winstep wrote:
Of course there aren't [any links to Winstep themes]. Brad's intention when storing themes for non-SD applications at Wincustomize was NEVER to promote those applications, but the other way around (siphon in users from other applications into SD applications). He says so himself (in a brief moment of full disclosure) in a post at WC I have stored here somewhere.
Well, that much was obvious from the start. There was no need for WC when he started it, there were lots of thriving skins sites then - esp. Skinz.org and (I think that's what it was called) PCDesktops come to mind. (ISTR a Dutch or Flemish guy involved with the latter who gave Winstep and WS themes a good bit of exposure, and I think some themes too?)
winstep wrote:
Ethical? Not really given what he was saying at the time. But it makes 100% sense business wise - and that is what Brad is, a business man. Not many people are able to build a company like SD from the ground up (and do it twice! Once with OS/2, again with Windows).
Sure, a businessman first and foremost, but one who a) has made some very poor decisions, and b) appeared to have only one ethic - Brad and profit. Businessmen can and should have good ethics and still be successful. Yes, not a lot of people are able to build up any kind of business and make it thrive, even fewer who can have a business very nearly go bust and then raise more capital and support and rebuild it. However, he hardly rebuilt SD from the ground up. By the time OS/2 Warp 4 finally saw the public light of day (hey, I still have my beta CDs!
) it was already becoming clear that it would not survive in the consumer market at least, long before IBM announced its retirement.
Yes, that must have hit SD's bottom line, but they had ample time to migrate to Windows - porting from OS/2 to Win32 was not all
that hard, certainly compared to the other way around, and they already had a limited version of OD for Win on sale well before OS/2 crashed out in terms of generating any revenue for SD, and lots of former OD for OS/2 users did migrate with SD. Nonetheless, SD did come fairly close to popping their collective clogs then. However, Brad had the good fortune and good sense to 'buy in' WB and creator Neil Banfield, and SD never looked back from that point on (until the next bankruptcy anyway), although that was by no means the only 'rescue' factor. The next time SD faced going belly up they had a pretty substantial cash injection, though I can't remember any details.
winstep wrote:
At one point (many years ago) it was indeed bandwidth/cost. But now bandwidth is cheap and Winstep has its own dedicated server with a TON of free bandwidth to go around, so that is definitely not a problem.
At one point I did hire someone to do the database/themes repository, but unfortunately the project ended up being abandoned for several reasons. Also, given author rights, etc, the themes repository would have to essentially start empty.
Yes, dedicated servers with oodles of bandwidth have become cheap (certainly from local providers here), so I'm glad you have that. So why not do it anyway, what's to lose? Winstep can only gain in the longer term. All skins sites started up with almost zero content and went on from there. I'd gladly contribute all my new efforts, exclusively.. I'd also offer the web code but alas can't remember my mysql etc - can barely remember basic html, if that. :/
Speaking of themes, I've been wondering why you haven't set up a theming forum, for discussion etc. specifically concerning theming and esp. theme creation?
winstep wrote:
Tony Chow? Yeah, I remember the bastard lol. He has the credit of making the first true dock for Windows (which is what got me into this mess, eheh), but he completely gave up on it soon after. At the time he was asking users to send him their NeXT icon collections. I did, he used it, but never even bothered replying with a simple 'Thank you'.
I do resent him. And so should you.
LOL! Alright then, from now on I shall!
Esp. for not thanking you.
(Or anybody for registering, it seems.)
winstep wrote:
Thibaud Dijan? Last I heard (many years ago) he got married and had a baby. Guess he felt the need to get a 'real job' to feed his family (not easy to make a living as a shareware author).
Brad seemed to dislike him a lot, I remember him specifically stating that he would never allow a HVD themes section on Wincustomize (yeah, Thibaud could be an arrogant little pr*ck at times lol).
LOL! Yes, I do remember all that. And yes, he could be an arrogant so-and-ao, almost as much as Brad.
(I still must have all the beta and release install archives somewhere - probably in 'Archives'.
)
winstep wrote:
nexter wrote:
Anyway, we could all be running a lean, mean OS today that totally empowered the user instead of dis-enfranchising him more and more and
wasting a heap of resources in terms of disk space, RAM, etc. etc.
You know, that's a very common, but also very wrong, misconception. 'Starting over' with a clean slate is actually a TERRIBLE mistake, and we have history to prove it:
Remember Netscape? At one time it was the dominant Windows browser... until someone there thought it was a good idea to re-write it from scratch.
It took them one or two years to finally have *something* that could be publicly released. By then the rest of the world had already moved on to other browsers and Netscape quickly faded into oblivion.
Yes, I remember the 'Nutscrape' disaster very well, but at least part of the cause of its demise was the free bundling of IE. And they went about it the wrong way in not keeping the existing version bang up to date. And just look what's become of the original's successor, FF. Great browser, good gfx engine (but bloated as hell) and (probably) the most used browser, perhaps after IE. But all in all, perhaps not the best example of a failed re-write from scratch.
winstep wrote:
Worse than that (and this is what most people who aren't developers - and even some who are! - don't take into consideration): the new 'clean' version was now a buggy mess! You see, the stability of a product is the *cumulative* effect of all those bugs you have been fixing for years. That 'fat' around your tissues is also what keeps everything together and you alive!
When you start from scratch, you're going back to ground zero in terms of stability. It is *impossible* to write bug free code in the first try.
Now, this was a simple browser. Imagine what would happen to something as complex as Windows.
Indeed. I basically agree. But MS had the resources to maintain a very long beta cycle to iron out any serious bugs. If they'd started straight after, say, the release of XP (while updating that and eventually in effect making it something like Win7) they could have had a long time to do it right and also have a very long beta cycle. It would have been perfectly alright to have a first release out by say 2015 or so. Hell, that actually might have been too much time for the teams of developers, giving them too much opportunity to f*** up royally.
It could have been done right, and it should have been. (The user-transparent Win32 etc. emulation layer would even have ensured continued backward compatibility for years yet.)
winstep wrote:
Also, don't forget that most of Windows popularity is due to that 'lets keep things backwards compatible for as long as possible' mentality that dominated Microsoft back then (alas, not anymore, which is why we have the current mess).
The abandonment of this school of thought was clearly signaled when Microsoft decided to kill classic VB (only the most popular programming language EVER!) and replace it with that incompatible, slow and bloated, .NET nightmare. As you can see, 'new' is not always synonym to 'best'.
Indeed, not by any means. And .NET seemed like a nightmare from the start. The abandonment of classic VB was unforgivable I think. Backwards compatibility is always a good philosophy and should have been adhered to here, just as it should be in a hypothetical new OS through an emulation layer.
And that is the point. There does come a point with many things when you have to come to the conclusion that starting over is not only the best but the only thing to do. And Windows reached that point long ago IMO. (I'm not including the server etc. versions, they obviously would have had to be updated etc. and maintained until the desktop OS had pretty much proven itself. But not a problem for MS, they have the resources.)
Granted, there is no real precedent for something like this. But with Win now long being the only commercial desktop OS and the dominant OS (I'm not counting 'The Dark Side' as that's a tiny minority sport, but not entirely dis-counting Linux), it would have been time to abandon the house because of its shaky, flaky, crumbling, and ancient foundations.
winstep wrote:
nexter wrote:
Heck, just think, back in the 80s we already had an 'average user' desktop computer and OS that was fully 32bit, had PMT, true colour GFX cards, could access the full 32bit memory space, and even with the TCP/IP stack, installed in about 6MB! Yes, Meg. That was the Amiga.
Ah. The Amiga. So far ahead of its time.
Yep, Commodore made a huge mess of it. What a wasted opportunity.
Indeed.