have to bring my laptop to different places all the time and then the weight and battery life are the key factors.
And since switching from a Lenovo Thinkpad to an MBP 3 years ago, I've become addicted to OSX.
I never read the book and I don't agree with you. I think the movie did portray an alien threat that the world had to band together to face.
Yeah. I'm not a big fan of the movie, but it was refreshingly different enough from your average hero movie to be entertaining to watch. The end saved the movie. "I triggered it 35 minutes ago". That is what saved the whole movie for me.
What if they would for example put out a contract on Linus Thorvalds. Say 1 million to kill him? How illegal are the illegal practices that you would be happy with?
I can assure you that 1 million + legal fees if it was discovered, is cheap compared to the value that Linus has.
If you're fine with that, maybe you can suggest which other OSS developers should be on the hitlist?
Latin isn't changing much any more, as it's what is called a "dead language" nowadays, but it has changed a lot over time. The Latin of a few hundred years B.C. is not the same as that spoken and written a thousand or even two thousand years later.