Hey, this application is really cool, thanks! I've been looking for something like this.... am I allowed to do this on Slashdot, or will people get upset?
So did he just remove pulseauio then? Was he lucky enough that his card has decent ALSA drivers? They're about 50/50 last I checked.
I couldn't see myself doing serious audio work without dropping in OSS or something.....or is this guy only using the system to output audio? If you can't even play games with Pulseaudio I can't imagine it would be very good for pro audio...
Somewhere around 50,000 projects now use the GPLV3 license.
How many projects in the open source ecosystem that actually pull in corporate cash use the GPLv3 exclusively? Can you name any off the top of your head? All those little "Bob's Random Number Generator" sort of projects are just foliage in that market. Only a few projects really receive corporate attention and sponsorship, such as the kernel itself. GCC only recently switched over and I guarantee you that will end up moving a lot of resources to the more sanely licensed LLVM. Any monetized project which switches to that license is committing suicide.
I like how the article casually cites the GPLv3 as if any monetized project would ever touch it, or at the very most single-license code under it...
I hate to break it to you clowns, but nobody really cares what the GPLv3 says because it's a political missile, not a useful contribution to the world of software licensing. You really need to keep the discourse at the relevant license, which is the GPLv2. When companies support the GPLv3, it's just a token. It's almost always dual licensed to protect the companies who actually have to make money and support products built on the technology.
Besides this, it sounds to me like Microsoft is Re-re-defining open standards. Does anyone remember what "Open" meant in the days of Unix yore? CDE is "open.";)
I don't know when GNU or the FSF or one of their apes decided that they held the official definition of open specifications, because they have been around for quite a while, longer than the software industry.
Bing has pretty much cornered the market of people who use the internet by typing natural language questions into the IE address bar.
Imagine that for a moment... people who use the internet by clicking on the IE address bar and typing "How do I get rich working from home?" So it's really no question why they have the fantastic click-through.
I'd say the data makes perfect sense.
But that's not to say Bing isn't a pretty nice search engine. I use its video search and (occasionally) restrict it to youtube to use it as a cleaner and better youtube than youtube. Wrap your minds around that.
The problem with Microsoft's concept is that they don't have the same culture to sell. Apple has a niche (albeit a very deep niche) market which supports the notion of exclusiveness (which anyone can conveniently buy into). Microsoft doesn't have that kind of exclusiveness (unless you're talking about excluding people who are using previous versions of their OS on older hardware). What Microsoft will instead find they're selling is ubiquity, and not even a nice sort of ubiquity either. It's more of a fetid, horrid inevitability, not so much like death as spending the holiday with in-laws.
This is a very interesting point. I would argue that Microsoft has a culture, also... but it's always been a developer culture, not a user culture. Microsoft has catered to developers through things like Visual Studio and.NET and Silverlight and such forever, now. As a user culture, Windows does have a sort of inevitability- it's not conducive to Apple's elitist "counterculture." The idea that users just get Windows and have to deal with it instead of being part of something larger really feeds both Apple (and Canonical's) culture of escapees.
Let's talk about user experience for a second, though. Recent Vanilla copies of Windows (Vista included) have been really smooth and beautiful products from all sorts of standpoints. However, if you use a Retail Windows machine, you'll never even see the clever simplicity of it because it's loaded to the brim with BS. Imagine if HP shipped Mac OS X systems for a second and you'll realize why Apple isn't allowing their OS to escape their monoculture- because parties like them or Dell or Sony or whoever can take a Mac-like user experience and make it hideous and transparently exploitative.
Microsoft has smooth products on its own. Zune is a smooth, attractive product, software and hardware-wise. The Xbox 360 is smooth and attractive hardware, also- it really displays what Microsoft is able to do when they emulate Apple's concept of monoculture.
So here's a weird concept: Microsoft has no means by which to deliver the Windows platform to customers in the form it leaves Redmond as aside from on the retail shelf as an Operating System. Microsoft badly needs a branded top-to-bottom user experience or stricter guidelines on presenting Windows 7 if they want users to actually see the beauty of the system and design, not a ton of unnecessary third party panels and utilities... Nvidia's control panel is invasive, third party wireless tools are extremely invasive, all sorts of applications are and they violate the User Experience guidelines wholesale...
If Microsoft could release a single piece of hardware that properly provides the Windows platform and follows the rules and has the attractive industrial design you'd find in their hardware, like the 360, or Zune, or what have you, I don't think it would be so different from Apple. You can tell they're beginning to toy with it- first the Xbox, then the Zune, then Surface. Why not release a little bit of Hardware and create a user-centric experience in PC's for perhaps the first time? Or perhaps they're going to skip the tail of the PC era and shoot for mobile. We shall see.
And I'd like to refute before it's even mentioned anyone bringing up Ubuntu as an example as to why PC manufacturers don't need to fill their systems up with malware, because Canonical is not profitable. Their market strategy is not a valid point. However, I will accept that their refugee platform is very successful at adoption socially... it would be great if adoption actually helped them.
In the case of these drivers, they make Linux a better option as a guest OS. That means there's probably at least one lost Windows sale because a business can use Linux instead. This is not good for Microsoft, but necessary, since they used GPL code. The sale is less valuable to them than the cost of writing the entire program themselves.
They used GPL code in order to write Linux drivers, though. Windows Server's ability to hypervise Linux is actually a feature, since many enterprises are mixed environments. Nobody wants to adopt a Server platform that doesn't play well with the rest of the infrastructure. Some organizations actually make use of Windows Server with Active Directory to augment the authentication structure of existing UNIX/NFS systems, for instance. In the server market, companies might still have a web server, a file server, a mail server lying around running Unix that they don't want to eliminate. Maybe it works for them. It's better for Microsoft to be vetting Windows Server for mixed environments, which are an important component of the enterprise market. It also means that the company's guest Linux systems can utilize an existing UNIX configuration while benefiting from Windows Server's security model. What it offers is flexibility.
I mean, I'm not sure what "entire program" you're referring to here when you say they would have to "write the entire program". Linux drivers tend to leverage GPL'd code, especially if they're to be properly integrated into the Linux kernel. These components have always been slated for integration into a linux kernel in one way or another, previously as binary drivers, so this submission makes perfect sense for Microsoft fiscally.
This is an example of Microsoft doing with the Linux platform the same thing every other developing party does with it, making it work for their usage scenario. In this case, Microsoft is leveraging it as a integratable guest OS option for customers. This code release will save everyone time and money, so I am simply stating that it isn't penal in nature--there was no threatened lawsuit. This whole article on Slashdot is really just an intentionally sinister angle on a hypothetical conflict that did not occur.
The release of anything, no strings attached, would drastically improve Microsoft's reputation with the Linux community, without hurting their bottom line.
Microsoft has been contributing slightly to the open source community through PHP and Apache already, but we are indeed talking about no-strings-attached GPLv2 kernel code here. I would also argue that, through Novell, the Linux community has benefited greatly from Mono/C#, which is quickly becoming one of the most popular solutions for developing linux desktop apps.
Besides this, Microsoft as a publically-owned corporation generally maintains the viability of its own platform, not competing ones, so the lack of prior contribution to Linux is not mysterious nor malevolent.
The real reason is that they probably don't own all the code in the driver. Replacing large parts of the X stack had some merit in the past, but right now they are far behind ATI and Intel for this reason - for example they do not support XRandR 1.3, so everyone needs to use their stupid utility in order to configure dual monitors.
Yeah, it's definitely a trade-off. But at the same time, they also have a better solution for memory management than DRM in the DRI stack. This means they will have better GL performance... they also offer some video decoding/playback acceleration in certain players. Nvidia's drivers have been able to offer an excellent experience on Linux for much longer than DRI has been really functional or usable, but it's probably about time they start conforming to some of the standard features modern X is offering, like XRandR as you mentioned.
You mean the same way standard operating systems don't install to a static path on a fixed device and therefore need to touch the BIOS to install? Oh, except they don't! The BIOS already scans for a bootable OS and it can scan for SplashTop as well.
If you're suggesting there's absolutely no BIOS or ROM based component to Splashtop, I have no idea what they're marketing it as. I figured they would have installed the core system to some sort of ROM and simply set up a 512 mb persistent storage nest somewhere on the system, not unlike Dyne:Bolic. If it really is just installing a DOS-style bootloader and loading off the hard drive, then it's just going to be another lame linux distribution with a custom-tuned init system. It would probably get out-booted by a well optimized Windows installation.
Who's to say SplashTop has two different installer bases for ROM and Hard Disk anyway? While the hard drive splashtop scenario might work fine in linux if it is as you say it is and it just tosses it onto the hard disk, I think the ROM would still be awkward. Once more, distributing untestable linux code that writes to your BIOS/specialized ROM or SSD might be a bit scary... even my linux-based EeePC wouldn't do that with its default system... and that's a purpose-built Linux.
Oh whoops, and I forgot... nobody uses Desktop Linux exclusively so the effort would be a massive waste of time and money.
That's a generalization, not a fact. It implies a whole set of instances of Linux being bad at "talking to the BIOS." I challenge you to cite one instance, never mind a whole set, of "talking to the BIOS" that Windows performs without problems and that Linux has trouble doing. I can cite the reverse: getting or setting the wakeup alarm that every modern PC and even laptops have, that you can set from the BIOS screen. Windows just can't do it. The capability certainly isn't built into Windows already, but even beyond that I couldn't even find a third-party program to do it in Windows. In Linux it's trivial. Just read or write/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm. So looks like Windows is pretty retarded at talking to the BIOS.
Anyway, if the functionality you need to talk to the BIOS (say it's something non-standard) isn't present, you can distribute a low level application that provides the functionality on Windows. If someone didn't add it to the Linux kernel at some point, then it's over before it started. Linux doesn't have system calls for talking to the kernel.
If you want to expose the underlying system functionality of Windows, then clicking around the GUI isn't the right way to go. You really should open up something like PowerShell and get your hands on the innards of the Windows system. It's a bit different, because Windows is object oriented instead of being text-string oriented, but I think you'll find there is an awful lot more available functionality in the system for a poweruser. Don't worry about grabbing 3rd party tools to expose system functions... just use PowerShell, write a script, schedule it. Only through something like PowerShell will you ever really see how much Windows knows about your hardware, it's really quite impressive. It's a true PC operating system, and it shows.
Windows is much much better after you've used linux for a long time. Take it from me.
On my desktop machine with MythTV, my system regularly powers on to record a program, then afterwards if no one is logged on it sets the alarm for the next recording and shuts down. It's been doing this for years and hasn't blown up yet! I can even cite the code [kernel.org] in case you want to nitpick it or claim it's not BIOS access. cmos_read_alarm and cmos_set_alarm.
And what if I wanted to do something that wasn't hacked into the kernel? There's a lot of functionality in Linux th
Why would Microsoft release something actually valuable, when they're sitting on a large pile of worthless things that could be released first, like QuickBasic and old versions of DOS?
QBASIC and DOS are not being contributed to an existing GPL-based platform. They're essentially dead legacy code. I think the easiest way to explain that would be that the drivers Microsoft is contributing aren't being pushed forth because they're useless or outdated, but because they're useful. It seems to me that they're leveraging the open source development model to improve interoperability and streamline the development process since they're contributing to a GPL platform.
It's about using the right license for the right scenario in the same manner that you wouldn't bring a croquet mallet to a baseball game. A binary driver distribution model the realm of the GPL is contrary to the linux development model and would not save anyone time or money. There's simply no reason to swim up river, in this case.
This is an example of functionality being added to the linux kernel that is mutually beneficial to both platforms because it's improving linux as a guest in Windows' hypervisor solution. So, what Microsoft is giving away IS valuable, but moreso because they're submitting it as a kernel component, not merely on its own.
In short, it's an asset for both platforms *because* it's open source.
Unfortunately, this promise covers only part of what is needed to implement.NET. [fsf.org] This is fairly typical Microsoft behavior IMO. The form of what they appear to be offering is quite acceptable. Unfortunately, the substance is not. Much like their publication of APIs and other specs: at first glance they often appear impressive and even comprehensive, but just a little digging reveals just enough bugs, omissions, and errors to make the whole thing useless.
Would you like to be more specific? The FSF is an anti-Microsoft political organization, not a reliable technical resource.
As far as I can tell, this is simply a political argument pushing for a branded license provided by the organization making these claims.
Please quote a neutral and non-biased source that is not acting out of economic self-interest.
Here is what Microsoft said in the initial press release:
Q: Why release the code?
A: Because we have utilized Linux code, Microsoft has an obligation to open source the device drivers. This is the process outlined by the Linux community.
Q: Why open source the code?
A: Because this is a requirement of the community, and critical in ensuring that as the Linux Kernel evolves, and as Hyper-V evolves, that the Hyper-V Linux Device Drivers evolve as well.
So... when was there a cover-up? Seems to me like it simply wasn't reported because no one considered it relevant to report, given that it was in the press release.
It's not something you brag about, just a reality. They wrote some linux drivers, and that's a huge waste of time and resources to maintain in a closed source fashion unless you have a really good reason (like Nvidia, who have to re-engineer much of X to allow modern graphics technology in Linux).
It's rare that Microsoft should have to touch GPL code for any reason, but now that they have to for Hyper-V, they're adhering to the GPL. At one point does this story become sinister or scary?
Duh, don't you get it? The loader is built into the BIOS [splashtop.com] already. That's why there was already an option to boot Splashtop, which responded with a message saying it was not installed. That loader is there to load and boot a Linux kernel more quickly and efficiently, but Splashtop is stored on another device. Early motherboards had it preinstalled on an integrated SSD. But this guy's motherboard didn't have an SSD built-in, so Splashtop has to be installed on the hard drive.
Unless Splashtop uses a static path and assumes all systems are placing it in the exact same place on the exact same hard drive configuration (IDE, SATA, etc), I would assume that anything having to do with a BIOS loading linux distribution would have to at least touch the BIOS to install. Whether or not it's loading into a ROM chip, it's talking to the BIOS, something linux is more than a little bit retarded at.
So I would also go with possibility B in my original post, where I mentioned that creating a consistent imaging, flashing, and customized install solution would be easier with Windows because A) they have a software distribution model and B) Everyone uses Windows. This jackass at least knew what he had to do when he opened that disk. Imagine if it had some wonky linux app. Then everyone but this jackass would have to figure out what the hell it was. Even the EeePC had a windows based loader for its linux installer. If you were the sort of masochist that uses linux, you could figure it out yourself or buy a usb dvdrom. It's that simple. I mean, do you even know if the installer is a mere image writer? If it's not, then it's going to be trickier through Linux.
So no, my post is not wrong. Linux remains a wacky and inconsistent platform that you do not want to distribute software for. Releasing untested software would make anyone nervous, and there's no way to guess when whatever linux distribution whomever is using decides to smash compatibility with the others (new features!). The fact of the matter is if you made a linux app, you would have to maintain it. And then everyone bitches at you to GPL anything you create, so then you have to create a lame little portal with the source code and some sort of open.company.com address. It's just a huge bitch to work with that system and community. I can see why Asus got sick of the Linux community and pulled out.
Wait, how many people even use linux? Like 1% of the desktop market share? Who would waste their time with that outside of the workstation market?
Alternatively, companies that wrote Windows software in the 90's can still enjoy compatibility because backwards compatibility just isn't that hard! Ask Sun.
I can tell you one thing for certain, if your hobbyist OS ever becomes actually secure (not merely make-believe secure), it's going to drop some of the little shred of compatibility it has--and it will be a headache for everyone who ever released complex software on it.
Why are you talking about that? This story has nothing to do with flashing the BIOS. This is about installing an OS to the hard drive.
Do you have any idea what the original post was about? The Linux they're talking about boots from a ROM, not the hard disk. If you weren't so busy attempting to disarm my points without adhering to any sort of concrete or relevant information, maybe you could have found time to read that.
This is a totally meaningless statement.
You're not very "technical," are you? It's a lot easier for Windows to talk to ACPI, PCI, or BIOS, because Microsoft maintains the specifications and designs their system internals accordingly. Linux on a PC is the same as on any other platform, it's UNIX. It's not meant to act that way. That gives Windows an advantage for talking to the BIOS in general--it's a PC system by design. That's not saying Linux CAN'T, just that it generally doesn't because it's platform-independent by design.
(A bunch of whiny debate team lingo about my statements)
This is the internet, you prissy bitch. Stay on the goddamn subject.
Yeah, let's all judge operating systems by the stereotypes about their users... BTW, any fervently irrational UNIX/Linux geeks you've talked to were probably just getting defensive in response to your fervently irrational attacks on Linux. They're mirroring you, and whatever insanity you throw at them. Except they are most likely reasonable later, when they're actually dealing with another reasonable person.
I can't believe you have the gall to attack my post from a logical standpoint. This whole paragraph describes an imaginary conflict and resolution.
And do you think none of those new Mac users are intentionally avoiding Windows? Or is avoiding Windows only okay when the alternative has your approval? Most new Mac users are leaving Windows because they're dissatisfied with it. If they were happy with Windows, they wouldn't have switched. Another thing that helps Mac OS X adoption is that it comes preinstalled on a popular line of computers. Put a Linux machine on store shelves and people will buy that too.
Mac users are switching because it offers a better user experience. Desktop linux was sold in stores and on new computers for years (notably by Walmart) and has consistently failed in the market. Dell attempted to sell Ubuntu on PC's and that failed in the market. I suggest you look at the sales figures on linux vs. windows netbooks. Desktop linux was rejected by the market in lieu of Windows, even on netbooks where it was supposed to get a foothold. Google Chrome OS is currently the only hope the linux kernel has of running on mass-market consumer machines.
Wow, now you are arguing in favor of archaic designs. Well-written DHTML is often a much better user experience than the classic full-document reload on every click of the 90's. I don't even get what you're trying to say about Google...
I am merely saying that they've lost sight of the distinction between document and application. Information is served best through more simplistic formats, like Wikipedia. You like linking to Wikipedia, right? It makes you feel sooo smart.
Despite what your preconceived notions may tell you, I do understand what computing is, and I assure you, desktops and laptops as we know them today are not going away any time soon. People will still have to write stuff in ten years, and you know what they're going to want for that? A full-sized keyboard.
Do you really think you need a tower to offer a keyboard... What are you, 12? You don't think they could make a workstation that docks with a mobile? Hardware is way too large and power consuming right now.
Am I the only one who doesn't find this strange at all? They're submitting drivers for Hyper-V to strengthen Windows Server as a host for mixed OS environments where UNIX servers need to be virtualized. They're working on interoperability to strenghten their product. For instance, Windows Server has a great NFS implementation. Some in our organization consider it the best, actually, so they replaced many of our UNIX NFS servers with Windows Servers.
Interoperability sells and linux kernel drivers are written under the GPL. This is an action Microsoft took both in self-interest and conformance with standard practices for submitting linux kernel code. It's a time saver to just use the GPL and submit kernel code than to go through the awkward trouble of maintaining a binary driver, which is only helpful in special cases, like where Nvidia is replacing much of the X/DRM stack.
Do you even have any idea what the PC specification is? This means that Windows is built around the PC/BIOS architecture while linux is built around a more independent unix architecture. It's a technical truth, not an opinion.
If you weren't an abject moron, you might have argued that that was a good thing. Most would.
Some people try to take this problem into account when making decisions. To a naive person, it seems dogmatic, but it's actually quite pragmatic to behave in a way that would be in your interest if other people did the same. It lays the groundwork for your own interests to be served in the future.
This is ridiculous. I can't believe you argued the tragedy of the commons in regard to a basic technical problem. Here I am talking about how you use Windows to flash ROMs because it adheres to the PC specification and has a binary distribution model (so you can ship a simple unique flashing app with the board) and it is easier to speak to the BIOS through it and you brought out the tragedy of the commons.
Let me attempt to look at this for what it is, a software environment for my home computing hardware. With that in mind...
Some might argue that you are pushing a far inferior form of single system dominance by pushing UNIX.. You're pushing something here that's archaic to the point of being dangerous to national security infrastructure, the linux operating system. This is just plain scary. It's scary because Linux is such a castle in the sky. It's a massive basket of failed promises and assurances to the point where it is basically a trojan horse for enterprise-like infrastructure. It's so low quality and insecure that its use in government applications literally frightens me. Do you have any idea how bad the virus situation would be if Linux was the dominant system instead of Windows? The UNIX security model doesn't apply to complex systems like Linux, you poor fools! Why does the "future" need to be a poorly implemented flavor of a system from the past?
And this topic was on Home Desktops... there are no home desktop linux distributions competitive with commercial offerings.
You've thrown out the entire technical precedent involved in a completely simple issue of operating system choice for consumer hardware (actually the use thereof for bios operations) and made it an issue of philosophy... you're pushing this amateur hacked-to-shit 1970's operating system on me for what seems like religious reasons.
For example, remember the dark age of the web? You had to use Internet Explorer or some sites wouldn't display right, look right, or even let you in. Despite that, some people were willing use the competition and demand that sites work with their alternative browsers. You might have told them to just use IE and stop complaining or made fun of them for "thinking IE will dissolve their hands," but it's thanks to them that we have IE8, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari, and Opera 9. Without them we'd all still be on IE6 and there'd be ActiveX all over the place.
The IE example is terrible. Opera, Firefox (at one point), and Chrome can all be considered in some ways better or more advanced browsers than IE. They won legitimately, not idealistically. They are superior products. Linux is a sad and weak platform compared to Windows, so the issue fails. Now if you argued that something like BeOS should have succeeded Windows on a technical standpoint, maybe I could see your point. Maybe Mac OS X, but it's actually gaining market share. But Linux? Are you kidding me?
The web now-a-days sucks, anyway. It's full of useless javascript that makes it retardedly slow, everything is bloated, information flow is patchy, and it's basically dominated by a single entity wrapper, Google. Furthermore, people have lost track of the segregation of application and document models so now the web does both poorly.
We're still in the dark age of operating systems, but the end is in sight. Consumers now have a Linux option with some vendors. And there's those netbooks. Eventually, not supporting Linux will be as common as requiring Internet Explorer on a website is today. And then there will be a large number of people switching.
No. I don't think desktop linux will ever gain relevance. Not in its current form. If
Sometimes when an idea seems stupid to you, that's because it's actually wooshing over your head. Your comment reads like "Ha ha, if the Earth was round we'd fall off it you idiot!" If you stop assuming other people are morons, you just might learn something.
Oh, so I take it you have something insightful to impart, then? What exactly am I missing?
I presume that you refer to that portion of Windows that acts as a DOS emulator.
I was actually talking about a tool that formats and images a usb stick. That's not the kind of behavior that Wine "emulates."
It seems that you may be a bit infatuated with Bill Gate's operating system. In fact, the only reasons we don't routinely flash from Linux involve proprietary mfrs refusing to code for Linux.
You mean Dave Cutler's operating system, right? I am a big fan of NT, I won't lie. I think motherboard manufacturer's disinterest in linux has more to do with a lack of consistent driver API's, and the knowledge that they don't have to waste time and money so that 15 of their users can play with UNIX on their systems (home users). Someone else will do it. Workstation oriented boards will be far more likely to have good linux/unix support, since there isn't a passable or popular home/desktop linux offering but it's pretty serious in the workstation.
When I make fun of linux users, I am generally talking about home linux users.
I recently bought a board for the purpose of flashing chips that had been bricked. It works fine, and I've rescued three "dead" boards so far. Unfortunately, I can only run the software on Windows. It won't run from a virtual machine (or, at least, I'm not smart enough to have figured out how to do so) and I genuinely fear the results of running it in Wine. There ARE NO DRIVERS OR SOFTWARE available for Linux.
If you're running a linux/unix oriented shop, then that's actually a pretty good idea. Linux remains intentionally obscured from the PC architecture, so it will never be the sort of system you flash PC motherboards from... and that's probably a good thing.
Personally, I think that rescuing dead mainboards is serious shitzls. I just hate to do such a chore with a frivolous Windows gaming machine.
I swear some of you people are like the North Korean refugees who are afraid if they touch the ground in South Korea, their hands will rot and fall off.
Your glorious supreme leader and chief asshat-for-life, Richard M Stallman, is lying to you. If you use Windows, your hands will not rot and fall off.
The motherboard manufacturer obviously mistakingly though you were part of the 99% of users that used Windows, and gave you an easy tool to either flash directly (do not attempt this in linux) or flash a usb stick to install it on boot (cross platform would be awkward for that). In the days of incompatible mac applications, they would create hybrid disks with HFS+ layers that would offer the files to you with Mac metadata. You don't have this luxury in linux. There is no right way to distribute binaries, so the best they can do is offer Windows junk and assume if you have Linux, you probably occasionally boot into Windows anyway when you have to complete grownup work.
The issue is not INSTALLING A LINUX DISTRIBUTION. The issue is flashing a ROM on your motherboard. Windows has a much better grasp of the PC specification, for better or worse. I would imagine it's much easier to write a tool that flags the motherboard that it's time to write from (either a ROM or the filesystem) to the ROM on reboot in Windows (ASUS style) or to provide a canned solution to image a usb stick in Windows. If you are a linux user, you might find syslinux and an img file somewhere on the CD that you can easily just dd to a usb stick.
DO NOT attempt this in Wine, it's going to require a part of Windows that that's system/driver oriented. Wine is for high level compatibility, it does not know how to speak to the PC/BIOS/PCI system like Windows does. This is a situation where it's using the part of Windows that makes it an Operating System, not an API layer.
If your tinfoil hat is on so firmly that it can never be removed, and you are now afraid of any system that is not approved by your glorious leader, this might have a better shot of working in ReactOS than it ever would in Linux. Of course, I assume that, like every other PC system, they don't understand the PC specification either, so it's going to get close to working and break something. I take no responsibility but to laugh at you--that is my duty.
I think what they've found here is right. The Radio Format has been getting a free ride and so have all those brigands listening to it in their cars. All the people in the world are a bunch of no-good sound thieves, Hell, they even have large fleshy scoops on the side of their heads just sucking up and stealing all the free sounds they can get close to. If only we could have those things permanently blocked so the only sounds that come through them are properly paid and licensed by the source.
I should start going to sleep at night with earmuffs on so some ghetto-blasting kid in a donk doesn't come cruising down the street blasting hip-hop and turning me into a music pirate. Then I'd have no choice but to turn myself in for participating in an illegal public listening of a song I didn't pay for.
The fact that Google will have a larger potential market than Linux currently has is a point I've accepted. When I'm doubting is that software developers will treat Google Chrome OS as anything other than a platform they need to port "good enough" software to. So by combining two (different!) markets Google and Linux could both benefit! And that Google were fools when they said their product is based on Linux if it can't run Linux software, and they're going to have to stop doing that!
First off, porting software is a situation google appears to be out and out avoiding by doing a "web-centric" OS. I don't believe Chrome OS will have a native execution environment exposed to developers, but that's just a theory. I have a feeling Google is putting this system squarely in the cloud. It's probably why they are able to make sweeping claims about the security of their system. No native execution = fewer casual exploits.
Why will Adobe et al fix this for Google Chrome OS, but not for Google Chrome OS (as well as Linux/X11 people)? That's my question. X11 isn't incapable of being fast and smooth, it's just that the drivers and software need to be (re)written. It's the same either way! Many people at Google run Linux and will continue to do so after Chrome OS is released, so at best it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
X11 is so overly complex for what it actually accomplishes in the desktop space that it might actually be cheaper and more elegant to wipe it out and start from scratch on display. As it stands, both Windows and Mac have display layers with superior multimedia performance. Better driver API's and GL integration could go a long way in spurring linux driver development for display. Adobe's flash isn't slow on linux by choice, it's simply not as fast of a display layer as windows offers and there's no "right" way to accelerate it. In linux, compatibility vs performance is a thinner tightrope vs. windows where there is a robust and standard way to accelerate things for display (DirectX).
I only have internet access about three-quarters of the time I'm trying to do work (and when I have it I often achieve less work than in the quarter of the time I don't...), and surely I'm not unrepresentative. Maybe it's the fact that I try to do (uni) work on my laptop that makes me unrepresentative...
This is definitely not the right OS for you. I personally won't be running it, either.
I wouldn't. But there's enough people who switch to Linux and insist on using Firefox even though it sucks donkeysballs when there's browsers on Linux which don't. I'm not the Firefox-OpenOffice.org-etc type,[1] so I'm trying to judge a group I'm not: but you're probably right in that the sort of person who installs Ubuntu/has someone install Ubuntu onto their computer to make it work when Windows dies, but then assumes they will have access to the same (free) software they were running on Windows, is not the sort of person who will be buying these Google Chrome OS machines. I don't know... (and I don't plan on buying one).
Anyone who is able to effectively use Ubuntu could be considered an expert user. It's not that Ubuntu's usability paradigm is *hard*, it's just that it doesn't adhere to its own principles strictly. When things fail on Ubuntu, the process of solving the problem is often way more obscure and complicated than on Windows or especially Mac. I think Google Chrome OS will kill Ubuntu as a casual OS, but I think hardcore linux users will not switch to it- it has nothing they want.
[1]: I'm the has-run-Linux-for-10+-years, writes-patches-to-his-regular-software-to-make-sure-it-works-for-him type. Linux seems amazingly more popular now than it did when I started using it, so that might make me overestimate it today, but it seems like many people who choose to use Linux now don't necessarily understand the costs/benefits
It's got nothing to do with X. X11 has more users than Google Chrome OS has. At best, one can assume third-party software writers will care as much for an X11-based Google Chrome OS as they would for an independent Google Chrome OS (meaning they have to port three times). It's hard to see how you could rationally conclude they'll care more for an Linux-based Google OS that uses its own graphical system, then they'd care for a Linux-based Google OS that uses X11.
Driver writers might have the benefit of both a more stable and consistent driver API to work with and a larger expected userbase. Hardware providers will give higher priority to Chrome OS because it is a higher profile OS with a larger anticipated userbase. It is more important, in short. I suspect it will render any home-oriented Desktop Linux moot within months of release.
It's also hard to see how you could rationally conclude it'd be easier for end users to deal with a Linux-based Google OS that can't run Linux software, then a Linux-based Google OS that can run Linux software.
There are no successful or popular desktop linux distributions, so the lack of common linux software should be no issue. Google's online apps outstrip the popularity of open source linux software to such an extent that this will be a nonissue for the web-centric home users Google is targeting.
If Google's not using X11, they're going to have to be really careful about making sure people don't talk about Linux and Google Chrome OS in the same sentence, except as a contrast. Otherwise people are going to be wondering--Firefox and OpenOffice.org and Skype and Pidgin and whathaveyou all run on Linux. Why don't they run on this Linux (yet)?
You will not be running Firefox on Chrome OS, because the Chrome Browser is the basis for the desktop environment. You will likely be using Google Docs for your office suite and something talk-oriented for IM. Application developers like Skype will likely find a way to get their application running on the Chrome OS, since it will be larger than Desktop Linux. I think you vastly overestimate the popularity of linux for home users, so the lack of a "familiar" environment will only inconvenience a small number of users, comparatively. Third-party software developers don't take linux very seriously. They will have much more reason to take Chrome OS seriously. Besides, the interface for Chrome OS applications is supposedly the web-- web-centric companies can deploy on this operating system on day one.
(Plus, as far as speed's concerned, when it comes down to it, X11 is plenty fast enough for a netbook. For chrissake, who's going to run something that needs instant responsiveness on a netbook?)
The web is an extremely rich media environment. In the best adapted netbook-based linux distributions (such as UNR and Moblin) on an atom-based netbook, you can not attain smooth video watching a youtube video. It doesn't matter whose fault this is; it is unacceptable. Responsive media is essential for a home use platform, because home users' computing is centered around media. That means things like X11 and pulseaudio have no place on a desktop computer.
No offense, but I trust groklaw more than an unknown/. poster.
Groklaw is just a reactionary front for the FSF. They will always search for a legalese means by which to parrot the tripe that anti-industry figures like RMS spout. They've got a clear bias against Microsoft, so any information you get on that matter from them will always tell you the same thing, no matter what the case is.
I'm not terribly impressed with them or their paranoid bullshit, so I will wish you and your tinfoil hat a good day.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, this application is really cool, thanks! I've been looking for something like this. ... am I allowed to do this on Slashdot, or will people get upset?
So did he just remove pulseauio then? Was he lucky enough that his card has decent ALSA drivers? They're about 50/50 last I checked.
I couldn't see myself doing serious audio work without dropping in OSS or something... ..or is this guy only using the system to output audio? If you can't even play games with Pulseaudio I can't imagine it would be very good for pro audio...
Somewhere around 50,000 projects now use the GPLV3 license.
How many projects in the open source ecosystem that actually pull in corporate cash use the GPLv3 exclusively? Can you name any off the top of your head? All those little "Bob's Random Number Generator" sort of projects are just foliage in that market. Only a few projects really receive corporate attention and sponsorship, such as the kernel itself. GCC only recently switched over and I guarantee you that will end up moving a lot of resources to the more sanely licensed LLVM. Any monetized project which switches to that license is committing suicide.
I like how the article casually cites the GPLv3 as if any monetized project would ever touch it, or at the very most single-license code under it...
I hate to break it to you clowns, but nobody really cares what the GPLv3 says because it's a political missile, not a useful contribution to the world of software licensing. You really need to keep the discourse at the relevant license, which is the GPLv2. When companies support the GPLv3, it's just a token. It's almost always dual licensed to protect the companies who actually have to make money and support products built on the technology.
Besides this, it sounds to me like Microsoft is Re-re-defining open standards. Does anyone remember what "Open" meant in the days of Unix yore? CDE is "open." ;)
I don't know when GNU or the FSF or one of their apes decided that they held the official definition of open specifications, because they have been around for quite a while, longer than the software industry.
Bing has pretty much cornered the market of people who use the internet by typing natural language questions into the IE address bar.
Imagine that for a moment... people who use the internet by clicking on the IE address bar and typing "How do I get rich working from home?" So it's really no question why they have the fantastic click-through.
I'd say the data makes perfect sense.
But that's not to say Bing isn't a pretty nice search engine. I use its video search and (occasionally) restrict it to youtube to use it as a cleaner and better youtube than youtube. Wrap your minds around that.
The problem with Microsoft's concept is that they don't have the same culture to sell. Apple has a niche (albeit a very deep niche) market which supports the notion of exclusiveness (which anyone can conveniently buy into). Microsoft doesn't have that kind of exclusiveness (unless you're talking about excluding people who are using previous versions of their OS on older hardware). What Microsoft will instead find they're selling is ubiquity, and not even a nice sort of ubiquity either. It's more of a fetid, horrid inevitability, not so much like death as spending the holiday with in-laws.
This is a very interesting point. I would argue that Microsoft has a culture, also... but it's always been a developer culture, not a user culture. Microsoft has catered to developers through things like Visual Studio and .NET and Silverlight and such forever, now. As a user culture, Windows does have a sort of inevitability- it's not conducive to Apple's elitist "counterculture." The idea that users just get Windows and have to deal with it instead of being part of something larger really feeds both Apple (and Canonical's) culture of escapees.
Let's talk about user experience for a second, though. Recent Vanilla copies of Windows (Vista included) have been really smooth and beautiful products from all sorts of standpoints. However, if you use a Retail Windows machine, you'll never even see the clever simplicity of it because it's loaded to the brim with BS. Imagine if HP shipped Mac OS X systems for a second and you'll realize why Apple isn't allowing their OS to escape their monoculture- because parties like them or Dell or Sony or whoever can take a Mac-like user experience and make it hideous and transparently exploitative.
Microsoft has smooth products on its own. Zune is a smooth, attractive product, software and hardware-wise. The Xbox 360 is smooth and attractive hardware, also- it really displays what Microsoft is able to do when they emulate Apple's concept of monoculture.
So here's a weird concept: Microsoft has no means by which to deliver the Windows platform to customers in the form it leaves Redmond as aside from on the retail shelf as an Operating System. Microsoft badly needs a branded top-to-bottom user experience or stricter guidelines on presenting Windows 7 if they want users to actually see the beauty of the system and design, not a ton of unnecessary third party panels and utilities... Nvidia's control panel is invasive, third party wireless tools are extremely invasive, all sorts of applications are and they violate the User Experience guidelines wholesale...
If Microsoft could release a single piece of hardware that properly provides the Windows platform and follows the rules and has the attractive industrial design you'd find in their hardware, like the 360, or Zune, or what have you, I don't think it would be so different from Apple. You can tell they're beginning to toy with it- first the Xbox, then the Zune, then Surface. Why not release a little bit of Hardware and create a user-centric experience in PC's for perhaps the first time? Or perhaps they're going to skip the tail of the PC era and shoot for mobile. We shall see.
And I'd like to refute before it's even mentioned anyone bringing up Ubuntu as an example as to why PC manufacturers don't need to fill their systems up with malware, because Canonical is not profitable. Their market strategy is not a valid point. However, I will accept that their refugee platform is very successful at adoption socially... it would be great if adoption actually helped them.
In the case of these drivers, they make Linux a better option as a guest OS. That means there's probably at least one lost Windows sale because a business can use Linux instead. This is not good for Microsoft, but necessary, since they used GPL code. The sale is less valuable to them than the cost of writing the entire program themselves.
They used GPL code in order to write Linux drivers, though. Windows Server's ability to hypervise Linux is actually a feature, since many enterprises are mixed environments. Nobody wants to adopt a Server platform that doesn't play well with the rest of the infrastructure. Some organizations actually make use of Windows Server with Active Directory to augment the authentication structure of existing UNIX/NFS systems, for instance. In the server market, companies might still have a web server, a file server, a mail server lying around running Unix that they don't want to eliminate. Maybe it works for them. It's better for Microsoft to be vetting Windows Server for mixed environments, which are an important component of the enterprise market. It also means that the company's guest Linux systems can utilize an existing UNIX configuration while benefiting from Windows Server's security model. What it offers is flexibility.
I mean, I'm not sure what "entire program" you're referring to here when you say they would have to "write the entire program". Linux drivers tend to leverage GPL'd code, especially if they're to be properly integrated into the Linux kernel. These components have always been slated for integration into a linux kernel in one way or another, previously as binary drivers, so this submission makes perfect sense for Microsoft fiscally.
This is an example of Microsoft doing with the Linux platform the same thing every other developing party does with it, making it work for their usage scenario. In this case, Microsoft is leveraging it as a integratable guest OS option for customers. This code release will save everyone time and money, so I am simply stating that it isn't penal in nature--there was no threatened lawsuit. This whole article on Slashdot is really just an intentionally sinister angle on a hypothetical conflict that did not occur.
The release of anything, no strings attached, would drastically improve Microsoft's reputation with the Linux community, without hurting their bottom line.
Microsoft has been contributing slightly to the open source community through PHP and Apache already, but we are indeed talking about no-strings-attached GPLv2 kernel code here. I would also argue that, through Novell, the Linux community has benefited greatly from Mono/C#, which is quickly becoming one of the most popular solutions for developing linux desktop apps.
Besides this, Microsoft as a publically-owned corporation generally maintains the viability of its own platform, not competing ones, so the lack of prior contribution to Linux is not mysterious nor malevolent.
The real reason is that they probably don't own all the code in the driver. Replacing large parts of the X stack had some merit in the past, but right now they are far behind ATI and Intel for this reason - for example they do not support XRandR 1.3, so everyone needs to use their stupid utility in order to configure dual monitors.
Yeah, it's definitely a trade-off. But at the same time, they also have a better solution for memory management than DRM in the DRI stack. This means they will have better GL performance... they also offer some video decoding/playback acceleration in certain players. Nvidia's drivers have been able to offer an excellent experience on Linux for much longer than DRI has been really functional or usable, but it's probably about time they start conforming to some of the standard features modern X is offering, like XRandR as you mentioned.
You mean the same way standard operating systems don't install to a static path on a fixed device and therefore need to touch the BIOS to install? Oh, except they don't! The BIOS already scans for a bootable OS and it can scan for SplashTop as well.
If you're suggesting there's absolutely no BIOS or ROM based component to Splashtop, I have no idea what they're marketing it as. I figured they would have installed the core system to some sort of ROM and simply set up a 512 mb persistent storage nest somewhere on the system, not unlike Dyne:Bolic. If it really is just installing a DOS-style bootloader and loading off the hard drive, then it's just going to be another lame linux distribution with a custom-tuned init system. It would probably get out-booted by a well optimized Windows installation.
Who's to say SplashTop has two different installer bases for ROM and Hard Disk anyway? While the hard drive splashtop scenario might work fine in linux if it is as you say it is and it just tosses it onto the hard disk, I think the ROM would still be awkward. Once more, distributing untestable linux code that writes to your BIOS/specialized ROM or SSD might be a bit scary... even my linux-based EeePC wouldn't do that with its default system... and that's a purpose-built Linux.
Oh whoops, and I forgot... nobody uses Desktop Linux exclusively so the effort would be a massive waste of time and money.
That's a generalization, not a fact. It implies a whole set of instances of Linux being bad at "talking to the BIOS." I challenge you to cite one instance, never mind a whole set, of "talking to the BIOS" that Windows performs without problems and that Linux has trouble doing. I can cite the reverse: getting or setting the wakeup alarm that every modern PC and even laptops have, that you can set from the BIOS screen. Windows just can't do it. The capability certainly isn't built into Windows already, but even beyond that I couldn't even find a third-party program to do it in Windows. In Linux it's trivial. Just read or write /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm. So looks like Windows is pretty retarded at talking to the BIOS.
http://www.dennisbabkin.com/php/download.php?what=WOSB
Anyway, if the functionality you need to talk to the BIOS (say it's something non-standard) isn't present, you can distribute a low level application that provides the functionality on Windows. If someone didn't add it to the Linux kernel at some point, then it's over before it started. Linux doesn't have system calls for talking to the kernel.
If you want to expose the underlying system functionality of Windows, then clicking around the GUI isn't the right way to go. You really should open up something like PowerShell and get your hands on the innards of the Windows system. It's a bit different, because Windows is object oriented instead of being text-string oriented, but I think you'll find there is an awful lot more available functionality in the system for a poweruser. Don't worry about grabbing 3rd party tools to expose system functions... just use PowerShell, write a script, schedule it. Only through something like PowerShell will you ever really see how much Windows knows about your hardware, it's really quite impressive. It's a true PC operating system, and it shows.
Windows is much much better after you've used linux for a long time. Take it from me.
On my desktop machine with MythTV, my system regularly powers on to record a program, then afterwards if no one is logged on it sets the alarm for the next recording and shuts down. It's been doing this for years and hasn't blown up yet! I can even cite the code [kernel.org] in case you want to nitpick it or claim it's not BIOS access. cmos_read_alarm and cmos_set_alarm.
And what if I wanted to do something that wasn't hacked into the kernel? There's a lot of functionality in Linux th
Why would Microsoft release something actually valuable, when they're sitting on a large pile of worthless things that could be released first, like QuickBasic and old versions of DOS?
QBASIC and DOS are not being contributed to an existing GPL-based platform. They're essentially dead legacy code. I think the easiest way to explain that would be that the drivers Microsoft is contributing aren't being pushed forth because they're useless or outdated, but because they're useful. It seems to me that they're leveraging the open source development model to improve interoperability and streamline the development process since they're contributing to a GPL platform.
It's about using the right license for the right scenario in the same manner that you wouldn't bring a croquet mallet to a baseball game. A binary driver distribution model the realm of the GPL is contrary to the linux development model and would not save anyone time or money. There's simply no reason to swim up river, in this case.
This is an example of functionality being added to the linux kernel that is mutually beneficial to both platforms because it's improving linux as a guest in Windows' hypervisor solution. So, what Microsoft is giving away IS valuable, but moreso because they're submitting it as a kernel component, not merely on its own.
In short, it's an asset for both platforms *because* it's open source.
Unfortunately, this promise covers only part of what is needed to implement .NET. [fsf.org] This is fairly typical Microsoft behavior IMO. The form of what they appear to be offering is quite acceptable. Unfortunately, the substance is not. Much like their publication of APIs and other specs: at first glance they often appear impressive and even comprehensive, but just a little digging reveals just enough bugs, omissions, and errors to make the whole thing useless.
Would you like to be more specific? The FSF is an anti-Microsoft political organization, not a reliable technical resource.
As far as I can tell, this is simply a political argument pushing for a branded license provided by the organization making these claims.
Please quote a neutral and non-biased source that is not acting out of economic self-interest.
For instance, it could agree not to sue reimplementers of .NET (Mono, etc.)
You mean like in their irrevocable covenant not to sue?
http://www.microsoft.com/interop/cp/default.mspx
Here is what Microsoft said in the initial press release:
Q: Why release the code?
A: Because we have utilized Linux code, Microsoft has an obligation to open source the device drivers. This is the process outlined by the Linux community.
Q: Why open source the code?
A: Because this is a requirement of the community, and critical in ensuring that as the Linux Kernel evolves, and as Hyper-V evolves, that the Hyper-V Linux Device Drivers evolve as well.
Source: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/microsoft-linux-hyper-v-drivers.html
So... when was there a cover-up? Seems to me like it simply wasn't reported because no one considered it relevant to report, given that it was in the press release.
It's not something you brag about, just a reality. They wrote some linux drivers, and that's a huge waste of time and resources to maintain in a closed source fashion unless you have a really good reason (like Nvidia, who have to re-engineer much of X to allow modern graphics technology in Linux).
It's rare that Microsoft should have to touch GPL code for any reason, but now that they have to for Hyper-V, they're adhering to the GPL. At one point does this story become sinister or scary?
Duh, don't you get it? The loader is built into the BIOS [splashtop.com] already. That's why there was already an option to boot Splashtop, which responded with a message saying it was not installed. That loader is there to load and boot a Linux kernel more quickly and efficiently, but Splashtop is stored on another device. Early motherboards had it preinstalled on an integrated SSD. But this guy's motherboard didn't have an SSD built-in, so Splashtop has to be installed on the hard drive.
Unless Splashtop uses a static path and assumes all systems are placing it in the exact same place on the exact same hard drive configuration (IDE, SATA, etc), I would assume that anything having to do with a BIOS loading linux distribution would have to at least touch the BIOS to install. Whether or not it's loading into a ROM chip, it's talking to the BIOS, something linux is more than a little bit retarded at.
So I would also go with possibility B in my original post, where I mentioned that creating a consistent imaging, flashing, and customized install solution would be easier with Windows because A) they have a software distribution model and B) Everyone uses Windows. This jackass at least knew what he had to do when he opened that disk. Imagine if it had some wonky linux app. Then everyone but this jackass would have to figure out what the hell it was. Even the EeePC had a windows based loader for its linux installer. If you were the sort of masochist that uses linux, you could figure it out yourself or buy a usb dvdrom. It's that simple. I mean, do you even know if the installer is a mere image writer? If it's not, then it's going to be trickier through Linux.
So no, my post is not wrong. Linux remains a wacky and inconsistent platform that you do not want to distribute software for. Releasing untested software would make anyone nervous, and there's no way to guess when whatever linux distribution whomever is using decides to smash compatibility with the others (new features!). The fact of the matter is if you made a linux app, you would have to maintain it. And then everyone bitches at you to GPL anything you create, so then you have to create a lame little portal with the source code and some sort of open.company.com address. It's just a huge bitch to work with that system and community. I can see why Asus got sick of the Linux community and pulled out.
Wait, how many people even use linux? Like 1% of the desktop market share? Who would waste their time with that outside of the workstation market?
Alternatively, companies that wrote Windows software in the 90's can still enjoy compatibility because backwards compatibility just isn't that hard! Ask Sun.
I can tell you one thing for certain, if your hobbyist OS ever becomes actually secure (not merely make-believe secure), it's going to drop some of the little shred of compatibility it has--and it will be a headache for everyone who ever released complex software on it.
Why are you talking about that? This story has nothing to do with flashing the BIOS. This is about installing an OS to the hard drive.
Do you have any idea what the original post was about? The Linux they're talking about boots from a ROM, not the hard disk. If you weren't so busy attempting to disarm my points without adhering to any sort of concrete or relevant information, maybe you could have found time to read that.
This is a totally meaningless statement.
You're not very "technical," are you? It's a lot easier for Windows to talk to ACPI, PCI, or BIOS, because Microsoft maintains the specifications and designs their system internals accordingly. Linux on a PC is the same as on any other platform, it's UNIX. It's not meant to act that way. That gives Windows an advantage for talking to the BIOS in general--it's a PC system by design. That's not saying Linux CAN'T, just that it generally doesn't because it's platform-independent by design.
(A bunch of whiny debate team lingo about my statements)
This is the internet, you prissy bitch. Stay on the goddamn subject.
Yeah, let's all judge operating systems by the stereotypes about their users... BTW, any fervently irrational UNIX/Linux geeks you've talked to were probably just getting defensive in response to your fervently irrational attacks on Linux. They're mirroring you, and whatever insanity you throw at them. Except they are most likely reasonable later, when they're actually dealing with another reasonable person.
I can't believe you have the gall to attack my post from a logical standpoint. This whole paragraph describes an imaginary conflict and resolution.
And do you think none of those new Mac users are intentionally avoiding Windows? Or is avoiding Windows only okay when the alternative has your approval? Most new Mac users are leaving Windows because they're dissatisfied with it. If they were happy with Windows, they wouldn't have switched. Another thing that helps Mac OS X adoption is that it comes preinstalled on a popular line of computers. Put a Linux machine on store shelves and people will buy that too.
Mac users are switching because it offers a better user experience. Desktop linux was sold in stores and on new computers for years (notably by Walmart) and has consistently failed in the market. Dell attempted to sell Ubuntu on PC's and that failed in the market. I suggest you look at the sales figures on linux vs. windows netbooks. Desktop linux was rejected by the market in lieu of Windows, even on netbooks where it was supposed to get a foothold. Google Chrome OS is currently the only hope the linux kernel has of running on mass-market consumer machines.
Wow, now you are arguing in favor of archaic designs. Well-written DHTML is often a much better user experience than the classic full-document reload on every click of the 90's. I don't even get what you're trying to say about Google...
I am merely saying that they've lost sight of the distinction between document and application. Information is served best through more simplistic formats, like Wikipedia. You like linking to Wikipedia, right? It makes you feel sooo smart.
Despite what your preconceived notions may tell you, I do understand what computing is, and I assure you, desktops and laptops as we know them today are not going away any time soon. People will still have to write stuff in ten years, and you know what they're going to want for that? A full-sized keyboard.
Do you really think you need a tower to offer a keyboard... What are you, 12? You don't think they could make a workstation that docks with a mobile? Hardware is way too large and power consuming right now.
Am I the only one who doesn't find this strange at all? They're submitting drivers for Hyper-V to strengthen Windows Server as a host for mixed OS environments where UNIX servers need to be virtualized. They're working on interoperability to strenghten their product. For instance, Windows Server has a great NFS implementation. Some in our organization consider it the best, actually, so they replaced many of our UNIX NFS servers with Windows Servers.
Interoperability sells and linux kernel drivers are written under the GPL. This is an action Microsoft took both in self-interest and conformance with standard practices for submitting linux kernel code. It's a time saver to just use the GPL and submit kernel code than to go through the awkward trouble of maintaining a binary driver, which is only helpful in special cases, like where Nvidia is replacing much of the X/DRM stack.
I see. You're insane. Nevermind, then.
Do you even have any idea what the PC specification is? This means that Windows is built around the PC/BIOS architecture while linux is built around a more independent unix architecture. It's a technical truth, not an opinion.
If you weren't an abject moron, you might have argued that that was a good thing. Most would.
Some people try to take this problem into account when making decisions. To a naive person, it seems dogmatic, but it's actually quite pragmatic to behave in a way that would be in your interest if other people did the same. It lays the groundwork for your own interests to be served in the future.
This is ridiculous. I can't believe you argued the tragedy of the commons in regard to a basic technical problem. Here I am talking about how you use Windows to flash ROMs because it adheres to the PC specification and has a binary distribution model (so you can ship a simple unique flashing app with the board) and it is easier to speak to the BIOS through it and you brought out the tragedy of the commons.
Let me attempt to look at this for what it is, a software environment for my home computing hardware. With that in mind...
Some might argue that you are pushing a far inferior form of single system dominance by pushing UNIX.. You're pushing something here that's archaic to the point of being dangerous to national security infrastructure, the linux operating system. This is just plain scary. It's scary because Linux is such a castle in the sky. It's a massive basket of failed promises and assurances to the point where it is basically a trojan horse for enterprise-like infrastructure. It's so low quality and insecure that its use in government applications literally frightens me. Do you have any idea how bad the virus situation would be if Linux was the dominant system instead of Windows? The UNIX security model doesn't apply to complex systems like Linux, you poor fools! Why does the "future" need to be a poorly implemented flavor of a system from the past?
And this topic was on Home Desktops... there are no home desktop linux distributions competitive with commercial offerings.
You've thrown out the entire technical precedent involved in a completely simple issue of operating system choice for consumer hardware (actually the use thereof for bios operations) and made it an issue of philosophy... you're pushing this amateur hacked-to-shit 1970's operating system on me for what seems like religious reasons.
For example, remember the dark age of the web? You had to use Internet Explorer or some sites wouldn't display right, look right, or even let you in. Despite that, some people were willing use the competition and demand that sites work with their alternative browsers. You might have told them to just use IE and stop complaining or made fun of them for "thinking IE will dissolve their hands," but it's thanks to them that we have IE8, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari, and Opera 9. Without them we'd all still be on IE6 and there'd be ActiveX all over the place.
The IE example is terrible. Opera, Firefox (at one point), and Chrome can all be considered in some ways better or more advanced browsers than IE. They won legitimately, not idealistically. They are superior products. Linux is a sad and weak platform compared to Windows, so the issue fails. Now if you argued that something like BeOS should have succeeded Windows on a technical standpoint, maybe I could see your point. Maybe Mac OS X, but it's actually gaining market share. But Linux? Are you kidding me?
The web now-a-days sucks, anyway. It's full of useless javascript that makes it retardedly slow, everything is bloated, information flow is patchy, and it's basically dominated by a single entity wrapper, Google. Furthermore, people have lost track of the segregation of application and document models so now the web does both poorly.
We're still in the dark age of operating systems, but the end is in sight. Consumers now have a Linux option with some vendors. And there's those netbooks. Eventually, not supporting Linux will be as common as requiring Internet Explorer on a website is today. And then there will be a large number of people switching.
No. I don't think desktop linux will ever gain relevance. Not in its current form. If
Sometimes when an idea seems stupid to you, that's because it's actually wooshing over your head. Your comment reads like "Ha ha, if the Earth was round we'd fall off it you idiot!" If you stop assuming other people are morons, you just might learn something.
Oh, so I take it you have something insightful to impart, then? What exactly am I missing?
I presume that you refer to that portion of Windows that acts as a DOS emulator.
I was actually talking about a tool that formats and images a usb stick. That's not the kind of behavior that Wine "emulates."
It seems that you may be a bit infatuated with Bill Gate's operating system. In fact, the only reasons we don't routinely flash from Linux involve proprietary mfrs refusing to code for Linux.
You mean Dave Cutler's operating system, right? I am a big fan of NT, I won't lie. I think motherboard manufacturer's disinterest in linux has more to do with a lack of consistent driver API's, and the knowledge that they don't have to waste time and money so that 15 of their users can play with UNIX on their systems (home users). Someone else will do it. Workstation oriented boards will be far more likely to have good linux/unix support, since there isn't a passable or popular home/desktop linux offering but it's pretty serious in the workstation.
When I make fun of linux users, I am generally talking about home linux users.
I recently bought a board for the purpose of flashing chips that had been bricked. It works fine, and I've rescued three "dead" boards so far. Unfortunately, I can only run the software on Windows. It won't run from a virtual machine (or, at least, I'm not smart enough to have figured out how to do so) and I genuinely fear the results of running it in Wine. There ARE NO DRIVERS OR SOFTWARE available for Linux.
If you're running a linux/unix oriented shop, then that's actually a pretty good idea. Linux remains intentionally obscured from the PC architecture, so it will never be the sort of system you flash PC motherboards from... and that's probably a good thing.
Personally, I think that rescuing dead mainboards is serious shitzls. I just hate to do such a chore with a frivolous Windows gaming machine.
I don't find NT 6 to be frivolous at all.
I swear some of you people are like the North Korean refugees who are afraid if they touch the ground in South Korea, their hands will rot and fall off.
Your glorious supreme leader and chief asshat-for-life, Richard M Stallman, is lying to you. If you use Windows, your hands will not rot and fall off.
The motherboard manufacturer obviously mistakingly though you were part of the 99% of users that used Windows, and gave you an easy tool to either flash directly (do not attempt this in linux) or flash a usb stick to install it on boot (cross platform would be awkward for that). In the days of incompatible mac applications, they would create hybrid disks with HFS+ layers that would offer the files to you with Mac metadata. You don't have this luxury in linux. There is no right way to distribute binaries, so the best they can do is offer Windows junk and assume if you have Linux, you probably occasionally boot into Windows anyway when you have to complete grownup work.
The issue is not INSTALLING A LINUX DISTRIBUTION. The issue is flashing a ROM on your motherboard. Windows has a much better grasp of the PC specification, for better or worse. I would imagine it's much easier to write a tool that flags the motherboard that it's time to write from (either a ROM or the filesystem) to the ROM on reboot in Windows (ASUS style) or to provide a canned solution to image a usb stick in Windows. If you are a linux user, you might find syslinux and an img file somewhere on the CD that you can easily just dd to a usb stick.
DO NOT attempt this in Wine, it's going to require a part of Windows that that's system/driver oriented. Wine is for high level compatibility, it does not know how to speak to the PC/BIOS/PCI system like Windows does. This is a situation where it's using the part of Windows that makes it an Operating System, not an API layer.
If your tinfoil hat is on so firmly that it can never be removed, and you are now afraid of any system that is not approved by your glorious leader, this might have a better shot of working in ReactOS than it ever would in Linux. Of course, I assume that, like every other PC system, they don't understand the PC specification either, so it's going to get close to working and break something. I take no responsibility but to laugh at you--that is my duty.
I think what they've found here is right. The Radio Format has been getting a free ride and so have all those brigands listening to it in their cars. All the people in the world are a bunch of no-good sound thieves, Hell, they even have large fleshy scoops on the side of their heads just sucking up and stealing all the free sounds they can get close to. If only we could have those things permanently blocked so the only sounds that come through them are properly paid and licensed by the source.
I should start going to sleep at night with earmuffs on so some ghetto-blasting kid in a donk doesn't come cruising down the street blasting hip-hop and turning me into a music pirate. Then I'd have no choice but to turn myself in for participating in an illegal public listening of a song I didn't pay for.
The fact that Google will have a larger potential market than Linux currently has is a point I've accepted. When I'm doubting is that software developers will treat Google Chrome OS as anything other than a platform they need to port "good enough" software to. So by combining two (different!) markets Google and Linux could both benefit! And that Google were fools when they said their product is based on Linux if it can't run Linux software, and they're going to have to stop doing that!
First off, porting software is a situation google appears to be out and out avoiding by doing a "web-centric" OS. I don't believe Chrome OS will have a native execution environment exposed to developers, but that's just a theory. I have a feeling Google is putting this system squarely in the cloud. It's probably why they are able to make sweeping claims about the security of their system. No native execution = fewer casual exploits.
Why will Adobe et al fix this for Google Chrome OS, but not for Google Chrome OS (as well as Linux/X11 people)? That's my question. X11 isn't incapable of being fast and smooth, it's just that the drivers and software need to be (re)written. It's the same either way! Many people at Google run Linux and will continue to do so after Chrome OS is released, so at best it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
X11 is so overly complex for what it actually accomplishes in the desktop space that it might actually be cheaper and more elegant to wipe it out and start from scratch on display. As it stands, both Windows and Mac have display layers with superior multimedia performance. Better driver API's and GL integration could go a long way in spurring linux driver development for display. Adobe's flash isn't slow on linux by choice, it's simply not as fast of a display layer as windows offers and there's no "right" way to accelerate it. In linux, compatibility vs performance is a thinner tightrope vs. windows where there is a robust and standard way to accelerate things for display (DirectX).
I only have internet access about three-quarters of the time I'm trying to do work (and when I have it I often achieve less work than in the quarter of the time I don't...), and surely I'm not unrepresentative. Maybe it's the fact that I try to do (uni) work on my laptop that makes me unrepresentative...
This is definitely not the right OS for you. I personally won't be running it, either.
I wouldn't. But there's enough people who switch to Linux and insist on using Firefox even though it sucks donkeysballs when there's browsers on Linux which don't. I'm not the Firefox-OpenOffice.org-etc type,[1] so I'm trying to judge a group I'm not: but you're probably right in that the sort of person who installs Ubuntu/has someone install Ubuntu onto their computer to make it work when Windows dies, but then assumes they will have access to the same (free) software they were running on Windows, is not the sort of person who will be buying these Google Chrome OS machines. I don't know ... (and I don't plan on buying one).
Anyone who is able to effectively use Ubuntu could be considered an expert user. It's not that Ubuntu's usability paradigm is *hard*, it's just that it doesn't adhere to its own principles strictly. When things fail on Ubuntu, the process of solving the problem is often way more obscure and complicated than on Windows or especially Mac. I think Google Chrome OS will kill Ubuntu as a casual OS, but I think hardcore linux users will not switch to it- it has nothing they want.
[1]: I'm the has-run-Linux-for-10+-years, writes-patches-to-his-regular-software-to-make-sure-it-works-for-him type. Linux seems amazingly more popular now than it did when I started using it, so that might make me overestimate it today, but it seems like many people who choose to use Linux now don't necessarily understand the costs/benefits
It's got nothing to do with X. X11 has more users than Google Chrome OS has. At best, one can assume third-party software writers will care as much for an X11-based Google Chrome OS as they would for an independent Google Chrome OS (meaning they have to port three times). It's hard to see how you could rationally conclude they'll care more for an Linux-based Google OS that uses its own graphical system, then they'd care for a Linux-based Google OS that uses X11.
Driver writers might have the benefit of both a more stable and consistent driver API to work with and a larger expected userbase. Hardware providers will give higher priority to Chrome OS because it is a higher profile OS with a larger anticipated userbase. It is more important, in short. I suspect it will render any home-oriented Desktop Linux moot within months of release.
It's also hard to see how you could rationally conclude it'd be easier for end users to deal with a Linux-based Google OS that can't run Linux software, then a Linux-based Google OS that can run Linux software.
There are no successful or popular desktop linux distributions, so the lack of common linux software should be no issue. Google's online apps outstrip the popularity of open source linux software to such an extent that this will be a nonissue for the web-centric home users Google is targeting.
If Google's not using X11, they're going to have to be really careful about making sure people don't talk about Linux and Google Chrome OS in the same sentence, except as a contrast. Otherwise people are going to be wondering--Firefox and OpenOffice.org and Skype and Pidgin and whathaveyou all run on Linux. Why don't they run on this Linux (yet)?
You will not be running Firefox on Chrome OS, because the Chrome Browser is the basis for the desktop environment. You will likely be using Google Docs for your office suite and something talk-oriented for IM. Application developers like Skype will likely find a way to get their application running on the Chrome OS, since it will be larger than Desktop Linux. I think you vastly overestimate the popularity of linux for home users, so the lack of a "familiar" environment will only inconvenience a small number of users, comparatively. Third-party software developers don't take linux very seriously. They will have much more reason to take Chrome OS seriously. Besides, the interface for Chrome OS applications is supposedly the web-- web-centric companies can deploy on this operating system on day one.
(Plus, as far as speed's concerned, when it comes down to it, X11 is plenty fast enough for a netbook. For chrissake, who's going to run something that needs instant responsiveness on a netbook?)
The web is an extremely rich media environment. In the best adapted netbook-based linux distributions (such as UNR and Moblin) on an atom-based netbook, you can not attain smooth video watching a youtube video. It doesn't matter whose fault this is; it is unacceptable. Responsive media is essential for a home use platform, because home users' computing is centered around media. That means things like X11 and pulseaudio have no place on a desktop computer.
No offense, but I trust groklaw more than an unknown /. poster.
Groklaw is just a reactionary front for the FSF. They will always search for a legalese means by which to parrot the tripe that anti-industry figures like RMS spout. They've got a clear bias against Microsoft, so any information you get on that matter from them will always tell you the same thing, no matter what the case is.
I'm not terribly impressed with them or their paranoid bullshit, so I will wish you and your tinfoil hat a good day.