We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
Blizzard doesnt have a track record of cracking down on Wine usage, and its not like they dont know it exists.
We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly. Blizzards games have tended to be shining examples of Wine actually working well.
Be as pedantic as you want, Wine emulates Windows behavior. Whether it does so by reimplementing the libraries is irrelevant; the thing that is accomplished is environment emulation.
Why would they release a Linux client for WoW when WoW has been probably the best supported program with Wine for the last 5 years? You DO know they made the decision to go with both DirectX and OpenGL graphics paths, when they could have just done the windows only DirectX, right?
I mean, if there were things that didnt work with WoW/Wine, yea maybe they could fix it, but it was flawless, with only occasional patch-day issues. Addons, graphics, everything "just worked".
Complain about the diablo 3 issue, but complaining about WoW's linux support? Seriously?
Heres another useful response: If you refuse to do a fresh install, at LEAST remove everything labeled "HP" in programs and features-- especially the security bs they hand out in the oem installs.
4, because its large binary files rather than individual text files, disk corruption is more damaging and harder to recover from
Ill go let the mySQL guys know right away, so they can get on converting back to individual plaintext files-- since those are so clearly more reliable.
And how it can "fail" at "installing" a "driver", which might have no consequences whatsoever.
Then there are 3 possibilities: 1) the device really does need a driver, and it hasnt been supplied 2) the device has malfunctioned, and is not responding properly 3) youve done something to your base windows install (like screwing with the inf folder) that prevents windows from properly configuring the device
As I understand it, "installing a driver" in the context of USB has something to do with associating that particular device with that particular USB port. It is, in fact, doing something, because subsequent connections from the same device to the same USB port will not initiate an "installation" (which incidentally disproves your theory... if you dont believe me, remove and reconnect a USB mouse to the same USB port: first time will cause an instalation, second will not).
And no, "things related to system configuration" arent reported as installing a driver. Things related to the OS talking to hardware are, because thats what a driver is.
If secureboot gets the boot (har har), Im hoping extlinux is here to stay. After working with syslinux et al for some time, Ive grown to love their flexibility and simplicity.
No, because there are 0 commands in bash that will allow you to add a vmware repository, modify a vmware profile, and set that profile as the default, or else export it as an ISO. They only exist in the PowerCLI as cmdlets, not in any other environment.
Ive used OSX, Windows XP-7, Gnome 2, Gnome 3/unity, and KDE 3/4. I like the feel of KDE4, but feel like it has WAY too much futzing required. I think OSX is confusing and limiting (the window management I havent gotten the hang of, and it seems like it wants to hobble you).
Of them all, yes, I prefer the windows 7 style that reveals how many windows an app has open without using up scads of space, and auto-organizes them. It is far more useable when you have 50 windows open than any of the alternatives.
I do both NOC work, networking, and helpdesk. Consulting is what I do, and if it involves computers or computer communication, I will fix it.
Helpdesk issues have gotten pretty easy, because I have got a pretty good handle on what users struggle with, and how to fix their issues. Windows isnt perfect, but it works, and its pretty consistent. Linux, from my own experience, is not, and while you can set someone up with an Ubuntu install and train them on it, for the most part its a risky proposition. Will they opt to run dist-upgrade? Will that break everything? You dont know, its like playing russian roulette.
Its a well known fact that you cant easily switch from IDE mode to AHCI mode after windows is installed. Luckily, that isnt exactly something your average user does (and doesnt impact the "desktop experience"), and those who ARE interested generally can figure out how to do it.
SMB network shares dont use drivers at all. HID devices 99.99% of the time arent "installing a driver", theyre setting up the config for that device. HID drivers come with Windows.
You mean Windows' mess of deeply nested and illogical configuration options and wizards?
Having had to mess with both at times, i would MUCH rather deal with the incredibly well documented registry than deal with gconf +.app folders +/etc options and try to figure out which one wins out at the end of the day.
As for "wizards", who have you ever met that uses a wizard to config something in windows? And what alternative does Linux offer that would be better in such a scenario? Have the user just fire up a terminal and paste some random commands in that he found on the web? Yea, THATS user friendly. As of 2-3 years ago, if your mouse wasnt working properly or you had the wrong resolutions for X, the standard fix involved editing xorg.conf, which if done improperly strands you at a console with no help available.
Incidentally, the first time that happened was probably the best learning experience I had on Linux, but it wasnt exactly pleasant to try to figure out how to survive now that IRC and web browsing were out (until I discovered irssi and links)
Nah, the real problem with Linux is the same thing it's been for years - lack of critical applications. Sure, these days, any web-based applications will work like a charm... but it's things crucial to your business - in my case AutoCAD, MasterCAM and our Infor ERP system - that prevent Linux on anything but the most basic of machines.
You dont think the fact that upgrades will randomly strand large percentages of userbase without sound, or without working wireless, or will bork Intel NICs.,...etc has anything to do with it?
The problem is that without the huge resources that MS has to do QA on a massive level, Linux will NEVER have the release-day polish that MS has (at least if you forget that ME and Vista existed...)
Because there is no way they could anticipate all possible scenarios.
Possibility: There are two dhcp servers on the network handing out different subnets. The native diagnostic tries to ping the gateway, which isnt responding because your dhcp config is wrong. Diagnostic is reporting "Gateway down", which is incorrect, and throws you for a loop.
Or, you just go to CLI and do "ipconfig/all", and you see the problem in 10 seconds; and you verify that the gateway doesnt exist with a quick arp -a.
Speaking of Powershell, it is more than a little amusing how the percentage of admins that care about it rounds to zero in spite of all the hype we heard from Microsoft droids a few years back.
Ignorance abounds. Powershell is pretty much mandatory for many Exchange and VMWare tasks. IIRC, you need to use PowerCLI to set up a hostprofile in VMWare (which isnt a minor thing, if you intend to do stateless installs), and modifying Exchange certs in 2007 comes to mind.
Also, if you plan to do any tasks for a non-trivial number of objects, youd be pretty foolish to try to do so from the GUI.
Unless Im mistaken, powershell is really only being pushed for server use. Its not even bundled with the desktop, you have to install it extra. On the server from 2008 and on, its built in.
Maybe thats because the Windows desktop environment tends to be far superior for the end user than the Linux one. Does linux have better updates backend, better patching philosophy, better boot options? Sure, but thats all irrelevant, and if you doubt that the Windows desktop experience is superior you simply dont work with enough normal human beings.
Queue about 50 responses about how X distro with Y desktop environment and Z window manager is superior, but all with curiously absent explainations for how your average joe is going to set that up, much less get support for it when something inevitably doesnt work that they need. Good luck going to the ubuntuforums and starting with "I ripped out Gnome for lxde, and replaced grub with extlinux....."
I spent several years with Ubuntu as a primary distro, and it was both a lot of fun and a great learning experience, but most of that experience came from things like upgrading to 7.04 and spending several days trying to iron out why sound no longer works, or figuring out why Ventrilo wont cooperate with Wine and push-to-talk. The thing is, Im not really your average user and most people arent gonna want to spend days futzing with kernel driver blacklists or compatibility layers. The honest to goodness truth is that with just about ANY problem you could find on a Windows desktop, I could google it and find a technet article, a MS KB, and a ton of forum and experts-exchange answers on it. The same simply isnt true for Linux, and thats partly because of its fragmentation and marketshare.
Linux is great for systems that will be managed by folks who do Linux, and its great when those folks can set up a locked down system for someone else. But as an every day replacement for Windows, to be managed and run by average Joe? Yea, not quite yet.
I have bad news for you (and OP)-- no matter what solution you pick, at the end of the day its going to be a computer in someone's closet hosting a VPN. The only question is whose closet, whose computer, and what type of computer.
Honestly, depending on where you are, getting a cage in a co-lo center like equinox or Hurricane Electric and throwing your own box in there may be the best solution. The "company" becomes "the navy" and "the colo provider", both of which are at the high end of "trust-worthy"-- reputable colos tend to have remarkably good security. Also, since its your cage, you can audit it to your heart's content: no nasty suprises about unpatched vulns or anything.
I was looking into something similar, and Hurricane Electric offers cages with really good connection (gbit plus) for really good pricing. Only limitations are the power (7amps, i think), but if you build your server right (like a xeon E3-1220Lv2 or E3-1260L) you can get a very performant appliance that can handle all the VPN you can throw at it. Personally, Id recommend pfSense if price is a factor, otherwise you could do somethin like a sonicwall or whatever (though they will be several times more expensive and handle several times less traffic than the xeon).
The quality of the OS has not been a problem for 3 years now, and before that was only a problem for 2 years.
Nowadays, they DO have control of the quality of the shipped "distro", and THAT is a problem-- they inevitably make it far far worse by lowering PC performance by 20-30% with all their bloatware.
Slashdot Mirror
Heres the blue-post (Blizzard statement)
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#402
We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
Blizzard doesnt have a track record of cracking down on Wine usage, and its not like they dont know it exists.
A clear and concise explaination for why they might ban Linux users. Only problem? Banning Linux users isnt whats happening here, and they have stated that playing on Linux will NOT get you banned:
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/blizzard-clarifies-diablo-iii-ban.html
We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.
Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.
I dont think Warden works properly on Linux, but then it didnt for WoW either, and that didnt stop it from working flawlessly. Blizzards games have tended to be shining examples of Wine actually working well.
Be as pedantic as you want, Wine emulates Windows behavior. Whether it does so by reimplementing the libraries is irrelevant; the thing that is accomplished is environment emulation.
Why would they release a Linux client for WoW when WoW has been probably the best supported program with Wine for the last 5 years? You DO know they made the decision to go with both DirectX and OpenGL graphics paths, when they could have just done the windows only DirectX, right?
I mean, if there were things that didnt work with WoW/Wine, yea maybe they could fix it, but it was flawless, with only occasional patch-day issues. Addons, graphics, everything "just worked".
Complain about the diablo 3 issue, but complaining about WoW's linux support? Seriously?
Heres another useful response: If you refuse to do a fresh install, at LEAST remove everything labeled "HP" in programs and features-- especially the security bs they hand out in the oem installs.
Did you not read my post about its necessity in Exchange and VMWare tasks?
Or are you now going to claim that Exchange and VMWare are blips that noone cares about, too?
4, because its large binary files rather than individual text files, disk corruption is more damaging and harder to recover from
Ill go let the mySQL guys know right away, so they can get on converting back to individual plaintext files-- since those are so clearly more reliable.
And how it can "fail" at "installing" a "driver", which might have no consequences whatsoever.
Then there are 3 possibilities:
1) the device really does need a driver, and it hasnt been supplied
2) the device has malfunctioned, and is not responding properly
3) youve done something to your base windows install (like screwing with the inf folder) that prevents windows from properly configuring the device
As I understand it, "installing a driver" in the context of USB has something to do with associating that particular device with that particular USB port. It is, in fact, doing something, because subsequent connections from the same device to the same USB port will not initiate an "installation" (which incidentally disproves your theory... if you dont believe me, remove and reconnect a USB mouse to the same USB port: first time will cause an instalation, second will not).
And no, "things related to system configuration" arent reported as installing a driver. Things related to the OS talking to hardware are, because thats what a driver is.
If secureboot gets the boot (har har), Im hoping extlinux is here to stay. After working with syslinux et al for some time, Ive grown to love their flexibility and simplicity.
No, because there are 0 commands in bash that will allow you to add a vmware repository, modify a vmware profile, and set that profile as the default, or else export it as an ISO. They only exist in the PowerCLI as cmdlets, not in any other environment.
I stand corrected, I never even looked on Win7-- not having seen it in start menu or progs/features, i assumed it was not there.
Ive used OSX, Windows XP-7, Gnome 2, Gnome 3/unity, and KDE 3/4. I like the feel of KDE4, but feel like it has WAY too much futzing required. I think OSX is confusing and limiting (the window management I havent gotten the hang of, and it seems like it wants to hobble you).
Of them all, yes, I prefer the windows 7 style that reveals how many windows an app has open without using up scads of space, and auto-organizes them. It is far more useable when you have 50 windows open than any of the alternatives.
I do both NOC work, networking, and helpdesk. Consulting is what I do, and if it involves computers or computer communication, I will fix it.
Helpdesk issues have gotten pretty easy, because I have got a pretty good handle on what users struggle with, and how to fix their issues. Windows isnt perfect, but it works, and its pretty consistent. Linux, from my own experience, is not, and while you can set someone up with an Ubuntu install and train them on it, for the most part its a risky proposition. Will they opt to run dist-upgrade? Will that break everything? You dont know, its like playing russian roulette.
Its a well known fact that you cant easily switch from IDE mode to AHCI mode after windows is installed. Luckily, that isnt exactly something your average user does (and doesnt impact the "desktop experience"), and those who ARE interested generally can figure out how to do it.
SMB network shares dont use drivers at all. HID devices 99.99% of the time arent "installing a driver", theyre setting up the config for that device. HID drivers come with Windows.
You mean Windows' mess of deeply nested and illogical configuration options and wizards?
Having had to mess with both at times, i would MUCH rather deal with the incredibly well documented registry than deal with gconf + .app folders + /etc options and try to figure out which one wins out at the end of the day.
As for "wizards", who have you ever met that uses a wizard to config something in windows? And what alternative does Linux offer that would be better in such a scenario? Have the user just fire up a terminal and paste some random commands in that he found on the web? Yea, THATS user friendly. As of 2-3 years ago, if your mouse wasnt working properly or you had the wrong resolutions for X, the standard fix involved editing xorg.conf, which if done improperly strands you at a console with no help available.
Incidentally, the first time that happened was probably the best learning experience I had on Linux, but it wasnt exactly pleasant to try to figure out how to survive now that IRC and web browsing were out (until I discovered irssi and links)
Nah, the real problem with Linux is the same thing it's been for years - lack of critical applications. Sure, these days, any web-based applications will work like a charm... but it's things crucial to your business - in my case AutoCAD, MasterCAM and our Infor ERP system - that prevent Linux on anything but the most basic of machines.
You dont think the fact that upgrades will randomly strand large percentages of userbase without sound, or without working wireless, or will bork Intel NICs.,...etc has anything to do with it?
The problem is that without the huge resources that MS has to do QA on a massive level, Linux will NEVER have the release-day polish that MS has (at least if you forget that ME and Vista existed...)
Because there is no way they could anticipate all possible scenarios.
Possibility: There are two dhcp servers on the network handing out different subnets. The native diagnostic tries to ping the gateway, which isnt responding because your dhcp config is wrong. Diagnostic is reporting "Gateway down", which is incorrect, and throws you for a loop.
Or, you just go to CLI and do "ipconfig /all", and you see the problem in 10 seconds; and you verify that the gateway doesnt exist with a quick arp -a.
Speaking of Powershell, it is more than a little amusing how the percentage of admins that care about it rounds to zero in spite of all the hype we heard from Microsoft droids a few years back.
Ignorance abounds. Powershell is pretty much mandatory for many Exchange and VMWare tasks. IIRC, you need to use PowerCLI to set up a hostprofile in VMWare (which isnt a minor thing, if you intend to do stateless installs), and modifying Exchange certs in 2007 comes to mind.
Also, if you plan to do any tasks for a non-trivial number of objects, youd be pretty foolish to try to do so from the GUI.
Unless Im mistaken, powershell is really only being pushed for server use. Its not even bundled with the desktop, you have to install it extra. On the server from 2008 and on, its built in.
PS None of the above applies to Win8, which I think is going to be an unmitigated disaster for any poor user who gets stuck with it.
Maybe thats because the Windows desktop environment tends to be far superior for the end user than the Linux one. Does linux have better updates backend, better patching philosophy, better boot options? Sure, but thats all irrelevant, and if you doubt that the Windows desktop experience is superior you simply dont work with enough normal human beings.
Queue about 50 responses about how X distro with Y desktop environment and Z window manager is superior, but all with curiously absent explainations for how your average joe is going to set that up, much less get support for it when something inevitably doesnt work that they need. Good luck going to the ubuntuforums and starting with "I ripped out Gnome for lxde, and replaced grub with extlinux....."
I spent several years with Ubuntu as a primary distro, and it was both a lot of fun and a great learning experience, but most of that experience came from things like upgrading to 7.04 and spending several days trying to iron out why sound no longer works, or figuring out why Ventrilo wont cooperate with Wine and push-to-talk. The thing is, Im not really your average user and most people arent gonna want to spend days futzing with kernel driver blacklists or compatibility layers. The honest to goodness truth is that with just about ANY problem you could find on a Windows desktop, I could google it and find a technet article, a MS KB, and a ton of forum and experts-exchange answers on it. The same simply isnt true for Linux, and thats partly because of its fragmentation and marketshare.
Linux is great for systems that will be managed by folks who do Linux, and its great when those folks can set up a locked down system for someone else. But as an every day replacement for Windows, to be managed and run by average Joe? Yea, not quite yet.
another M$-Windows-like kludge?
Last I checked MS is pushing Server Core (aka GUI-less server install) and powershell everything.
You were saying?
PS: the registry isnt a bad idea, it just has a lot of cruft. Most anti-registry sentiment is based on ignorance.
I have bad news for you (and OP)-- no matter what solution you pick, at the end of the day its going to be a computer in someone's closet hosting a VPN.
The only question is whose closet, whose computer, and what type of computer.
Honestly, depending on where you are, getting a cage in a co-lo center like equinox or Hurricane Electric and throwing your own box in there may be the best solution. The "company" becomes "the navy" and "the colo provider", both of which are at the high end of "trust-worthy"-- reputable colos tend to have remarkably good security. Also, since its your cage, you can audit it to your heart's content: no nasty suprises about unpatched vulns or anything.
I was looking into something similar, and Hurricane Electric offers cages with really good connection (gbit plus) for really good pricing. Only limitations are the power (7amps, i think), but if you build your server right (like a xeon E3-1220Lv2 or E3-1260L) you can get a very performant appliance that can handle all the VPN you can throw at it. Personally, Id recommend pfSense if price is a factor, otherwise you could do somethin like a sonicwall or whatever (though they will be several times more expensive and handle several times less traffic than the xeon).
they had no control of the quality of the OS.
The quality of the OS has not been a problem for 3 years now, and before that was only a problem for 2 years.
Nowadays, they DO have control of the quality of the shipped "distro", and THAT is a problem-- they inevitably make it far far worse by lowering PC performance by 20-30% with all their bloatware.