Your commentsfail to take into account Microsoft's biggest strength: Marketing.
XP offered nothing to the average user that Win2k didn't already do better, but people migrated to it. They'll do the same for Vista.
Re:Old, but valid news
on
Sudo vs. Root
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· Score: 1
You made one good point and several arguable ones. However, the good point is the entire basis of the whole silly article, so please allow me to repeat it:
poorly configured systems are less secure.
That's it! Yet another article telling us that poorly configured systems are less secure. Amazing stuff.
The fact that it doesn't have DRM is one reason the industry won't work very hard to keep it from dying (or at all).
The quality issue is one I find vastly amusing--CDs are being portrayed as 'not good enough' in the audiophile market, and 'so severely overkill that you'll never hear the loss in mp3' to the mass market, when in fact neither are true.
On a complete tangent, the biggest thing I don't like about CDs is that when they get damaged, they're effectively destroyed around that area of the disk. A record can get scratched, and you can still hear the music. Digital skipping is completely amelodic.
At any rate, CDs are here for a few more years. They _will_ get replaced eventually, but it's going to be at least 15 years before we lose physical media completely.
First of all, make sure the program is ready to be released.
It has to be WELL and COMPLETELY documented! If there's no useable manual, then it's just another beta. I use a program routinely that's robust, full-featured, and poorly-documented. There are endless features I can't suss out, because not only are they undocumented but what they're tied to is also undocumented.
The user interface has to be as close to standard as reasonable, and has to work well. If it's obtuse or painful to use, it'll get tossed in the garbage ASAP.
The code needs to be written properly. In other words, clean, efficient, robust, and portable! If for instance it needs gcc version 4.4.2.3.8.1.0b (as opposed to any ANSI C compiler), then it needs fixing. If it needs gmake (as opposed to make) then it needs fixing. If the man page requires groff instead of troff, then it needs to be burned to the ground!
You're right. Two interesting facts come up in your post, which are worth commenting on:...the chances of binaries from that era doing something are a lot higher than say running any unix binary from that era on the latest Red Hat/Debian/Whatever.
and
Compiling with the latest GCC..."
Yep. And thank you Linux, for trashing Unix porting progress and taking us back to 1981. SunOS binaries from 1993 will almost certainly run on Solaris 10. Same with HP-UX and AIX. On the other hand, Linux binaries from last Tuesday may or may not work on the same machine after patches. Between distros, you're almost completely SOL.
There are TONS of ways to create portable code--everything that doesn't deeply tie into the kernel or device drivers should be portable. X11 was part of that portability, as were many other bits and pieces. The good Unix developers took pride in writing efficient, portable, clean code.
Linux as a complete system and a community (i.e. not just the kernel) has turned its back on backwards compatability, and also on interoperability. Worse, it is developing a base of 'standards' which are absolutely required. Most apps now don't need a C compiler, they need GCC version 'x'. Similar problems exist for make/gmake and bloody troff/groff! That's right, people are writing MAN PAGES which require a specific release and version of GNU tools to read (MPlayer is one example).
The more time I spend with Linux, the more frustrating it is to see a ground-up free OS making all of the same mistakes that MS has made, but without the marketing/financial benefit to justify them.
Yep, this is called marketing. One might even call it sleazy marketing, but it's not a patch on what goes on in most other industries.
Have you ever seen an entertainment show (Entertainment Tonight, etc.) claim that an upcoming movie is going to suck? Or that an actor can't act?
Have you read a BAD review of any audio equipment? The high-end audio industry is probably the single biggest collection of criminal liars in the world.
This is so old that it's not even non-news. It's just par for the course. Assume that this behaviour runs every industry and business you interact with, and you'll have a fairly clear view of the western world.
All of the reasons listed are valid. I like books, I like being able to carry them around with me, I like the feel of them, I like not having to plug in a password every time I sit down to read one, etc., etc..
Here's the real question: Why on earth should ebooks be considered a desirable target? Why must we try to put EVERYTHING into electronic format? The human/computer interface is so incredibly limited, and doesn't add anything to what books provide, except in the case of reference material searching.
Why is this culture so obsessed with turning everything we do into a computer application?
So here's the conundrum I have with obvious and satirical product placement. Take a movie like Shrek 2. Everyone in the land of Far Far Away is drinking coffee in Farbucks. When the dragon torches Farbucks, they all run across the street into...another Farbucks.
Obviously a sharp jab at Starbucks, but I'm also willing to bet that they PAID to be made fun of, because it will indirectly drive up sales.
Nothing to say about piracy here, but I do want to comment on EA.
When computer games were young and either text-based or vapid arcade fluff (or possibly both) a new company was founded, called Electronic Arts. These guys (and gals) figured that computer games could be a new art form, and truly deserved to be backed as art.
Archon. M.U.L.E. Hard Hat Mack. These games paved the way for computer games as more than 'arcade at home.' Now, however, EA is a 2 BILLION dollar purveyor of schlock and mediocrity.
Pity to see that sooner or later, all pioneers either go bankrupt or lose their direction.
You've got it backwards. This is how Linux was written.
Windows was written by a team of intelligent, dedicated, focused programmers subject to rigorous peer review. The only downside is that the corporation has some very clear and explicit goals which don't include code quality.
Microsoft's opinion matters because (a) they're HUGE, and (b) HTPC is getting close to maturity.
Sooner or later, the system feeding your TV will likely be a purpose-built PC. For many people it already is. Since that device is probably going to run Windows, they have a strong say in it.
The other thing has nothing to do with the content, and everything to do with the hardware format. When DVD drives become passe', you'll buy a new PC with either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. If only one of those is plug-and-play, then that's the one that will DOMINATE the PC world. Amongst other things, this will also determine what people master their indy content on.
Microsoft is a giant, and like most giants the world shakes when they roll over.
Most people don't give a rat's ass about copy protection. They SHOULD, but most don't. It's only in the technical venues that you see most people even aware of it, let alone concerned.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Individually, people may be ignorant. Collectively, they become stupid. You can explain something to a person, and they'll actually understand--it's really quite wonderful! If left to their own devices though, they'll revert back to their 'pre-enlightened' behaviour, but with more knowledge.
In the USA, the backers of the Republican party plotted to bring Bush into power, for the sole purpose of invading Iraq as a pretext for eventually establishing control over the entire middle-east. Bush lied about WMD, lied about links between the Hussein family and bin Laden, lied about links between his own family's links to Hussein, and when a large amount of the population was told about it, what did they do? They voted him back in! The media and the political groups can and do lie with impunity, even when the truth is readily available, because people want to believe the authorities, even when they know better. If you tell the truth to people, they'll clamp their hands over their ears and start yelling, "I'm not listening!!!"
How many people actually refuse to buy from a company after hearing about some horrible behaviour (Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Sony, Halliburton, etc.?) Probably less than a tenth of a percent. So when only 0.1% of the people who actually know the truth don't act on it, how much potential danger is there in lying to the population? If a huge scandal breaks and the populace actually gets outraged (very rare indeed), then in a month they'll have forgotten about it anyways, and things will be back to business as usual.
People are wilfully ignorant, and will happily replace their blinders after they've been ripped off. That, in my mind, is stupidity.
"It's no wonder the average person turns on them when they finally learn the truth. You can't keep lying to people and expect them to trust you."
I was right with you up until this comment.
The average person has no fucking clue. If you TELL them how badly they're being lied to, they'll rationalise it to themselves by assuming that you're stretching the truth, or that the companies aren't really THAT bad, or that there's nothing they can do.
The average person is wilfully blind, retarded, and damned near too lazy to breathe. Most corporations operate on that principle.
This only works in a relatively small environment. Sooner or later, you need your own support people, no matter what the OS. When this happens, Windows needs about 3.5x as many people per 'computing unit' (measured any number of ways, it comes out to a similar number) as Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX). Sadly, this is a benefit for Windows dominance--inefficiency leads to visual recognition. If 60% of a company runs on Unix and the remaining 40% on Windows but there are three times as many Windows admins, who do you think the execs associate with IT? Who gets the 'environment architect' jobs? Even crashes--they don't look good and they piss people off, but the OS that causes the most problems is the OS that is forefront in peoples' minds.
Efficency and reliability may yet doom Unix. INCREASED headcount for Windows is going to push it towards global domination.
Very interesting comments. I know quite a few people who would at least compare favourably to your source, and absolutely none of them would agree with the declaration of NT as a revolution, or even a particularly interesting footnote. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that at least one intelligent and qualified person _does_ believe that.
I remember being frustrated with MacOS (after coming from 8-bit OSes), and being quite excited over buying my first computer and being able to get this NEW thing called Windows 3.0, which would fix all of the mistakes Apple had made when they moved from the ][+ to the Mac. Then I started using it, and discovered just how horrible it was. Eventually I left and went to OS/2 2.1, and then Win95. Architecturally OS/2 was a masterpiece, but Win95 stole enough ideas from everything else in existence that it actually had the best GUI around, when it came out. Pity it was still a buggy shell on top of DOS.
Meanwhile, NT4 was around, and was mostly a server OS by default, since it wouldn't run any actual applications. In all honesty, it wasn't bad--it ran, and it was relatively solid once it was installed and configured.
Win2k was MS's high-water-mark. It was a resource pig at the time, but it was the most stable OS MS has ever released, according not just to myself but to some intelligent Wintel admins I know and respect. It also had some fairly revolutionary features, at least as compared to most OSes (including Unix). Sun's new service manifest model with automatic service restarters isn't a _lot_ different in concept to what MS has been doing for a long time now. As much as I like to bash MS, they have come up with some good refinements to existing ideas.
However, where's the revolution? What made NT revolutionary? I don't see anything--a GUI for managing the OS (which is based on traditional OS concepts) is occasionally helpful, sometimes confusing, and decidedly more problematic to maintain. As near as I can see, that was the biggest architectural change that MS made, and I'm not at all sure it was a good one.
I wouldn't say that anyone who uses WIndows as a server is a moron, but the only problems that I see MS solving _better_ than the competition are:
1) Problems that MS has invented (i.e. the best CIFS server is made by the company that invented the protocol because they didn't want to use NFS). 2) Short-term user happiness and lower initial training costs (which in my experience are offset by the higher ser maintenance costs). 3) Hiding easy but knowledge-intensive tasks behind a nearly knowledge-free interface.
Out of curiosity, what does your OS Theory friend think of Solaris 10?
Compulsions are often labelled addiction, when it's simply the wrong word. What you are arguing over are compulsions. What Szasz implicitly suggests is that all addictions are actually compulsions.
Addiction, as a biochemical feedback loop, is NOT a function of the individual, it's a function of the chemistry! Heroin is addictive. Crystal meth is frighteningly addictive (with the highest rate of recidivism of all known drugs). Acid is not addictive. THC is not addictive. Sex, gambling, and the internet are not addictive. Alcohol is addictive. There's a clear definition and a clearly understood mechanism, and too many people think that addiction is 'what they think it is.'
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Her classroom, her rules.
Don't like it? Leave.
There now. Wasn't that simple?
Your commentsfail to take into account Microsoft's biggest strength: Marketing.
XP offered nothing to the average user that Win2k didn't already do better, but people migrated to it. They'll do the same for Vista.
You made one good point and several arguable ones. However, the good point is the entire basis of the whole silly article, so please allow me to repeat it:
poorly configured systems are less secure.
That's it! Yet another article telling us that poorly configured systems are less secure. Amazing stuff.
The fact that it doesn't have DRM is one reason the industry won't work very hard to keep it from dying (or at all).
The quality issue is one I find vastly amusing--CDs are being portrayed as 'not good enough' in the audiophile market, and 'so severely overkill that you'll never hear the loss in mp3' to the mass market, when in fact neither are true.
On a complete tangent, the biggest thing I don't like about CDs is that when they get damaged, they're effectively destroyed around that area of the disk. A record can get scratched, and you can still hear the music. Digital skipping is completely amelodic.
At any rate, CDs are here for a few more years. They _will_ get replaced eventually, but it's going to be at least 15 years before we lose physical media completely.
"EA is stumbling, and a big part of its time-tested strategy is about to change."
Ooh, this sounds good. Does it mean that they're going to write original, quality software?
"The company hopes that its next mega-franchise..."
Hmm. Apparently not. Pity.
First of all, make sure the program is ready to be released.
It has to be WELL and COMPLETELY documented! If there's no useable manual, then it's just another beta. I use a program routinely that's robust, full-featured, and poorly-documented. There are endless features I can't suss out, because not only are they undocumented but what they're tied to is also undocumented.
The user interface has to be as close to standard as reasonable, and has to work well. If it's obtuse or painful to use, it'll get tossed in the garbage ASAP.
The code needs to be written properly. In other words, clean, efficient, robust, and portable! If for instance it needs gcc version 4.4.2.3.8.1.0b (as opposed to any ANSI C compiler), then it needs fixing. If it needs gmake (as opposed to make) then it needs fixing. If the man page requires groff instead of troff, then it needs to be burned to the ground!
Lots of mostly true and slightly debateable points. However:
#./configure && make && make install
This is a Linuxism that's only recently starting to be backported into Unix.
You're right. Two interesting facts come up in your post, which are worth commenting on: ...the chances of binaries from that era doing something are a lot higher than say running any unix binary from that era on the latest Red Hat/Debian/Whatever.
and
Compiling with the latest GCC..."
Yep. And thank you Linux, for trashing Unix porting progress and taking us back to 1981.
SunOS binaries from 1993 will almost certainly run on Solaris 10. Same with HP-UX and AIX. On the other hand, Linux binaries from last Tuesday may or may not work on the same machine after patches. Between distros, you're almost completely SOL.
There are TONS of ways to create portable code--everything that doesn't deeply tie into the kernel or device drivers should be portable. X11 was part of that portability, as were many other bits and pieces. The good Unix developers took pride in writing efficient, portable, clean code.
Linux as a complete system and a community (i.e. not just the kernel) has turned its back on backwards compatability, and also on interoperability. Worse, it is developing a base of 'standards' which are absolutely required. Most apps now don't need a C compiler, they need GCC version 'x'. Similar problems exist for make/gmake and bloody troff/groff! That's right, people are writing MAN PAGES which require a specific release and version of GNU tools to read (MPlayer is one example).
The more time I spend with Linux, the more frustrating it is to see a ground-up free OS making all of the same mistakes that MS has made, but without the marketing/financial benefit to justify them.
Yep, this is called marketing. One might even call it sleazy marketing, but it's not a patch on what goes on in most other industries.
Have you ever seen an entertainment show (Entertainment Tonight, etc.) claim that an upcoming movie is going to suck? Or that an actor can't act?
Have you read a BAD review of any audio equipment? The high-end audio industry is probably the single biggest collection of criminal liars in the world.
This is so old that it's not even non-news. It's just par for the course. Assume that this behaviour runs every industry and business you interact with, and you'll have a fairly clear view of the western world.
This is OLD law! Why they had to invent a new, somewhat flakey law to deal with the digital equivalent is just stupid.
All of the reasons listed are valid. I like books, I like being able to carry them around with me, I like the feel of them, I like not having to plug in a password every time I sit down to read one, etc., etc..
Here's the real question: Why on earth should ebooks be considered a desirable target? Why must we try to put EVERYTHING into electronic format? The human/computer interface is so incredibly limited, and doesn't add anything to what books provide, except in the case of reference material searching.
Why is this culture so obsessed with turning everything we do into a computer application?
So here's the conundrum I have with obvious and satirical product placement.
Take a movie like Shrek 2. Everyone in the land of Far Far Away is drinking coffee in Farbucks. When the dragon torches Farbucks, they all run across the street into...another Farbucks.
Obviously a sharp jab at Starbucks, but I'm also willing to bet that they PAID to be made fun of, because it will indirectly drive up sales.
Is this good, bad, or indifferent?
Nothing to say about piracy here, but I do want to comment on EA.
When computer games were young and either text-based or vapid arcade fluff (or possibly both) a new company was founded, called Electronic Arts. These guys (and gals) figured that computer games could be a new art form, and truly deserved to be backed as art.
Archon. M.U.L.E. Hard Hat Mack. These games paved the way for computer games as more than 'arcade at home.' Now, however, EA is a 2 BILLION dollar purveyor of schlock and mediocrity.
Pity to see that sooner or later, all pioneers either go bankrupt or lose their direction.
Something to look at:
Ace Money. A single account is a free download, more accounts are fairly cheap. It seems to be a pretty good little program.
You've got it backwards. This is how Linux was written.
Windows was written by a team of intelligent, dedicated, focused programmers subject to rigorous peer review. The only downside is that the corporation has some very clear and explicit goals which don't include code quality.
Thank you! Somehow the Linux community has absorbed a very 21st century corporate attitude of taking over the world. This pisses me off to no end.
However, it _is_ a religion for many many advocates. It shouldn't be, but it often is.
Microsoft's opinion matters because (a) they're HUGE, and (b) HTPC is getting close to maturity.
Sooner or later, the system feeding your TV will likely be a purpose-built PC. For many people it already is. Since that device is probably going to run Windows, they have a strong say in it.
The other thing has nothing to do with the content, and everything to do with the hardware format. When DVD drives become passe', you'll buy a new PC with either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. If only one of those is plug-and-play, then that's the one that will DOMINATE the PC world. Amongst other things, this will also determine what people master their indy content on.
Microsoft is a giant, and like most giants the world shakes when they roll over.
Well um...no.
Most people don't give a rat's ass about copy protection. They SHOULD, but most don't. It's only in the technical venues that you see most people even aware of it, let alone concerned.
Translation:
"I'm an engineer, therefore engineering is better! Research scientists are weenies. Neener neener!"
It's a pity that engineering still has brainless twats like you to maintain its bad reputation.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Individually, people may be ignorant. Collectively, they become stupid.
You can explain something to a person, and they'll actually understand--it's really quite wonderful! If left to their own devices though, they'll revert back to their 'pre-enlightened' behaviour, but with more knowledge.
In the USA, the backers of the Republican party plotted to bring Bush into power, for the sole purpose of invading Iraq as a pretext for eventually establishing control over the entire middle-east. Bush lied about WMD, lied about links between the Hussein family and bin Laden, lied about links between his own family's links to Hussein, and when a large amount of the population was told about it, what did they do? They voted him back in! The media and the political groups can and do lie with impunity, even when the truth is readily available, because people want to believe the authorities, even when they know better. If you tell the truth to people, they'll clamp their hands over their ears and start yelling, "I'm not listening!!!"
How many people actually refuse to buy from a company after hearing about some horrible behaviour (Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Sony, Halliburton, etc.?) Probably less than a tenth of a percent. So when only 0.1% of the people who actually know the truth don't act on it, how much potential danger is there in lying to the population? If a huge scandal breaks and the populace actually gets outraged (very rare indeed), then in a month they'll have forgotten about it anyways, and things will be back to business as usual.
People are wilfully ignorant, and will happily replace their blinders after they've been ripped off. That, in my mind, is stupidity.
"It's no wonder the average person turns on them when they finally learn the truth. You can't keep lying to people and expect them to trust you."
I was right with you up until this comment.
The average person has no fucking clue. If you TELL them how badly they're being lied to, they'll rationalise it to themselves by assuming that you're stretching the truth, or that the companies aren't really THAT bad, or that there's nothing they can do.
The average person is wilfully blind, retarded, and damned near too lazy to breathe. Most corporations operate on that principle.
This only works in a relatively small environment. Sooner or later, you need your own support people, no matter what the OS. When this happens, Windows needs about 3.5x as many people per 'computing unit' (measured any number of ways, it comes out to a similar number) as Unix (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX). Sadly, this is a benefit for Windows dominance--inefficiency leads to visual recognition. If 60% of a company runs on Unix and the remaining 40% on Windows but there are three times as many Windows admins, who do you think the execs associate with IT? Who gets the 'environment architect' jobs? Even crashes--they don't look good and they piss people off, but the OS that causes the most problems is the OS that is forefront in peoples' minds.
Efficency and reliability may yet doom Unix. INCREASED headcount for Windows is going to push it towards global domination.
Very interesting comments. I know quite a few people who would at least compare favourably to your source, and absolutely none of them would agree with the declaration of NT as a revolution, or even a particularly interesting footnote. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that at least one intelligent and qualified person _does_ believe that.
I remember being frustrated with MacOS (after coming from 8-bit OSes), and being quite excited over buying my first computer and being able to get this NEW thing called Windows 3.0, which would fix all of the mistakes Apple had made when they moved from the ][+ to the Mac. Then I started using it, and discovered just how horrible it was. Eventually I left and went to OS/2 2.1, and then Win95. Architecturally OS/2 was a masterpiece, but Win95 stole enough ideas from everything else in existence that it actually had the best GUI around, when it came out. Pity it was still a buggy shell on top of DOS.
Meanwhile, NT4 was around, and was mostly a server OS by default, since it wouldn't run any actual applications. In all honesty, it wasn't bad--it ran, and it was relatively solid once it was installed and configured.
Win2k was MS's high-water-mark. It was a resource pig at the time, but it was the most stable OS MS has ever released, according not just to myself but to some intelligent Wintel admins I know and respect. It also had some fairly revolutionary features, at least as compared to most OSes (including Unix). Sun's new service manifest model with automatic service restarters isn't a _lot_ different in concept to what MS has been doing for a long time now. As much as I like to bash MS, they have come up with some good refinements to existing ideas.
However, where's the revolution? What made NT revolutionary? I don't see anything--a GUI for managing the OS (which is based on traditional OS concepts) is occasionally helpful, sometimes confusing, and decidedly more problematic to maintain. As near as I can see, that was the biggest architectural change that MS made, and I'm not at all sure it was a good one.
I wouldn't say that anyone who uses WIndows as a server is a moron, but the only problems that I see MS solving _better_ than the competition are:
1) Problems that MS has invented (i.e. the best CIFS server is made by the company that invented the protocol because they didn't want to use NFS).
2) Short-term user happiness and lower initial training costs (which in my experience are offset by the higher ser maintenance costs).
3) Hiding easy but knowledge-intensive tasks behind a nearly knowledge-free interface.
Out of curiosity, what does your OS Theory friend think of Solaris 10?
" The functional definition of an addiction is an activity that interferes with you conducting your daily life."
Whose "functional" definition is that one?
Argh. Close, but not right.
Compulsions are often labelled addiction, when it's simply the wrong word. What you are arguing over are compulsions. What Szasz implicitly suggests is that all addictions are actually compulsions.
Addiction, as a biochemical feedback loop, is NOT a function of the individual, it's a function of the chemistry! Heroin is addictive. Crystal meth is frighteningly addictive (with the highest rate of recidivism of all known drugs). Acid is not addictive. THC is not addictive. Sex, gambling, and the internet are not addictive. Alcohol is addictive. There's a clear definition and a clearly understood mechanism, and too many people think that addiction is 'what they think it is.'