"Why Windows Vista will change the industry"?

riiiiiiight.... thats why apple is the standard of operating systems around the world.

you must be kidding....it's with out a doubt not the standard in the sales department or the number of apps that you can run... after all 95% of computers can't be wrong

Can you read? Did you take the time and read the entire article by following the link?

Answer IS: The Media Center PC and Extender Industry!

Geesh...

RK

You do know that Bill Gates owns a large peice of Apple Computer right?
The Os's for PC and apple's look very similar all through the years? coincidence I doubt that.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have been friends since the old days.

Because they'll stop shipping, supporting, and enhancing XP.
Vista will revolutionize by being the only choice.



Troy

Bill Gates is clearly the world's worst programmer. He has made some good business decisions, but Microsoft dominates largely by illegal anti-competitive and monopolistic practices. Bill Gates is a criminal--I'm not calling him that, the U.S. government has. Bill Gates never "un-became" a criminal, he bribed a bunch of politicians to put the charges against Microsoft on permanent hold--hey, it's the American Way. And thanks to the DMCA and DRM, Microsoft's biggest threat--open-source software--evaporates, as you will not be able to obtain content for any open-source platform. Furthermore, DRM is being used primarily as an (illegal) anti-competitive tool (that was always its real intent), to lock you into a single vendor's proprietary DRM, which they then use to lock you into inflated hardware and content prices (just as Apple has done with iPod and iTunes, and Microsoft will now do with Vista, Zune, extenders, et al.)

Actually it was Microsoft not Bill Gates that bought the small part of Apple, they also sold it several years latter for quite a profit, probably to the chagrin of Steve Jobs that forced them to buy the shares.


Actually it has more to do with market testing and the easiest way to control the computers then anything else.

Say what you will, but Bill Gates may be the greatest visionary that has ever lived. If it wasn't for his vision of "A PC on every desktop" and "information at your fingertips", things just may not be the way they are today.

Microsoft put it's products where it's vision was, other companies cry instead of competing.

RK

Actually Microsoft dominance come from the fact that having two separate incompatible systems just doesn't work, Microsoft made some underhanded deals they didn't establish market dominance through those practices alone, it took constant improvements, and smart decisions in their OS design, along with Apple blunders to get into the position.

Though I don't think Bill Gates is up to date with modern OOP practices, he was a fairly talented programmer in his time. He is certainly not a criminal, breaking monopoly laws carries no jail term, simply fines for the corporation and the possibility of the corporation being broken up if it's deemed that it's in the publics best interests. Though I think they got off lightly because there was no evidence recent abuses of it's monopoly according to US law. I am sure the campaign contributions helped, but the judge (who is appointed for life) would have had to reach the conclusions on his own also. Remember being a monopoly is legal, abusing it is not.

As far as DRM preventing open source, you are right DRM can not easily comply with the standards required for the support of various DRM formats because it would be too easy to circumvent, though they are a boon to Apple and Microsoft they aren't an attempt at lock in because their are things being required by the content providers not Microsoft and Apple. Also DRM does not stop you from using your computer for anything except accessing protected content like HD/BR DVDs, and downloaded songs.

Finally on the consumer front, Apple and Google are bigger threats then FLOSS to Microsoft. FLOSS is on the other hand a bigger threat to Microsoft on the server and applications end of things if they can get their act together.

Funny, the Consumer Reports review of Vista ends with the advise to go buy an Apple (O.K., kind of:-)

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/e...s-vista_ov.htm

And I kind of agree. I do use MCE (Vista now) for my dedicated HTPC (running on a dual-boot Intel Mac Mini,) but there a lot of things in Vista which are inferior to OS X. For instance, I have done countless reinstalls on my 3 PCs because of various problems, but have done exactly ONE reinstall on my numerous Macs in the last 5 years or so.

I do think Vista MCE is a better front-end than anything available for OS X currently, but with Leopard just a few months away, I am certainly keeping my options open. Time will tell if Apple makes Front Row the best front-end out there. If when it comes it fits my needs better than Vista MCE, I just reboot into OS X, if not, I stay in Vista:-)))

This isn't true. Steve W. would openly admit that if it hadn't been for Jobs, there would have been no Apple computer. Wozniak was not interested in business and had to be effectively coerced, begged, and pressured into joining Apple, which he thought would be a total failure. He wanted to just play with his toys and have a safe job at HP.

So, though I'm a techno-geek, you do have to give credit where credit is due and there is a reason for having a sales and marketing side of a business, because for the most part techno-geeks don't have the skills necessary to run a business (or the time if they are creating the product.)

The reason that MS is where it is today instead of Apple is that MS was a business, whereas Apple was a vision. The vision carried them a long way, but at some point you have to actually have a viable business, and you have to have someone at the top who (though not a technical maven) understands the technical side enough that he can keep the ship steering in the right direction, and the clout to make it stick. Those things didn't exist at Apple. Jobs was a visionary but really not a technical person, and he was a horrible internal company leader (though perhaps a great public businessman.)

Gates, OTOH, had a vision as well, but it was to sell as much product as possible and own the market. And he had sufficient technical accumen to keep the ship on course and the stock holdings to kick butt and take names. And that worked out better in the end.

And don't kid yourself that Apple was a shining beacon on the hill. They screwed over people inside and outside the company as well, most notably cutting off those rabidly loyal small stores that had supported them through the hard times.

I don't think this is an appropriate board to be discussing OSX vs. Vista.

This board is for discussing Windows HTPC solutions and helping those that wish to construct and use Windows/Vista HTPC's. There is a mac forum for those who wish to discuss OSX.

I hope the moderators step in quickly and shut this thread down.

This is a discussion completely relevant to HTPC's the fact that some people want to duscuss history of HTPC's and the computer industry and talk a bit about apple in a microsoft based forum has no impact on anyone that doesn't want to read it.

As long as you can all be civil and there aren't too many whiny hall monitor wannabe's flagging it this is a worthwhile discussion covering HTPC's in general and please, if you aren't interested just don't read.
Many of us find these types of discussions both relevant and entertaining.

Just be adult and civilized and the thread should not be closed. Disagree, fine, but don't be a jerk about it.

Troy

pcCinema...to repeat, there is a mac forum for OSX discussions. You do realize that don't you?

Let's start a discussion on the mac forum about the history of of HTPC's and the computer industry and talk a bit about microsoft...do you agree that's a good idea?

Does this thread really bother you that bad? Just ignore it.

OK, I'll participate.
Let's see...OSX vs. Windows...oh, I know, OSX is the operating system that copied Windows support of Intel processors. Yes, and I remember the history of Apple benchmarks that they used to demonstrate the clearly superior performance of PowerPC.

Your point? My Windows boxes generally are on the same install as the first time I booted the machine up, and still run like that day in most cases (one machine has random blue screens because the motherboard is finally deciding to give up the ghost). My OS X machine OTOH took 3 installs to get it the way I wanted it because the tools provided don't provide the options for power users.

And saying that it says to buy an Apple is stretching it rather far, he simply presents the options available to the users. Besides who actually goes to consumer reports for computer advice? That makes about as much sense as asking them which receiver you should buy.

It's a safe bet that both of you are relatively young; your comments show a lack of knowledge about the history of the computer industry. I don't have time to go into any in-depth history here, but I'll present a few facts which you can research. Just prior to the introduction of the IBM PC (1980; the PC was introduced in 1981), there were many different types of what were then called microcomputers--many brands, many different brands and types of microprocessors, and a number of different operating systems. Z80 CPU S-100 bus systems running CP/M were the dominant systems. A big leap was about to happen from 8-bit CPU's and 8-bit buses to 32-bit CPU's, initially with 16-bit buses but quickly poised to shift to full 32-bit buses. There were a number of new microprocessors coming out, such as the Motorola M68000 series, the National Semiconductor NS16000 series, the Zilog Z8000 series, the Intel 8086 series, and others. The Motorola M68000 series was the clear front-runner, with a true 32-bit instruction set, general-purpose registers, and a clear path to 32-bit buses. The Intel 8086 series was generally considered to be non-competitive, with only 16-bit registers and buses. Eighty to one-hundred companies were building M68000 systems running Unix. A very small group of IBM engineers in Boca Raton, Florida, designed what would become the IBM PC. IBM wasn't really interested in it, they thought that the microcomputer market was small and not serious (IBM was known for mainframes, the dominant computer platform at that time). In the computer industry, the IBM PC was considered a laughingstock. Not only did it have the worst of the new processors, the Intel 8086 series, it didn't even have an 8086. IBM used the 8088, which had the 16-bit 8086 instruction set, with an 8-bit bus. There are a lot of different stories about what happened between IBM and Digital Research when IBM tried to license CP/M. IBM went to both Digital Research and Microsoft to talk about getting an OS for its PC. Bill Gates had only written a crappy BASIC interpreter, and didn't have an OS, so he turned IBM down. A deal between IBM and Digital Research didn't materialize (again, a lot of different stories) quickly, so IBM went back to Microsoft and Bill Gates agreed to provide an OS, which he didn't have, and being a college dropout, wasn't knowledgeable enough or talented enough to produce quickly. He had heard about a CP/M clone for the 8086 series, and bought it from the programmer for $50,000. That became MS-DOS, the licensing of which to IBM (which called it PC-DOS) and later, PC clone makers, is what built Microsoft--something that Bill Gates never wrote. I will give Bill Gates credit for having the vision to see that software could have value. At that time, hardware companies only viewed software as a component that was required for their hardware to function, and the hardware was the real money-maker. IBM foolishly agreed to let Bill Gates license MS-DOS on other hardware, because there weren't any PC clones at that time, and IBM didn't think that the PC was ever going to have more than a few sales. IBM did strike a deal with Digital Research, so you could actually buy a PC with either PC-DOS or CP/M-86, but IBM priced CP/M-86 several times higher than PC-DOS, so of course it never went anywhere.

Again, I don't have time for a complete history. Much to the surprise of everyone in the computer industry, including IBM, the IBM PC was a major success. What happened was that most businesses had stayed away from microcomputers. At that time, IBM and computers were synonymous. When the IBM PC came out, businesses thought that because it was from IBM, it must be a real computer, and that they would get what at that time was famous IBM support. From a computer engineering perspective, the PC was crap, but businesses didn't know that. On the plus side, PC's were physically quite sturdy, which was unusual at that time (Apples were terrible). What businesses didn't know was that IBM didn't support PC's like they did all of their other products. Anyway, the PC took off, so it became a cash cow for Microsoft, especially after PC clones later appeared and the market exploded.

The real turning point in the industry was what happened with OS/2 and Windows 95. IBM's OS/2 was by far the better OS, but IBM foolishly had Microsoft do much of the development of OS/2. Microsoft had Windows 3.1, which had some market penetration but not a lot. Initially, OS/2 was going to be a joint venture between IBM and Microsoft, but then Bill Gates realized that he could make a great deal more money by producing a better version of Windows. So Bill Gates screwed IBM on OS/2; there were some dirty tricks with Microsoft investment in the publishing industry, etc. Because of MS-DOS, computer users now associated software with Microsoft, not IBM, even though IBM was completely stomping Microsoft in the overall software market (even Bill Gates admits to getting fortuitous incorrect press at the time, claiming that Microsoft was the largest software maker). Bill Gates stopped licensing Windows code within OS/2. OS/2 didn't sell well, and even though Windows 95 was a year later than a decent version of OS/2, and even though it was an inferior product, it took off and Microsoft's stock soared, and the rest is history.

Apple was never really a significant threat to the IBM PC. They made way too many mistakes, were too proprietary, overpriced, and underpowered. You can read a very incomplete and probably inaccurate in places history of the PC here. One thing about Apple "stealing" GUI technology from Xerox--they were financed by the same venture capital firm, which wanted the Xerox people to show their technology to Apple, even though Xerox didn't want to, and Xerox management only understood copiers, and didn't undertand and wasn't really interested in the computer market. Microsoft did some work for Apple, and got early access to what Apple was working on.

I don't have time to go into all the dirty and illegal deals that Microsoft did. The biggest was forcing PC manufacturers to pay licensing fees on a per-box basis, not on an installed-copy basis, which was a clearly illegal anti-competitive measure and directly eliminated many potential competitors. Destroying competitors by hiring away their top talent may be legal; using virtually unlimited resources to make offers that are astoundingly extreme and completely unmatchable is another matter. Competing is legal; using anti-competitive measures to create or maintain a monopoly is illegal. When the government is prosecuting you, there is a law that essentially says if you pay off government officials to get out of it, you have to disclose who you paid off. A judge ruled that this law didn't apply to Microsoft when Microsoft bought its way out of litigation. Now, that's money talking. And if you think I'm making any of this up, do some research.

As for Bill Gates knowing anything at all about software engineering, don't make me laugh. He's a college dropout who clearly never learned anything about software engineering. I could go on endlessly in this regard. Shipping an operating system with different versions of DLL's that didn't even carry version information, having applications update the operating system, allowing applications to not only do that but replace newer DLL's with older DLL's, the Windows Registry (nobody, but nobody with the slightest education in computer science would ever create such a thing), using C and C-based languages such as C++ to do any sort of serious software development (real languages don't permit all of the endless problems that C-based languages have--stack corruption, corrupt pointers, pointer arithmetic, buffer overflows, unchecked indices/bounds, lack of true multiple inheritance, and on and on....) Although I could rightly accuse Bill Gates and Microsoft of setting the computer industry back by a quarter-century, it's more the fault of businesses and consumers who bought this garbage (by the way, I bought competitive products for as long as I could).

The DMCA and DRM exist because large corporations bribed legislators. The copyright laws were perfectly adequate, functional, and reasonably well balanced. DRM shifts all rights to content producers, and denies every right to content users, except those that the content producer chooses to grant. Everything about DRM is about making rich corporations richer, preventing innovation, preventing fair use, increasing profits, and increasing costs to the consumer. Of course vendors use DRM for vendor lock in. Every corporation is doing that--Apple, Microsoft, Google.... Soon, all cable channels will be encrypted, except possibly those that are available over-the-air, although the law doesn't preclude encrypting those. You can't do anything at all with encrypted recordings, except play them back within the limitations of the operating system, and with all the restrictions that the content provider and the cable operator choose to implement, which is basically every possible restriction. When you replace your computer or reinstall your OS, you lose all of those recordings. You can't play them back on another computer. Presently, you can't burn them to any media.

Google may be a long-term threat to Microsoft; Apple is largely irrelevant to Microsoft, only offering some competition in the media space.

I seriously don't have time for this. Do some research.

I think people greatly overestimate this, to the point of having it completely backwards. DRM is NOT good for anyone but (maybe) the content owners. PCs thrive, at least partially, because people can easilly do anything on them, they can play their CDs, DVDs, watch video clips from the internet, etc.

DRM makes all of that harder, and thus reduces the value of PCs. PCs are at their best in a completely open environment, and in turn, a completely open environment is best for MS/Apple/Linux, everyone in the PC industry.

DRM on PCs is a response to the content industries paranoia, not a concoction of the PC industry to generate profits.


And there are things in OS X that are inferior to Vista, and there are thing in Linux that are superior to both...


Part of what goes along with having 20x the users is you've got probably 50x the crappy programmers writing crappy, buggy programs. 90% of the problems with Windows are due to crappy 3rd party applications/drivers, not any fundamental flaw in the OS. And of course you get 20x the flack too.

If you were to limit Windows to the userbase and application/hardware base of Apple or Linux, you'd see far fewer problems. Likewise if Apple had to deal with the level of diversity of users/programs/hardware Windows does, you'd easilly see just as many problems there too.

Still, he managed to totally miss the influence and potential of the internet at first.

Except that they are completely unenforceable. It does no good to have adequate, functional, and reasonably well balanced laws if no one pays any attention to them and just downloads whatever they want for free. We have pretty good laws about breaking an entering, but if I can break into your house at will and never get caught, you'd probably start thinking about protecting yourself, regardless of how good the law might be on paper.


It's just a database of key-value pairs. Plenty of people with CS educations probably have created such things. What's the alternative? Individual files scattered all over the place? That's probably why drove someone (who I'm sure probalby had a CS education) to create it in the first place.


What language exactly would they have used in like the mid-80s (when the OS/2 and NT architecture that XP is ultimately derived from was being started) that would have avoided those problems and had sufficient performance to not be a complete dog when running 4B'ish lines of code? Which one would they use today for that matter? Keeping in mind that they also have to expose APIs to the outside world that can be called from any language, which a C style interface allows because of the simplicity of it's call interface and fundamental nature of the data types it supports.

I've written 700,000 lines of C++ code in our product and I can tell you that if it's done correctly, via a powerful high level object framework, it's a good compromise between performance safety, as long as your developers have the coding cojones to handle a complex language like C++. It would be a joke to try to write a product as complex and multi-threaded and performance sensitive as ours in something like Java or C#, much less a far larger and for more perofrmance sensitive operating system.

We also provide a Java/C#'esque virtual machine based OO language for users to use to extend the system, so that we don't have to expose our C++ interfaces to users, and I certainly believe that such languages have a place on the periphery, but if you do an OS in a really high level language, I can do one in a lower level language, and run circles around you in performance even with todays very fast CPUs. So there are various considerations at play in the choice of development language.

back on topic!!

Guys the story on the first page is about Vista Changing the industry not for PC guys like u all here, but for custom installers\\dealers who like myself do this for a living but instead of just installing just ur basic hometheater audio\\video stuff..it will now be alot easier to intergrate a HTPC into the mix which home automation and controll of just about everything in your house. the thing i love is Web Services for Devices which will make everything just work(its like Plug and play on steriods)

Just read the whole story to get some ideas on what this is all about

it has nothing to do with apple vs. windows..you people really have to get over that, it is what it is...windows is more popular..bottom line..does not matter who started what first, or who did this and that....Bill Gates is worth Billions..and soo is M$..they must be doing something right, NO?

And Steve Jobs and Apple are prob. worh billions tooo, but 90% of US still use windows for what ever reason because WE choose to

well, we certainly appreciate the time you've invested to show us your infinite knowledge of the PC-industry, which has absolutely no-bias whatsoever

man, I wished I watched Pirates of the Silicon Valley too! I love "Goose" from Top Gun

Copyright laws, like any other laws, can and have been enforced. The software industry and the media industry chose not to prosecute violators during the early days of software and media-content theft, when making examples out of violators would have significantly reduced such crimes. When you allow laws to go unenforced for long periods of time, of course they become meaningless. Look anywhere in the world where societies have broken down (Somalia, Iraq, etc.) People do whatever they want when laws aren't enforced; their behavior must be held in check. That's the history of humanity, whether there has been a formal legal system or merely a ruler or council of elders who decreed what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable behavior and has had the ability to enforce compliance through some means of punishment.

The Windows Registry is a disaster precisely because most software pretty much can and does do whatever it wants with it, to the detriment of other software, and because Windows has failed at every basic principle of an operating system, which includes protecting itself from applications and drivers, protecting applications and drivers from each other, and tracking resource ownership (including Registry entries) and cleaning up after errant applications. Some common shared information is necessary, but no thought ever went into the design or control of access to the Registry, and application-specific data is better handled in the application space.

Regarding C-based language alternatives in the mid-80's. There are and were hundreds of computer languages. Eiffel was available in 1986. Ada was an early language that had some object-oriented features, although it wasn't object-oriented (but it had many, many excellent features). Today, I would take a hard look at ECMA 367-2 / ISO 25436 Eiffel. No PC operating system in the 80's or 90's had anywhere near four billion lines of code.

I've noticed that people who have little to say, say little. Everyone has bias; people would do well not only to be aware of bias in others, but also in themselves. Actually, I did see The Pirates of Silicon Valley. I thought it was above-average in terms of the material that it covered. Unlike some people here, I was actually alive and cognizant during the timeframes that I referenced.

Wow..., 3 installs to get a pre-installed system to do what? If you really had an OS X box, you would know it's largely UNIX under the GUI..., so power users who know what they are doing can do a lot with it....


To quote CR: "... Or you can go with Apple. Chances are good that you will be able to run Vista on a Mac as well, once Apple updates its Boot Camp loader. Buying a Mac will get you a brand that offers excels in technical support and reliability. ..." What does that sound like to you? Sort of right, eh? All Intel Macs can already run Vista natively (Vista uses EFI, just like all the Intel Apples.) And Xp (with Boot Camp installed.) And Linux. And since Apple knows how to do good industrial design, the Intel Macs look good running all of them:-)



I completely agree, that's why I use Vista MCE on my Mac Mini. MCE is hands down better than anything available for OS X. I don't know Linux, but if I thought that a Linux front-end would fit me best, I would install it on the Mini and try it. I am not religious:-)

But Leopard is around the corner, and if the rumors are correct, it will have a killer front-end. If it does, I'll use it. If not, I'll stick with Vista MCE, or Media Portal, or whatever else I feel serves my purposes best. I just feel that the Mini, because of its small form factor, whisper-quiet, cool operation, nice simple design, and ability to run all major OSs, makes a fantastic HTPC box. If the predictions that the update will have HDMI are correct, it will be even better.



You should look into the Mac forum sometimes: One of the only two FAQs deals with installing Microsoft's MCE on Macs (yep, started by modest me:-)

Keep it in perspective: these OSs are only tools created by large public companies. Not deities whose honor we must defend at all costs....

OK. Please 'splain to me exactly how you would go out there now and stop all those folks using p2p systems. Maybe you have some answer that no one else has thought of. But the problem isn't that no one wants to enforce it, it's that it's unenforceable except through the content owners trying to protect themselves.


You make these sweeping accusations that are just completely unfounded. I can pretty much guarantee you that a huge amount of thought went into the design and creation of the registry. How does one implement system wide recovery mechanisms when every application stores its own configuration data in some randomly selected format and place?

Plenty of applications of course store some info in the registry and other stuff (which is not configuration type data) elsewhere. There are tradeoffs no matter what you do, and obviously it could be improved. But there's a fairly reasonable argument for the registry and what it's used for. If applications abuse it and store stuff that they shouldn't, that's not something that MS can really stop them from doing.


You missed the part about it having to be usable by everyone. The whole world would not have just stopped using whatever they were using and starting programming in Effiel, and Windows would have taken a huge hit in acceptance. The problem with any language that doesn't use very basic and fundamental data represntations (and minimal imposition of language specific semantics) is that it becomes a big drain on system resources to translate in and out from every language system that people want to use. A low level language interface to the OS, like C, can be called very efficiently from pretty much anything.

Though, that doesn't necessarily imply that people who say a lot have a lot to say either.