Or I am thinking perhaps they realized they lost?

I submitted the story but I realize back in the 1980's the same was said of IBM. They gave up when they lost to Microsoft. Today they are fairly open about their standards. DB2 is still proprietary but they have opened a lot of stuff and they charge a ton for consulting and enterprise level stuff.

MS is going the same route is my guess.

Folks I think Google is who we should fear next. Chrome has a lot of -webkit and -blink specific stuff in CSS not in HTML 5. I am not a pro MS troll at all but use to be an anti MS zealot many moons ago but changed.

Either way MS makes lots of software some bad but some really good. Visual Studio is a good one. Windows and IE which are the worst are improving. Office is ok with Excel being great and Outlook being crappy. No different than any other large software company.

Then use IE 6.

Html 5 is more than about text viewers with pictures. It is a standard for applets and guis

The page doesn't look right and it doesn't work. How can the Web Development guys be so incompetent? I am filling a bug report and expect a fix by the end of today. Thanks -phb

The developers do not actually run the OS outside of a VM in MacOSX.

OpenBSD seems to be tried and tested and true.

FreeBSD heights were the 4.x series. I kept on 4.x until 4.12 when 6.x was being released. Gave up. Started using XP and Linux off and on before leaving Linux altogether. Sad

Sounds like you need this if you want to blow $200 for a real desktop like system. Sure some emedded uses would call for an atom.

For building robots and doing simple things an ARM is fine and most importantly cheap! Folks still use XP machines with 512 megs of ram and cpus not much faster to this day. Postgresql, php, image recognition, and other clients tools ran fine on a pentium III. He'll Debian demoed a 1000 users with apache on a 75 mhz pentium back in the day!

These are not made to run VMware and virtual ized oses and video editing and compiling code. That's what a workstation like my i7 is for.

You know plenty of XP boxes which represent up to % 15 of us Internet users work just fine with 512 megs.

People everyday use word, excel, video editing, and a few tabs in IE 8 just fine with it. I think it's plenty for a hobbyist board. Also Intel makes $200 atom based pie based devices too with USB 3 and hdmi and more ram if you want power. Folks these are $49! That is the appeal for a cheap hacking board. $200 is a little much to goof with in comparison

Alpha doesn't exist anymore. RIP.

In 1999 it was hot and had all sorts of apps that were essential. CS majors loved them. For $3000 they could have their own but couldn't run games. It could do excel, word, visual studio, java, and Unix stuff with FreeBSD or Linux (I was in BSD camp back then). It could trounce a highly priced x86 in it's price range.

But yes it was niche for artists, hackers, and engineers. Carly Fiona killed it. Part of it came back to live with the AMD AthlonXPs and Athlons MPs which creamed the Pentium IVs. Really it was so much DEC you could swap the alpha and Athlon CPUs a decade ago!

Or Carly Fiona wanted Itanium instead.

The market was hot for ALPHA. My community college used them and Slashdot was using them as well in the turn of the century. They ran Windows and IE 6 for internet terminals and classroom labs. $3000 got you a powerful workstation that ran Linux and Windows with Office and Visual Studio and Office. True games were lacking outside Quake 3.

But Compaq bought DEC which HP bought and Carly Fiona pillaged. Rest in peace alpha.

They also purposedly crippled the chip to make it slow to sell more Itaniums.

MS from day 1 with NT was never use x86 as the main CPU.

This was to prevent another crappy DOS or Windows 95 quirky OS optimized and insecure with buffer overflows and optimizations for just x86 instead of portable C libraries.

NT was made for the mips in 1993, not x86 (later backported). This tradition continued and ARM makes sense for the server room.

Most apps are database driven or network specific and are I/O bottlenecked. Not CPU. A java servlet does a query and waits 10 million cpu cycles (exaggeration) waiting for Oracle to get the data from the spinning pile of rust and then process etc.

ARM makes sense in this as it saves money in power and customers are less needy with x86 compatibility there vs the desktop.

The history NT is really a fear of what happened to the crappy DOS based operating systems such as Windows.

NT from day 1 was purposedly not made x86 as the main cpu as people used assembler more in those days and MS management knew it would loose its portability and later security by having x86 hacks and direct memory calls in the kernel etc.

So NT 3.1 was made for the MIPS first on SGI then backported to x86. This continued to PowerPC in 1990s with NT 3.51 and NT 4 and later Alpha with Windows 2000. Itanium was made target which is why Balmer demoed Server 2003 on it first as x86 was not ready.

Today it is ARM. Actually it is very smart engineering wise to do this.

We all hate MS on Slashdot as it is the pro Unix anti MS site since the 1990s so it is a given here. But really portability was never a problem and it iw as not a dumb move.

In the long term ARM and low power cpus make sense for things like Database where I/O and not cpu is the bottleneck. Even in Java servelts and .NET app servers it is waiting for data() from the spinning piles or rust to fill a query more than the CPU.

The only thing is ARM loses its lower power qualities as soon as it does more and you add more things to it like virtualization, FPUS, etc.

IE has for 5 years now. Oh your comparing a 13 year old version when Mozilla and even Opera required quirks and hacks? Yeah real fair comparison. IE 6 was more standards compliant than Netscape and Mozilla 1.0 anyday. Compare a modern browsers