I used the alpha. I am about to install it to my netbook's hard drive; hopefully it provides a way to upgrade. I would presume the answer is yes, but it's pretty rough.
I kind of like XFCE, though. I hope this UI can be disabled easily. The second important note is whether (since this is Fedora-based) the Fedora repos can be enabled without making the computer do bad crashy things.
The other point that the summary neglected to mention is that this project is the first real implementation of Arjan Van De Ven's work on fast booting. He's the guy that made his Eee boot in five seconds. Moblin can be expected to boot fast, which I think is necessary if we're going to recategorize netbooks from 'underpowered miniature laptop' to 'powerful internet appliance'.
A friend of mine bought a macbook a few months ago because she needed a computer that was extremely simple and user-friendly. Macs are somewhat better in that regard than PCs, but the computer is still pretty incomprehensible to her. This new UI is probably not for the slashdot crowd (anyone who can tell you why it's important that Moblin has a (relatively) standard Xorg server is not really the intended audience), but I think for the common Joe or Jocelyn it's perfect. Especially if you were ever wanting to make a $100 netbook...if the price point is sufficiently low to the point where it's clear you're not buying a Real Computer, and stick this UI on it, you can both set new expectations for what the device is supposed to do and sell a lot of toys to people that don't really have any use for a Real Computer.
Random points: Webcam support is essential. The social networking pane needs to be Facebook, not Twitter. um, End of Line?
Sorry, we don't have drivers for that version of Windows.
Sorry, we actually have the wrong driver on our website. You can pay us $30 to send you a driver CD which also has the wrong driver on it.[1]
Sorry, the driver you're looking for is a network driver. You can't get online to download it.
Sorry, our driver install fails silently for no reason.
Sorry, our driver installer fails with a meaningless error message.
Sorry, the manufacturer of that device has no website.[2]
Sorry, the device drivers for this computer must be installed in a certain order for all hardware to function correctly. The information on how to do so is unavailable.
Sorry, you need a SATA driver to install XP and you have no floppy drive. Better hope you can emulate PATA in BIOS.
Sorry, the manufacturer's website is painfully slow! It will take you three days to download the driver, unless you want to snag it off some dodgy third-party god-I-hope-it's-not-an-attack-site.
Driver issues and viruses are 9/10ths of Windows tech support. Where have you been?
[1] Gateway sucks. Their website is better than Asus or Acer, though. [2] Anything sold at Radio Shack seems to be like this, although they're not the only ones.
No, it really doesn't mean that, either. It will be published in Nature, not Science, and the research does disprove all of the climate science that's been done in the last thirty years, much as you'd like to believe that.
Now, sit down and actually read the Woods Hole paper. Then, having been appraised of the facts, you can continue ranting as if nothing had happened.
You are of course correct, but none of the concerns you mentioned actually have much to do with application security, which was eldavojohn's argument.
The policy of not eviscerating your corporate IT structure on bleeding-edge software is sound, but in terms of the browser, or any other app in isolation, the best security is going to come from the latest version. And by enabling SELinux.
Running old versions of software for improved security sounds like eating rotten food to avoid getting swine flu. You have exactly the same chance of running into some unknown virus, and you're dealing with something that you *know* is inferior and a vector for disease.
"Once it's hardened..." Software doesn't magically become secure after fifty bugfixes. Even if that were true, the security update for IE6 is called IE7.
I hope you're just informing us of this policy rather than espousing it...it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.
You're right, it is worse: in the case of the police, you have no knowledge or oversight of what data is being gathered or how it is used.
I object to the legal double standard. We should have one law for everyone, be they Google, a casual photographer, a policeman (sans warrant), or the government itself.
I didn't specify live video encoding. That sentence does not make sense if interpreted to be referring to live video encoding. I would be remarkably misinformed to have used live video encoding as an example of something that does not run in real time. Live video encoding is not often encountered in a desktop PC environment, and I would go so far as to say that the majority of video broadcasts are not live.
I am somewhat confused as to why you're talking about live video encoding. Does this relate to multicore processing in some way?
Also, your sig is misleading. Most PCs have VGA or DVI-I output abilities, and the conversion to the RCA connectors requires no special electronics. To imply some sort of inability or incompatibility between PCs and SDTVs is...strange, and increasingly irrelevant as PCs and TVs both are moving towards HDMI (or DVI, which is electrically compatible).
Remember kids, IP infringement is bad and evil and scary no matter what the circumstances are. Remember the Constitution! Copyright was established to "... promote the progress of science and useful arts... " Therefore anything that infringes on copyright automatically detracts from science, Art, and Culture. WHEN YOU CREATE AN INFRINGING WORK, YOU KILL SCIENCE!
Also, all works of fan fiction and fanart must die. Not because of IP laws, just cause they suck./sarcasm
I'd really like to let the above stand, but I also want to make an additional point: this game is derivative Art. It may or may not be worth the attention being paid to it at the moment, but because of copyright and presumably trademark laws, it is being withheld from the public, and will remain so for many, many years to come, by which point no one will remember about it or care. Square Enix's case is solid, the law and its guiding principles are firmly on their side. On the other hand, they are choosing to suppress something that would otherwise enrich our Culture in a general sense, and not enrich the developers in a financial sense.
So, while I cannot claim that they are in error for doing that, I really wish they hadn't.
No, they haven't, with few exceptions. Doing multiple things at the same time isn't really the issue here, we're trying to figure out how to effectively split one task between multiple 'workers'. Video games are one of the harder places to try to apply this technique to, because they run in real time and are also constantly responding to user input. Video encoding is the opposite. One of the big problems with multicore is coordinating the various worker threads.
You could learn a lot by taking the time to read the wikipedia article on multicore.
The speed limit is a maximum, not a requirement. If you want to avoid bicyclists, get on a freeway. Also do note that in some places it is not legal for people to bike on the sidewalks.
If you don't want bikers on your roads, give them an alternative: build bike trails. It's nice, because they are generally synonymous with park land.
Printscreen not working with DVD playback most likely has nothing to do with DRM, it's probably related to how the image is composited and rendered on screen. XP has similar issues.
Yes swap, but the biggest culprit is video RAM. A few other devices on the motherboard and add-in cards also reserve memory, but it's mostly video RAM.
Windows 7 also requires 8GB of hard drive space, compared to 500-2000 for XP. The SSD in my netbook is 4GB.
Both XP and Win7 lose hard to linux, which fills less space with more useful software.
You mention RAM as an issue, as well. Storage and memory issues are not going to go away! This year the battlefield is netbooks, but by the time people can run Win7 on a netbook, they'll be able to run linux on their smartphones. Computing is likely to become smaller and more ubiquitous: between OSS and OS X, Microsoft had better watch out.
It's not that people don't want to develop for linux. It's that the GPL is viral. If you use a GPL library for part of your game engine, you have to GPL the whole enchilada. Game content can be closed-source, but with the engine you have to go one way or the other: all open, or all closed.
With the former, you can't use something like the Havok physics engine. With the latter, you miss out on one of the biggest reasons to make a game for an open source platform.
Your argument is more valid for cross-platform games, and the answer is probably Apple. If Apple starts to take over the desktop segment (they are the only ones with a real shot at it), then gaming may become more cross-platform, at which point linux will probably benefit as well.
Boot up time is not bad, but it's not five seconds. My Eee 900A does 10s from grub to desktop, and we ain't playin with no 'start services after the desktop is visible' crap.
The article says "....if your netbook uses a solid state hard disk then space may be more of a premium." It does. Most any linux distro will fit in under 4GB, with all the bells and whistles preinstalled: office suite, image editing, games, you name it. SSD drives are a must for laptops, certainly for me: I carried around a 2.5" HDD with my netbook for a week before it died of unrecoverable disk errors. By taking up so much storage (and CPU and memory), Win 7 is cutting itself out of the netbook market.
In a couple years Moore's Law will perhaps take care of that problem, but for the moment linux has a clear edge on netbooks. That edge will almost certainly continue to hold: Microsoft will probably never be able to match linux for size and power. This year, the battleground will be netbooks, next year it will be smartphones. With these kind of performance numbers, Microsoft is better off keeping XP alive.
As for me, I would like to see a good OS come out of Redmond, for once. If and when I get a desktop machine again, I'll probably keep a windows partition (or at least a VM) around for games, but Win7 is off the table until then.
Wow. The sentiment is unarguable, but the rest of your post is amazingly uninformed.
What is a den of thieves? Do thieves nest in the rafters of seedy pubs or something? Did anyone imply that credit card theft was "better" than some other kind of theft?
I understand that we like the freedom of the internet. But making a bot of somebody's computer is akin to rape.
Non sequitur. Also, the analogy is not appropriate: there is no physical harm being done.
...governments must fund efforts to detect and arrest the people responsible.
They do. Perhaps you can improve on that suggestion with some further content.
Plus, our banks and stores and so on must get smarter security.
Smarter than what? As long as they have massive amounts of valuable information, they are targets. However, that's not really the subject of TFA, which is the low-hanging fruit consisting of people using insecure browsers and operating systems. The people running Torpig didn't need to hack a bank, they just relied on people being idiots. Vista and Win7 may be steps towards a more secure desktop environment, but they're not a cure for the root issue: PEBKAC.
PEBKAC being ubiquitous, we should not expect a solution to the botnet issue any time soon. Just try and think of it as another idiot tax.
The former you can possibly make a case for. Getting rid of the latter is one of the big reasons for Vista/Win7.
Eventually you will either have to transfer your app to a VM or rewrite it entirely. Especially if you're running a closed-source consumer OS on consumer equipment. Hardware and software advance, old equipment fails, and software suffers from 'bit rot'.
There are exceptions to the rule of obsolescence, but they're not relevant to a discussion on windows, and vice versa.
I think you need a different country. This one has been the way it is for a long time, and there isn't any motive force for change, despite B. Obama's fine rhetoric.
A more populist government, it seems, would naturally follow from changing the voting structure to something other than FPTP. The chances of that are negligible, as are the chances for any real change in the causes of the issues you name. I think it's more significant even than 'the devil you know'; the corporate culture has become a cornerstone of the national identity.
If anyone can produce a convincing argument otherwise, I have some hope I'd like to affix to it.
That's quite possibly the worst analogy I've seen on slashdot.
You're the Devil's Advocate here. You have a number of strong arguments. You have a strong moral argument, as long as you don't dumb it down by using the word 'theft'. You also have a clear legal argument: filesharing, generally speaking, is illegal. You don't necessarily have to defend the RIAA or their actions---you could, but it's not necessary. Also, this is an issue that comes up a lot here, so you have time to refine your arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
I used the alpha. I am about to install it to my netbook's hard drive; hopefully it provides a way to upgrade. I would presume the answer is yes, but it's pretty rough.
I kind of like XFCE, though. I hope this UI can be disabled easily. The second important note is whether (since this is Fedora-based) the Fedora repos can be enabled without making the computer do bad crashy things.
The other point that the summary neglected to mention is that this project is the first real implementation of Arjan Van De Ven's work on fast booting. He's the guy that made his Eee boot in five seconds. Moblin can be expected to boot fast, which I think is necessary if we're going to recategorize netbooks from 'underpowered miniature laptop' to 'powerful internet appliance'.
A friend of mine bought a macbook a few months ago because she needed a computer that was extremely simple and user-friendly. Macs are somewhat better in that regard than PCs, but the computer is still pretty incomprehensible to her. This new UI is probably not for the slashdot crowd (anyone who can tell you why it's important that Moblin has a (relatively) standard Xorg server is not really the intended audience), but I think for the common Joe or Jocelyn it's perfect. Especially if you were ever wanting to make a $100 netbook...if the price point is sufficiently low to the point where it's clear you're not buying a Real Computer, and stick this UI on it, you can both set new expectations for what the device is supposed to do and sell a lot of toys to people that don't really have any use for a Real Computer.
Random points:
Webcam support is essential.
The social networking pane needs to be Facebook, not Twitter.
um, End of Line?
Sorry, we don't have drivers for that version of Windows.
Sorry, we actually have the wrong driver on our website. You can pay us $30 to send you a driver CD which also has the wrong driver on it.[1]
Sorry, the driver you're looking for is a network driver. You can't get online to download it.
Sorry, our driver install fails silently for no reason.
Sorry, our driver installer fails with a meaningless error message.
Sorry, the manufacturer of that device has no website.[2]
Sorry, the device drivers for this computer must be installed in a certain order for all hardware to function correctly. The information on how to do so is unavailable.
Sorry, you need a SATA driver to install XP and you have no floppy drive. Better hope you can emulate PATA in BIOS.
Sorry, the manufacturer's website is painfully slow! It will take you three days to download the driver, unless you want to snag it off some dodgy third-party god-I-hope-it's-not-an-attack-site.
Driver issues and viruses are 9/10ths of Windows tech support. Where have you been?
[1] Gateway sucks. Their website is better than Asus or Acer, though.
[2] Anything sold at Radio Shack seems to be like this, although they're not the only ones.
A "proper" binary-only driver? You complain about your hardware working in XP but not Vista and want linux to have the same problems? My head hurts...
If there is any good reason why hardware drivers should not always be open source, someone do please let me know.
No, it really doesn't mean that, either. It will be published in Nature, not Science, and the research does disprove all of the climate science that's been done in the last thirty years, much as you'd like to believe that.
Now, sit down and actually read the Woods Hole paper. Then, having been appraised of the facts, you can continue ranting as if nothing had happened.
That will help us right up until the time that the oceans turn anoxic, I think.
If, as you say, all operating systems are equal in cost, why should we subsidize Redmond?
You are of course correct, but none of the concerns you mentioned actually have much to do with application security, which was eldavojohn's argument.
The policy of not eviscerating your corporate IT structure on bleeding-edge software is sound, but in terms of the browser, or any other app in isolation, the best security is going to come from the latest version. And by enabling SELinux.
Running old versions of software for improved security sounds like eating rotten food to avoid getting swine flu. You have exactly the same chance of running into some unknown virus, and you're dealing with something that you *know* is inferior and a vector for disease.
"Once it's hardened..." Software doesn't magically become secure after fifty bugfixes. Even if that were true, the security update for IE6 is called IE7.
I hope you're just informing us of this policy rather than espousing it...it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.
You're right, it is worse: in the case of the police, you have no knowledge or oversight of what data is being gathered or how it is used.
I object to the legal double standard. We should have one law for everyone, be they Google, a casual photographer, a policeman (sans warrant), or the government itself.
I didn't specify live video encoding. That sentence does not make sense if interpreted to be referring to live video encoding. I would be remarkably misinformed to have used live video encoding as an example of something that does not run in real time. Live video encoding is not often encountered in a desktop PC environment, and I would go so far as to say that the majority of video broadcasts are not live.
I am somewhat confused as to why you're talking about live video encoding. Does this relate to multicore processing in some way?
Also, your sig is misleading. Most PCs have VGA or DVI-I output abilities, and the conversion to the RCA connectors requires no special electronics. To imply some sort of inability or incompatibility between PCs and SDTVs is...strange, and increasingly irrelevant as PCs and TVs both are moving towards HDMI (or DVI, which is electrically compatible).
OMG ITS A PIRACY GET IN THE CAR!!!!!
Remember kids, IP infringement is bad and evil and scary no matter what the circumstances are. Remember the Constitution! Copyright was established to " ... promote the progress of science and useful arts ... " Therefore anything that infringes on copyright automatically detracts from science, Art, and Culture. WHEN YOU CREATE AN INFRINGING WORK, YOU KILL SCIENCE!
Also, all works of fan fiction and fanart must die. Not because of IP laws, just cause they suck. /sarcasm
I'd really like to let the above stand, but I also want to make an additional point: this game is derivative Art. It may or may not be worth the attention being paid to it at the moment, but because of copyright and presumably trademark laws, it is being withheld from the public, and will remain so for many, many years to come, by which point no one will remember about it or care. Square Enix's case is solid, the law and its guiding principles are firmly on their side. On the other hand, they are choosing to suppress something that would otherwise enrich our Culture in a general sense, and not enrich the developers in a financial sense.
So, while I cannot claim that they are in error for doing that, I really wish they hadn't.
No, they haven't, with few exceptions. Doing multiple things at the same time isn't really the issue here, we're trying to figure out how to effectively split one task between multiple 'workers'. Video games are one of the harder places to try to apply this technique to, because they run in real time and are also constantly responding to user input. Video encoding is the opposite. One of the big problems with multicore is coordinating the various worker threads.
You could learn a lot by taking the time to read the wikipedia article on multicore.
The speed limit is a maximum, not a requirement. If you want to avoid bicyclists, get on a freeway. Also do note that in some places it is not legal for people to bike on the sidewalks.
If you don't want bikers on your roads, give them an alternative: build bike trails. It's nice, because they are generally synonymous with park land.
Printscreen not working with DVD playback most likely has nothing to do with DRM, it's probably related to how the image is composited and rendered on screen. XP has similar issues.
Yes swap, but the biggest culprit is video RAM. A few other devices on the motherboard and add-in cards also reserve memory, but it's mostly video RAM.
OMG IT'S A CLIMATE CHANGE GET IN THE CAR!
or maybe it's just a Gore-shaped bag of hot air?
Windows 7 also requires 8GB of hard drive space, compared to 500-2000 for XP. The SSD in my netbook is 4GB.
Both XP and Win7 lose hard to linux, which fills less space with more useful software.
You mention RAM as an issue, as well. Storage and memory issues are not going to go away! This year the battlefield is netbooks, but by the time people can run Win7 on a netbook, they'll be able to run linux on their smartphones. Computing is likely to become smaller and more ubiquitous: between OSS and OS X, Microsoft had better watch out.
It's not that people don't want to develop for linux. It's that the GPL is viral. If you use a GPL library for part of your game engine, you have to GPL the whole enchilada. Game content can be closed-source, but with the engine you have to go one way or the other: all open, or all closed.
With the former, you can't use something like the Havok physics engine. With the latter, you miss out on one of the biggest reasons to make a game for an open source platform.
Your argument is more valid for cross-platform games, and the answer is probably Apple. If Apple starts to take over the desktop segment (they are the only ones with a real shot at it), then gaming may become more cross-platform, at which point linux will probably benefit as well.
Boot up time is not bad, but it's not five seconds. My Eee 900A does 10s from grub to desktop, and we ain't playin with no 'start services after the desktop is visible' crap.
The article says "....if your netbook uses a solid state hard disk then space may be more of a premium." It does. Most any linux distro will fit in under 4GB, with all the bells and whistles preinstalled: office suite, image editing, games, you name it. SSD drives are a must for laptops, certainly for me: I carried around a 2.5" HDD with my netbook for a week before it died of unrecoverable disk errors. By taking up so much storage (and CPU and memory), Win 7 is cutting itself out of the netbook market.
In a couple years Moore's Law will perhaps take care of that problem, but for the moment linux has a clear edge on netbooks. That edge will almost certainly continue to hold: Microsoft will probably never be able to match linux for size and power. This year, the battleground will be netbooks, next year it will be smartphones. With these kind of performance numbers, Microsoft is better off keeping XP alive.
As for me, I would like to see a good OS come out of Redmond, for once. If and when I get a desktop machine again, I'll probably keep a windows partition (or at least a VM) around for games, but Win7 is off the table until then.
I think I'd recommend Nlite, although there are other means of accomplishing this task. It does appear to run in Wine.
Wow. The sentiment is unarguable, but the rest of your post is amazingly uninformed.
What is a den of thieves? Do thieves nest in the rafters of seedy pubs or something? Did anyone imply that credit card theft was "better" than some other kind of theft?
I understand that we like the freedom of the internet. But making a bot of somebody's computer is akin to rape.
Non sequitur. Also, the analogy is not appropriate: there is no physical harm being done.
...governments must fund efforts to detect and arrest the people responsible.
They do. Perhaps you can improve on that suggestion with some further content.
Plus, our banks and stores and so on must get smarter security.
Smarter than what? As long as they have massive amounts of valuable information, they are targets. However, that's not really the subject of TFA, which is the low-hanging fruit consisting of people using insecure browsers and operating systems. The people running Torpig didn't need to hack a bank, they just relied on people being idiots. Vista and Win7 may be steps towards a more secure desktop environment, but they're not a cure for the root issue: PEBKAC.
PEBKAC being ubiquitous, we should not expect a solution to the botnet issue any time soon. Just try and think of it as another idiot tax.
The former you can possibly make a case for. Getting rid of the latter is one of the big reasons for Vista/Win7.
Eventually you will either have to transfer your app to a VM or rewrite it entirely. Especially if you're running a closed-source consumer OS on consumer equipment. Hardware and software advance, old equipment fails, and software suffers from 'bit rot'.
There are exceptions to the rule of obsolescence, but they're not relevant to a discussion on windows, and vice versa.
Clearly the only proper course of action is to go to the source on this one: we should strip mine the sun!
I think you need a different country. This one has been the way it is for a long time, and there isn't any motive force for change, despite B. Obama's fine rhetoric.
A more populist government, it seems, would naturally follow from changing the voting structure to something other than FPTP. The chances of that are negligible, as are the chances for any real change in the causes of the issues you name. I think it's more significant even than 'the devil you know'; the corporate culture has become a cornerstone of the national identity.
If anyone can produce a convincing argument otherwise, I have some hope I'd like to affix to it.
That's quite possibly the worst analogy I've seen on slashdot.
You're the Devil's Advocate here. You have a number of strong arguments. You have a strong moral argument, as long as you don't dumb it down by using the word 'theft'. You also have a clear legal argument: filesharing, generally speaking, is illegal. You don't necessarily have to defend the RIAA or their actions---you could, but it's not necessary. Also, this is an issue that comes up a lot here, so you have time to refine your arguments.
Please do so.