Comments on: GNU/Linux is Winning, Apple and Microsoft Entangled in Stagnation

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:06:54 +0000

Yea, it is extremely interesting because their OSes compete with each other.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:50:46 +0000

I’m sure there’s some luckless programmer at Microsoft hard at work to try to make Webkit incompatible with itself.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:41:54 +0000

IMO the best thing to do in cases of problems like this is to debug the problem properly to see what really is at fault for deleting boot.ini.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:34:36 +0000

“Yggdrasil” showed up in the comments, spewing abuse.

Remember: PR is cheaper than coding!

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:27:41 +0000

Maybe Waggener spotted and reported that one.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:02:37 +0000

Thank you.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:02:08 +0000

Microsoft seemingly pondered embracing those engines too. Some remarks from Ballmer last year…

By: Marcus Koze

Marcus Koze — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:00:31 +0000

A bit off-topic, but a much better version of the video can be found here: http://video.linuxfoundation.org/video/1262 (modified voice pattern, a lot better awesome piece

By: Finalzone

Finalzone — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:33:37 +0000

Magnatune, Jamendo have stored in music in OGG Vorbis format. Granted they are not popular to Itunes but they do exist.
With Firefox 3.5, Opera supporting them, the impact will also affect those music store would provide OGG support. The reasons why store like Apple are relunctent are mostly for control.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:09:55 +0000

I am thinking in terms of music stores, not players.

By: reece

reece — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:05:42 +0000

Yuhong: OGG may not be common enough yet, but there are a growing number of media players that support it: Cowon and iRiver, for example. (See http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers for a list.) There is also RockBox (very good) if you have a player that supports it.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:37:38 +0000

If you want MP3s, go to for example Amazon’s DRM-free music store or convert from AAC using iTunes (which is possible because the music is now DRM-free). Ogg would be ideal but that is not common enough yet.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:32:01 +0000

Indeed, Steve Jobs was referring to DRM restrictions, not format restrictions. In fact even DRM-free music from iTunes is delivered in 256 kbps AAC.

By: twitter

twitter — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:54:49 +0000

Watch for falling hardware prices. Cool stuff, PowerPC is.

By: twitter

twitter — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:44:58 +0000

When Apple and M$ OS are free software we can say that media on those platforms is without restriction. In the mean time, both companies reserve the “right” to terminate your software licenses for any reason and regardless of loss to you. iPod and Zune, specifically, are viciously non free and hostile to user’s rights. Plug your iPod into another computer, for example, and it will delete all of your media. Both Apple and M$ media formats are patent encumbered, so that they can only be used by non free software. Pretending such media is without restriction is indeed a PR stunt and a careful piece of propaganda.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:49:38 +0000

On the matter of DRM, what do you think in retrospect about what BN called a ‘PR stunt’ by Apple now that Apple has completely got rid of DRM from all music in iTunes? I think that letter by Steve Jobs was important because it got the ball rolling.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:51:43 +0000

Maxthon is one of the most popular browsers in China (as I understand it) – Firefox is in the low single digits of share. Maxthon’s basically a skin on MSHTML … until the most recent edition, which is based on Webkit and uses MSHTML only when you tell it to for “compatibility mode.”

This sort of thing will drive out popular use of IE even amongst the Windows fans. Firefox and Webkit-based browsers are just better by any measure.

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:48:58 +0000

Apple have always been as viciously obsessive control freaks as Microsoft ever were. They just make better stuff.

By: reece

reece — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:07:55 +0000

It’s interesting how on the pie chart from the first link, IE is at around 50% total market share. Firefox 3 is at 40%, with the remaining 10% taken up by other (Safari, Opera, Chrome) and older browsers (FF2, etc).

Also interesting is that IE8 has a low market share — lower than IE6. IE used to have a 97/98% market share.

It’s also interesting how we are seeing a second ‘browser wars’ — this time, it is being fought on standards compliance; Acid2 and the race to Acid3 conformance (between Opera and WebKit, with FF3 doing well and 3.5 even better, but IE as usual dragging the market down); and JavaScript speed, with most of the browsers using some form of just-in-time (JIT) compilation. This time, IE is lagging behind.

You can do some really amasing things with HTML5/SVG/JavaScript, and still be standards compliant. The need for proprietary RIAs like flash and silverlight is vastly reducing. And Mozilla are doing interesting things with pushing browser design and functionality.

This is good for the user. Now, if IE could just disappear, the web would be a better place.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:17:50 +0000

Firefox is about 70% here.