Sorry, you are wrong. This is not the free-wheeling world of open source we are talking about here that runs in build-and-fix mode.
1. You can't assume it won't take 10 programmers.
I can, I will, and I did assume so. You obviously don't understand how large software projects are typically managed -- single people each own various different pieces. Likely, there's one or two guys that own the document.object piece of the scripting engine used by Internet Explorer, and those are the guys that would be tasked with fixing this. Tack on one tester to make sure it works, and maybe one program manager to document the problem/fix, and you come up with 4, maybe 5 people.
2. What, they are on payroll and just sit around with no work other than fixing bugs? No other projects that might have a priority?
Yes, they're on the payroll. No, they don't just sit around with no work other than fixing bugs. However, bugfixing is part of the job description. It needs doing. Most bug fixes generally are not very time consuming. The most time consuming part of fixing bugs is getting a valid repro. After that, in 90% of the cases, it's changing maybe one or two lines of code. The repro has already been done. Check BugTraq. That means the programmers just have to reproduce this in a lab, track it down, fix the problem, and hand it off. Two, maybe three days of work, tops. Highly unlikely that'll affect a different project, unless that project is already in ship mode. (In which case, you leverage one of your other developers who has a few free cycles.)
3. Slipping a timeframe in a publicly traded company can affect how they report revenues. Can't report revenues of money collected on a product that hasn't been released.
Red herring, per #2 above.
4. IE is free to the end user, but not free to create. It does take time to build and package, even if the fix takes 10 minutes.
Builds happen every single day at Microsoft (that's why you see large version numbers, like Windows 2000 was 5.0.2195). The infrastructure is already there, it's just a matter of using it. Packaging is generally done in the build process. Ship it off to Windows Update, let them deal with it afterwards. This is typical for most software development houses.
Before you apply business rules to an industry, you should work in that industry.
I do work in the industry. Do I have your permission now?
Hmm... or maybe it's because that problem with Linux went away a long time ago. A default workstation install of Red Hat Linux 7.2 has zero open ports and a firewall that blocks access to all ports under 1024.
Except that Red Hat Linux 7.2 is not exactly all that old. Even as recently as RedHat 7.0, there were still security problems with a default install. That's what, a year old? And RedHat is not the only distro out there. And not everybody installing today is installing the latest versions. I spoke with a guy just recently who wanted to install SuSE 6.0 (SuSE is at version 7.3, now. 6.0 is roughly 2-2.5 years old, or so), simply because those were the CDs he had on-hand. I constantly see people trying to install RedHat 6.2, and even 5.2. As well, your argument is ignoring all those people that installed Linux back during the whole dot-bomb bubble (because Linux was the up-and-coming cool thing to have), and promptly forgot about that system in their back room running it. That's what, RedHat 6.0? SuSE 6.0? Slackware 4.0? Those installations are still a problem even today.
Now, obviously if someone sets up a server and doesn't patch, that person is an idiot (and that is true no matter what OS he/she is running). Unfortunately for your argument, we're talking about an instant messenger client and a web browser, not things that are likely to be installed on a server. The fact is, you can't exploit my Linux system via Mozilla/Konq/Galeon/Netscape, yet every other week, a new way to exploit Windows using IE pops up.
Right. Anyone setting up a server and not patching is an idiot. But that doesn't mean people aren't doing just that. Both Microsoft and RedHat have taken steps to protect against that, yet Microsoft is villified while RedHat is heralded. That was exactly the point of the AC's comment. Yes, this article was about an IE exploit. Yes, his comment was off-topic. No, his comment is not ungrounded. Within the scope of his comment pertaining to servers, you know what he said is true. You might not want to believe it, but it is. Anyway, the reason why you don't see many exploits for Mozilla/Konq/Galeon/Netscape (three of which are all based on a single rendering engine, and the fourth can use that same engine as well) is because they are small potatoes compared to IE. There's just not much reason for hax0rs to spend their time finding exploits in those browsers when they're only going to hit maybe 5% of the browsing public (and I'm being generous). Microsoft software really doesn't have significantly more problems than any other software. Microsoft is simply a large target, and so many and more people spend much more time finding those holes (often for malicious purposes, sadly).
It's like in Fight Club, the formula, if a (the cost of paying 10 programmers $100k/Annum each) * b (the time it would take to fix) * c (the percent of people that wouldn't buy/use IE / Windows regardless of the plethora of flaws) is greater than some innane constant, they don't fix it.
Boy, I sure wish I was getting $100K/year. Oh well. Anyway, that equation is not quite correct, because
It shouldn't take 10 programmers to fix that flaw. Maybe one programmer, one tester. Two people.
Those people are going to get paid anyway. It's not like they're hired on the spot to fix those problems. They're already on the payroll, and fixing bugs is part of the job description.
The time it takes to fix is only relelvant if it affects other work. This is not always the case (not that it doesn't affect other work, but that it doesn't significantly hurt the other work in terms of slipping on a timeframe).
The equation is typically a*b > c, they don't fix it, not a*b*c > some arbitrary number. In the Fight Club case, c was the cost of litigation (including settlements). In your example, it would be lost revenue. I'm not so sure that's a good measure, here, since IE is free.
Of course, this applies to pretty much every business, not just Microsoft.
First off, this is not a virus. It's an Internet Explorer exploit allowing access to your Messenger contact list and other Messenger functions. As the post noted, it is fixed with the latest IE patch. The actual problem was with IE's document.open scripting object, and how it was able to access local system objects from web sites (basically, the about: URI namespace was considered to be in the "My Computer" security domain, which means it had much more lax security than an actual website. However, since about: can take valid html, site developers were able to embed Messenger objects in about: pages, and access information from that). This is not a problem with Messenger at all.
Unlike EULAs, the GPL does not pretend that you must accept its terms in order to simply use the software, because you don't have to. The GPL only comes into play when you redistribute the software. Under standard copyright law you can't do that at all; the GPL grants you the right to do this provided you fulfill certain conditions.
Right and wrong. If you don't accept the terms of the GPL, chances are you shouldn't be using GPLed software. The thing is, if a EULA for a proprietary piece of software limits you from distributing the software, or making changes to it, or running multiple copies, you're likely going to accept the EULA up to the point when you want to do one of those things. Now, if we were dealing with a GPL app, and you suddenly decided you wanted to modify it, distribute your version, and not release source, you'd raise hell. But if we were dealing with a proprietary app, and you decide you want to run it on your notebook, home machine, and work machine, most slashdotters wouldn't care. They're the same thing -- you're breaking the license.
False dilemna. "All software must be free" and "Anything put into a EULA constitutes a valid contract" are not the only alternatives. Standard copyright law is entirely adequate to protect the rights of software publishers.
I wasn't intentionally setting up those two choices as the only alternatives. EULAs do not have a good history of legal precedent, and I understand that they're generally fairly weak. I realize that, in theory, copyright law should be "good enough" to protect the ownership rights of software. My point was that until RMS gets his Candy Land dream, end users will never "own" the software they run (even with GPLed software, they do not and will not own the software itself, just the redistributable bits on a CD or in a tarball).
You come off sounding like a 4 year old who's too young to understand why Johnny's toy isn't your toy. You go ahead and keep doing as you're doing. One of these days, you will get caught (pirates always do. sometimes it takes longer than others, but in the end you will be busted). I hope you enjoy your fines and/or prison time. Because your argument of "I bought the CD, I now own the software," or "I hate Microsoft. They're the devil. That's why I stole their software," is not going to hold up in court at all.
I do not buy a license or simply a right to use software, I buy software.
Ah, but that is what you think, and the commercial software industry flat-out denies.
That means it is mine to do with as I please. I can put its CD in the microwave if I want and watch it spark when I turn it on,
Right. Because you own the media all those bits came on. You do not own those bits.
I can give it to my Da, I can sell it to my friend,
Right, assuming either the license you bought allows you to install the software in multiple places, or you uninstall the software on your system before you transfer ownership. Otherwise, no.
and I can install it on multiple machines.
No, you can't. Or, I should say, you can't unless the license gives you explicit rights to do so (say, the GPL for example). You can make a copy of a music CD to play in multiple places (home, car, office) because you are physically incapable of listening to that CD in multiple places at one time. Software is different. There are plenty of ways for you to use software in multiple places at any given point in time, so more restrictions are necessary. You can back up that installation CD. You have that right. But you can't go installing it at work, on your laptop, and at home, because you did not pay for three licenses.
M$ may not agree or like it but tough doo-doo. I own it.
Once again, no you don't. You own a license to use it. Even Open Source software and Free Software still deal with licenses (GPL == General Public LICENSE), the only difference is that those licenses give you explicit rights to install in multiple places, change the source code, pass the disk around to all your friends, etc. But you still don't own anything more than the CD those bits were on (and if you don't have a CD, you don't even own that; though I guess you would own the hard drive the tarball is on). This will continue to be the case until RMS gets his communistic fantasy world, where programmers never get paid, yet somehow amazingly never go hungry, even though they give away the fruits of their labor for free, letting them be "owned" by the hairy, unwashed masses. Luckily for every software professional out there, RMS's ideals are unworkable and impossible, so we won't ever get to that point.
Re:Once again, Slashdotters want to have it both w
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Read the Fine Print
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· Score: 2, Informative
On the contrary, sysadmins are advising that users disable automatic updates on XP because the tendency of the auto update facility to replace, for example, working drivers with faulty ones, as well as not providing information on which packages are being downloaded. (Read that in an article somewhere. Never used auto update myself.)
Which is 100% completely wrong. The auto update facility of Windows XP will only download updates that are marked as "critical" (ie, they fix a major bug or security problem). As well, they are not installed by default, simply downloaded (okay, so you can configure it to install by default, but the default is to download and then ask you what to do. Read the EULA -- it says "download", not "download and install"). When a new update is downloaded, a little text bubble pops out of the systray, and you can pop up a dialog that lets you install the updates now, install them later, or forget about it. At this point, you can also get details on what updates were downloaded, or just go to the Windows Update site and have 100% total control over everything.
I do see this as a privacy concern, because it is only with XP that windows update does not say "this is done without sending any information to microsoft." All other versions of windows use the anonymous facility, so they already have a working production update system which they've replaced with this more invasive version. -Coinciding with the EULA changes.
Really? Because the Windows XP Windows Update page explicitly says this:
Note Windows Update does not collect any form of personally identifiable information from your computer.
So it's a bit different from not sending any info to Microsoft, but it still protects your privacy (well, unless you're a tin foil-wearing conspiracy nut that thinks Microsoft is out to get you).
Whether it is an intentional attack on privacy/piracy or simply that MS decided the old mechanism wasn't efficient enough over a slow connection (or some other technical reason) is speculation.
More likely, it's simply you (and the rest of Slashdot) jerking your knee at a benign change to a useful tools (Windows Update), integrating it into a good OS (Windows XP, believe it or not) to make the users' lives easier. Don't want it? Turn it off. Microsoft can not turn it back on remotely.
If you are absolutely sure that you are getting popunders from msnbc, then why the hell am I not getting them! I hate feeling left-out.
MSNBC does random popup ads, in that not every time you load the page will an ad be displayed, but if you browse around on the site enough, or just get unlucky, you'll get a pop-up. I'm not sure I've ever seen a pop-under ad on MSNBC, but then I use a combination of Adzap with my Squid proxy and NoPopIE with Internet Explorer to banish most advertisements and popups. You may be using similar things, if you're never seeing popups on MSNBC
You know what would be great? If someone somehow managed to hack together a PlayStation or Dreamcast emulator for Linux - perhaps it would even be possible to get official permission for it (at least for the Dreamcast one, since Sega doesn't make the console anymore). Then, when people say there aren't any games for Linux, you could snap back and say that there are tons...
Several problems, there. First off, by your rationale, Windows machines already have thousands more titles than you'd expect, because they have emulators for everything from the old 2600 to the N64 and PSX, and everything in between. That said, I've never used an emulator that was 100% perfect. Even if it was only that the input method left something to be desired (using the keyboard, or even a PC gamepad, is rarely as good as using the original pad the game was designed for), I still consider it a problem. And emulation of later systems has problems in other areas, as well. N64 and PSX emulators have plenty of problems (look at Bleem!, for example), and don't work on many games. Finally, you're offering up a library of games that is slowly becoming unavailable. Within the year, I'd expect it to be quite difficult to find any of the good older PSX games (most of the newer games tend to be hacked-together kiddies games), or any Dreamcast games at all. The used market is not very reliable, and the games will be going for upwards of $100USD or more on ebay. Not a very reassuring thought, especially when you're dealing with people that are notorious for not wanting to spend money on software.
No, most likely what would happen is your average linux kiddie would go to the local blockbuster, rent a couple games, burn them off onto CDRs, and just play the copies ("official" emulators like Bleem! would likely incorporate copy protections (don't know for sure), but I doubt any community, grassroots emulator would bother). That'd get Sony and Sega on your backs very quickly, to be sure.
Id software are also Linux-friendly, with most of their games playable on the penguin...I suspect that there are a few Linux users in there.
Maybe, but not enough linux-only zealots to justify selling separate linux binaries. theCarmack basically said after Quake 3 Arena that sales of the linux port were so dismal that they wouldn't bother in the future. Oh, sure, there'll still be linux ports. Witness RTCW. They'll just be done in spare time, and take a little longer, and they won't be sold in a commercial box (like Zoid doing the ports for Q1 and Q2, they'll probably only have one or two guys on the ports for post-Q3 games, rather than hiring a whole company like Loki).
Lots of game servers run on linux, however, and id as well as others have typically been prompt about getting the servers ported over to linux quickly.
Sure, you don't need a lawyer -- until they sue you because their lawyer interpreted a part of the contract differently than you did (and because their lawyer is trained and educated in this kind of thing, take a guess who was the one that misinterpreted... hint: not the lawyer). So now, you have to pay a lawyer large legal fees to represent you in court. Or are you going to do that yourself, as well? If so, now you lost the case, and you have to pay an even larger sum to your client, as well as following whatever was decided (in this case, likely giving the client your intellectual property). So, rather than spend a few hundred for legal consultation over a contract dispute, or a few thousand for legal representation because you didn't get the consultation, you end up paying millions and give away part of your intellectual property. But that's better than paying a lawyer, right?
I'm sorry, but if you were the CEO of any company I was working for, I'd quit post haste, and encourage all my co-workers to do same. It may suck, but retaining legal consultation and representation (AKA, lawyers) is as much a part of good business practice as is treating your employees well.
Ack! Yeah, you're right. I totally forgot about Tribes. Watch as I rationalize that away, though. Tribes wasn't a very large success, commercially or amongst its players. Yes, it did develop a hardcore following, but it was nowhere as large as something like TF1, UT, or Half-Life (back when people would play the default Half-Life modes). So I'm going to justify my oversight by saying that while Tribes did introduce these games types first in a commercial setting (TF1 was still the original intro for the types), it was not seen by a majority of gamers. UT brought them to the masses, as it were.
But seriously, what does UT (in an unmodded state) offer that Quake 3 doesn't? I'm talking signficant gameplay things here that are NEW. I am well aware of the differences, I just don't think UT is new and revolutionary.
Domination and Assault. Okay, so the game types were not terribly new (the Domination game type was first seen in the old Team Fortress mod for Quake 1, with the excellent map canalzon; Assault was again seen first in a primitive form in Team Fortress, with the map hunted), but they were types that had not been previously available out of the box in a commercial game, and they were definitely not types available in Quake 3 (q3 had only deathmatch, team deathmatch, and CTF). As far as anybody playing the games in the default state, I wouldn't expect that. These games are pushing three years old. There have been many and more mods for them that extend the gameplay quite farther than the original default modes. It may very well be that Q3A has surpassed UT when you count the quality mods (I don't know, I haven't stayed on top of the communities for either).
However, both id and Epic are better engine developers than game designers. Witness the sheer number of games that have been based on their technology -- for Epic, there's DS9: The Fallen, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time, Rune, the never-to-be-released Duke Nukem Forever, and probably a few more I'm missing; for id, there have been games ranging from the early Wolf3D days (IIRC, Blake Stone was based on the Wolf3D engine), to Doom/Doom2 (Hexen and Heretic), to Quake (Hexen 2, Half-Life, DNF was going to use this originally), to Quake 2 (Daikatana, Anachronox), all the way up to Quake 3 (Elite Force, FAKK2, Alice, RTCW, MOH:AA, and more). id knows this, which is why they worked with Grey Matter and Nerve to make the recent Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Epic also knows this, which is why they're working with Legend (the guys who did Wheel of Time) to make the next Unreal (unimaginatively named Unreal 2). Expect to see more of this happening in the future -- as games keep getting bigger and more expensive to produce, companies will begin specializing. I don't think it'll be uncommon to see collaborations of three or more companies on a single game (like RTCW), where each company does what they're good at (single-player gameplay, multi-player gameplay, engine, art, design, marketing, etc).
A different organisation would just have allocated more resources (time, people, early design decisions) towards security than before, as part of the normal development cycle. that they have to do something like this implies they really don't care about these issues.
And you simply assume they haven't done this because there wasn't a press release. Okay, sure. Except that simply assigning more resources is not exactly sexy, and doesn't make for a useful or exciting press release. It's just "business as usual". Stopping to fix a bunch of past bugs, however, is different. It's quantifiable. They can show that they are actually doing something, while it's difficult to show to the world a bigger emphasis on security and stability during the design and development cycles.
Of course, I'm on slashdot, so I don't know why I would even think Microsoft should get the benefit of the doubt. Let's just slam them some more, eh?
After a month, if their programs and OS continue to crash for no apparent reason, we should milk it for all it's worth and point out that even when they put in an all out effect to improve quality, they fall short.
So, Microsoft makes an effort to do the Right Thing (tm), and yet they still get bashed? Good god, man! Try running one of their modern operating systems (Windows 2000, Windows XP), and then see how often "their programs and OS continue to crash for no apparent reason". You must be firmly living in the past if you believe that is in any way still the case. Either that or you've not used Microsoft software for a while, which makes you unqualified to comment at best (and a troll at worst, but I'll ignore that part since I'm feeding the trolls here).
What about ditching java from default installation and pushing.NET, and MSN passwords?
You can still install java, and will be prompted to do so the first time you load a page with a java applet (there are so few of those, and even fewer end-user java apps, I could see the average user going for years without ever knowing or caring that they don't have java installed). Pushing.NET is not necessarily a bad thing, as they're actually going for setting a standard the right way -- through a standards body (Sun's bailed on that process no less than three times). "MSN passwords" are only necessary if you use MSN. Assuming you mean Passport passwords for the Windows Messenger (which is different than the MSN Messenger), that's different -- the system prompts, but you can say "No" and it'll leave you alone.
I understand paranoia and conspiracy theories can be fun, but every now and then you need to step back into reality and realize that everybody is not out to get you, least of all Microsoft.
There is a very big difference between "transparent" and "translucent". The former means that light passes through the material almost completely unchanged (a certain amount of distortion is okay, but the point is that you can make out what's behind it). Translucent means that light is transmitted, but it's diffuse and you can't make out what's behind the material. This concrete is translucent. It's not transparent (read the article).
I just can't quite find a way to describe how damn frustrating it is when you realise that the FSF people are to the ideals of RMS what Britney Spears is to classical music theory. *gag*
Sounds like the history of the world, to me. Some visionary dreams up some idealistic yet flawed and unworkable ideology (Marx, for instance). Some people get it in their heads to implement this ideology (Russian Bolsheviks). Because the ideology is based completely on flawed hypotheses and assumptions, it's not workable in the form the original visionary envisioned. So it gets perverted and changed (Soviet Russia). And then years later, other idealistic individuals complain that the implementation was flawed, rather than realizing it was the original idea that was flawed to begin with. So of course the implementation of Free Software is so far gone from the "ideals of RMS". Yet the ideals of RMS are flawed, so the implementation is only doing the best it can with what it has to work with.
Re:They should open up their Windows products
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Borland C++ For Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Quite a few people still buy Delphi. Delphi users moving to C++ often buy C++ Builder. Otherwise, most everybody else chooses Visual Studio. So, I could see a case made for opening C++ Builder, but not Delphi (which happens to fall under "their Windows products").
A Toyota Camry would probably serve all the needs of anyone who wanted a sedan (except perhaps price), and yet I don't think anyone would argue that having multiple different models of sedans on the market is a good thing.
Red herring. Your analogy makes no sense. The equivalent to having multiple sedans on the market is not having the same game on multiple platforms, but instead having multiple games to chose from. Quake3 on Windows or Quake3 on linux is still a Toyota Camry, but what if I want RTCW (or a Chevy Impala)? A better analogy would be something stupid, like having a Toyota Camry with a Toyota engine, and a Toyota Camry with a Ford engine. For all intents and purposes the two will drive the same, but what's under the hood is quite different. And, that scenario doesn't exist in the automotive world.
Drawing analogies between the technology world and the automotive industry never works out well. Let's try not to do that any more, shall we?
Also linux does have a directInput equivalent, SDL. And while SDL doesn't yet support force feed back (which is kinda pointless IMO) it does everything else DirectInput does, while being much nicer to use. (at least that is what my friend told me who rewrote his directX based game to a SDL based game)
What version of DirectX was your friend using? How did he write his code? First off, DirectX has gone through many changes since its inception years ago. It went from truly horrible, to passably decent (around DX5) to pretty darned good (DX7 time frame) to awesome (DX8). DirectX 3 is very much different than DX 5, is very much different than DX8. They're all backwards compatible, but if you're targetting DX8 and writing like you're targetting DX3, then you're not targetting DX8 at all.
Also, since DirectX is very much about COM, there are plenty of ways to make it easier on the programmer. For example, ATL takes most of the pain out of COM programming. The various smart pointer classes relieve you of the tedious details of querying interfaces, making sure you properly ref count (AddRef and Release), and cleaning up your pointers when you're done. And if your friend was trying to slog through DX using pure C code (yes, it's possible), no wonder he thought it was nasty.
SDL is nice, yes, but it pales in comparison to DirectX. That shouldn't reflect poorly on SDL, since SDL is developed by a very small number of people with a very limited budget, when compared to DirectX (not to mention that SDL for win32 wouldn't even exist without DirectX, as it's just a portability layer over DX code). If your goal is an easily portable game, SDL and OpenGL are very good choices. If your goal is to make the best game you can on one platform (okay, two platforms if you consider that porting from win32 to XBox isn't too difficult as long as you're using DX), then DirectX is the way to go.
Yeah, figures I'd screw up the office locations. I never was a big fan of ION Storm (even though I did buy Deus Ex and Anachronox). The important part is that the office where theRomero and Tom Hall worked was the one that folded, while the office where Warren Specter worked (and which pumped out ION Storm's only really successful game) did not. Aside from that, the rest of my post is correct, and I would assume that's why I got rated as informative.
theRomero was on the Quake team. Deus Ex, however, was done by the awesome, ever-so-talented Warren Specter. Deus Ex was also done at the ION Storm Dallas (or wherever it was -- not Austin, where theRomero was) office, which was not closed. Instead, it went for some name change, I don't remember what. That same studio is now working on Thief 3, as well as Deus Ex 2. ION Storm Austin is gone. Dead. Finito. Tom Hall (also an ex-id guy, sucked into ION Storm by theRomero, made the moderately successful yet still fun Anachronox) and theRomero started Monkeystone Games, where they make games for various handhelds. They already have one game out for the PocketPC, something about a delivery boy. Maybe theRomero is learning, since this game was done in a matter of months, rather than years.
And remember, "Design is Law!" Oh, yeah, and theRomero has cut his hair. He's no longer sexy.
Slashdot Mirror
I can, I will, and I did assume so. You obviously don't understand how large software projects are typically managed -- single people each own various different pieces. Likely, there's one or two guys that own the document.object piece of the scripting engine used by Internet Explorer, and those are the guys that would be tasked with fixing this. Tack on one tester to make sure it works, and maybe one program manager to document the problem/fix, and you come up with 4, maybe 5 people.
Yes, they're on the payroll. No, they don't just sit around with no work other than fixing bugs. However, bugfixing is part of the job description. It needs doing. Most bug fixes generally are not very time consuming. The most time consuming part of fixing bugs is getting a valid repro. After that, in 90% of the cases, it's changing maybe one or two lines of code. The repro has already been done. Check BugTraq. That means the programmers just have to reproduce this in a lab, track it down, fix the problem, and hand it off. Two, maybe three days of work, tops. Highly unlikely that'll affect a different project, unless that project is already in ship mode. (In which case, you leverage one of your other developers who has a few free cycles.)
Red herring, per #2 above.
Builds happen every single day at Microsoft (that's why you see large version numbers, like Windows 2000 was 5.0.2195). The infrastructure is already there, it's just a matter of using it. Packaging is generally done in the build process. Ship it off to Windows Update, let them deal with it afterwards. This is typical for most software development houses.
I do work in the industry. Do I have your permission now?
Except that Red Hat Linux 7.2 is not exactly all that old. Even as recently as RedHat 7.0, there were still security problems with a default install. That's what, a year old? And RedHat is not the only distro out there. And not everybody installing today is installing the latest versions. I spoke with a guy just recently who wanted to install SuSE 6.0 (SuSE is at version 7.3, now. 6.0 is roughly 2-2.5 years old, or so), simply because those were the CDs he had on-hand. I constantly see people trying to install RedHat 6.2, and even 5.2. As well, your argument is ignoring all those people that installed Linux back during the whole dot-bomb bubble (because Linux was the up-and-coming cool thing to have), and promptly forgot about that system in their back room running it. That's what, RedHat 6.0? SuSE 6.0? Slackware 4.0? Those installations are still a problem even today.
Right. Anyone setting up a server and not patching is an idiot. But that doesn't mean people aren't doing just that. Both Microsoft and RedHat have taken steps to protect against that, yet Microsoft is villified while RedHat is heralded. That was exactly the point of the AC's comment. Yes, this article was about an IE exploit. Yes, his comment was off-topic. No, his comment is not ungrounded. Within the scope of his comment pertaining to servers, you know what he said is true. You might not want to believe it, but it is. Anyway, the reason why you don't see many exploits for Mozilla/Konq/Galeon/Netscape (three of which are all based on a single rendering engine, and the fourth can use that same engine as well) is because they are small potatoes compared to IE. There's just not much reason for hax0rs to spend their time finding exploits in those browsers when they're only going to hit maybe 5% of the browsing public (and I'm being generous). Microsoft software really doesn't have significantly more problems than any other software. Microsoft is simply a large target, and so many and more people spend much more time finding those holes (often for malicious purposes, sadly).
Boy, I sure wish I was getting $100K/year. Oh well. Anyway, that equation is not quite correct, because
Of course, this applies to pretty much every business, not just Microsoft.
First off, this is not a virus. It's an Internet Explorer exploit allowing access to your Messenger contact list and other Messenger functions. As the post noted, it is fixed with the latest IE patch. The actual problem was with IE's document.open scripting object, and how it was able to access local system objects from web sites (basically, the about: URI namespace was considered to be in the "My Computer" security domain, which means it had much more lax security than an actual website. However, since about: can take valid html, site developers were able to embed Messenger objects in about: pages, and access information from that). This is not a problem with Messenger at all.
Install the patch and be done with it.
Right and wrong. If you don't accept the terms of the GPL, chances are you shouldn't be using GPLed software. The thing is, if a EULA for a proprietary piece of software limits you from distributing the software, or making changes to it, or running multiple copies, you're likely going to accept the EULA up to the point when you want to do one of those things. Now, if we were dealing with a GPL app, and you suddenly decided you wanted to modify it, distribute your version, and not release source, you'd raise hell. But if we were dealing with a proprietary app, and you decide you want to run it on your notebook, home machine, and work machine, most slashdotters wouldn't care. They're the same thing -- you're breaking the license.
I wasn't intentionally setting up those two choices as the only alternatives. EULAs do not have a good history of legal precedent, and I understand that they're generally fairly weak. I realize that, in theory, copyright law should be "good enough" to protect the ownership rights of software. My point was that until RMS gets his Candy Land dream, end users will never "own" the software they run (even with GPLed software, they do not and will not own the software itself, just the redistributable bits on a CD or in a tarball).
You come off sounding like a 4 year old who's too young to understand why Johnny's toy isn't your toy. You go ahead and keep doing as you're doing. One of these days, you will get caught (pirates always do. sometimes it takes longer than others, but in the end you will be busted). I hope you enjoy your fines and/or prison time. Because your argument of "I bought the CD, I now own the software," or "I hate Microsoft. They're the devil. That's why I stole their software," is not going to hold up in court at all.
Ah, but that is what you think, and the commercial software industry flat-out denies.
Right. Because you own the media all those bits came on. You do not own those bits.
Right, assuming either the license you bought allows you to install the software in multiple places, or you uninstall the software on your system before you transfer ownership. Otherwise, no.
No, you can't. Or, I should say, you can't unless the license gives you explicit rights to do so (say, the GPL for example). You can make a copy of a music CD to play in multiple places (home, car, office) because you are physically incapable of listening to that CD in multiple places at one time. Software is different. There are plenty of ways for you to use software in multiple places at any given point in time, so more restrictions are necessary. You can back up that installation CD. You have that right. But you can't go installing it at work, on your laptop, and at home, because you did not pay for three licenses.
Once again, no you don't. You own a license to use it. Even Open Source software and Free Software still deal with licenses (GPL == General Public LICENSE), the only difference is that those licenses give you explicit rights to install in multiple places, change the source code, pass the disk around to all your friends, etc. But you still don't own anything more than the CD those bits were on (and if you don't have a CD, you don't even own that; though I guess you would own the hard drive the tarball is on). This will continue to be the case until RMS gets his communistic fantasy world, where programmers never get paid, yet somehow amazingly never go hungry, even though they give away the fruits of their labor for free, letting them be "owned" by the hairy, unwashed masses. Luckily for every software professional out there, RMS's ideals are unworkable and impossible, so we won't ever get to that point.
Which is 100% completely wrong. The auto update facility of Windows XP will only download updates that are marked as "critical" (ie, they fix a major bug or security problem). As well, they are not installed by default, simply downloaded (okay, so you can configure it to install by default, but the default is to download and then ask you what to do. Read the EULA -- it says "download", not "download and install"). When a new update is downloaded, a little text bubble pops out of the systray, and you can pop up a dialog that lets you install the updates now, install them later, or forget about it. At this point, you can also get details on what updates were downloaded, or just go to the Windows Update site and have 100% total control over everything.
Really? Because the Windows XP Windows Update page explicitly says this:
So it's a bit different from not sending any info to Microsoft, but it still protects your privacy (well, unless you're a tin foil-wearing conspiracy nut that thinks Microsoft is out to get you).
More likely, it's simply you (and the rest of Slashdot) jerking your knee at a benign change to a useful tools (Windows Update), integrating it into a good OS (Windows XP, believe it or not) to make the users' lives easier. Don't want it? Turn it off. Microsoft can not turn it back on remotely.
MSNBC does random popup ads, in that not every time you load the page will an ad be displayed, but if you browse around on the site enough, or just get unlucky, you'll get a pop-up. I'm not sure I've ever seen a pop-under ad on MSNBC, but then I use a combination of Adzap with my Squid proxy and NoPopIE with Internet Explorer to banish most advertisements and popups. You may be using similar things, if you're never seeing popups on MSNBC
Funny, I always thought that 1 AND 0 = 0. The only way to get 1 out of an AND is to do 1 AND 1. Perhaps you meant OR?
Several problems, there. First off, by your rationale, Windows machines already have thousands more titles than you'd expect, because they have emulators for everything from the old 2600 to the N64 and PSX, and everything in between. That said, I've never used an emulator that was 100% perfect. Even if it was only that the input method left something to be desired (using the keyboard, or even a PC gamepad, is rarely as good as using the original pad the game was designed for), I still consider it a problem. And emulation of later systems has problems in other areas, as well. N64 and PSX emulators have plenty of problems (look at Bleem!, for example), and don't work on many games. Finally, you're offering up a library of games that is slowly becoming unavailable. Within the year, I'd expect it to be quite difficult to find any of the good older PSX games (most of the newer games tend to be hacked-together kiddies games), or any Dreamcast games at all. The used market is not very reliable, and the games will be going for upwards of $100USD or more on ebay. Not a very reassuring thought, especially when you're dealing with people that are notorious for not wanting to spend money on software.
No, most likely what would happen is your average linux kiddie would go to the local blockbuster, rent a couple games, burn them off onto CDRs, and just play the copies ("official" emulators like Bleem! would likely incorporate copy protections (don't know for sure), but I doubt any community, grassroots emulator would bother). That'd get Sony and Sega on your backs very quickly, to be sure.
Maybe, but not enough linux-only zealots to justify selling separate linux binaries. theCarmack basically said after Quake 3 Arena that sales of the linux port were so dismal that they wouldn't bother in the future. Oh, sure, there'll still be linux ports. Witness RTCW. They'll just be done in spare time, and take a little longer, and they won't be sold in a commercial box (like Zoid doing the ports for Q1 and Q2, they'll probably only have one or two guys on the ports for post-Q3 games, rather than hiring a whole company like Loki).
Lots of game servers run on linux, however, and id as well as others have typically been prompt about getting the servers ported over to linux quickly.
Sure, you don't need a lawyer -- until they sue you because their lawyer interpreted a part of the contract differently than you did (and because their lawyer is trained and educated in this kind of thing, take a guess who was the one that misinterpreted ... hint: not the lawyer). So now, you have to pay a lawyer large legal fees to represent you in court. Or are you going to do that yourself, as well? If so, now you lost the case, and you have to pay an even larger sum to your client, as well as following whatever was decided (in this case, likely giving the client your intellectual property). So, rather than spend a few hundred for legal consultation over a contract dispute, or a few thousand for legal representation because you didn't get the consultation, you end up paying millions and give away part of your intellectual property. But that's better than paying a lawyer, right?
I'm sorry, but if you were the CEO of any company I was working for, I'd quit post haste, and encourage all my co-workers to do same. It may suck, but retaining legal consultation and representation (AKA, lawyers) is as much a part of good business practice as is treating your employees well.
Ack! Yeah, you're right. I totally forgot about Tribes. Watch as I rationalize that away, though. Tribes wasn't a very large success, commercially or amongst its players. Yes, it did develop a hardcore following, but it was nowhere as large as something like TF1, UT, or Half-Life (back when people would play the default Half-Life modes). So I'm going to justify my oversight by saying that while Tribes did introduce these games types first in a commercial setting (TF1 was still the original intro for the types), it was not seen by a majority of gamers. UT brought them to the masses, as it were.
Domination and Assault. Okay, so the game types were not terribly new (the Domination game type was first seen in the old Team Fortress mod for Quake 1, with the excellent map canalzon; Assault was again seen first in a primitive form in Team Fortress, with the map hunted), but they were types that had not been previously available out of the box in a commercial game, and they were definitely not types available in Quake 3 (q3 had only deathmatch, team deathmatch, and CTF). As far as anybody playing the games in the default state, I wouldn't expect that. These games are pushing three years old. There have been many and more mods for them that extend the gameplay quite farther than the original default modes. It may very well be that Q3A has surpassed UT when you count the quality mods (I don't know, I haven't stayed on top of the communities for either).
However, both id and Epic are better engine developers than game designers. Witness the sheer number of games that have been based on their technology -- for Epic, there's DS9: The Fallen, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time, Rune, the never-to-be-released Duke Nukem Forever, and probably a few more I'm missing; for id, there have been games ranging from the early Wolf3D days (IIRC, Blake Stone was based on the Wolf3D engine), to Doom/Doom2 (Hexen and Heretic), to Quake (Hexen 2, Half-Life, DNF was going to use this originally), to Quake 2 (Daikatana, Anachronox), all the way up to Quake 3 (Elite Force, FAKK2, Alice, RTCW, MOH:AA, and more). id knows this, which is why they worked with Grey Matter and Nerve to make the recent Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Epic also knows this, which is why they're working with Legend (the guys who did Wheel of Time) to make the next Unreal (unimaginatively named Unreal 2). Expect to see more of this happening in the future -- as games keep getting bigger and more expensive to produce, companies will begin specializing. I don't think it'll be uncommon to see collaborations of three or more companies on a single game (like RTCW), where each company does what they're good at (single-player gameplay, multi-player gameplay, engine, art, design, marketing, etc).
And you simply assume they haven't done this because there wasn't a press release. Okay, sure. Except that simply assigning more resources is not exactly sexy, and doesn't make for a useful or exciting press release. It's just "business as usual". Stopping to fix a bunch of past bugs, however, is different. It's quantifiable. They can show that they are actually doing something, while it's difficult to show to the world a bigger emphasis on security and stability during the design and development cycles.
Of course, I'm on slashdot, so I don't know why I would even think Microsoft should get the benefit of the doubt. Let's just slam them some more, eh?
So, Microsoft makes an effort to do the Right Thing (tm), and yet they still get bashed? Good god, man! Try running one of their modern operating systems (Windows 2000, Windows XP), and then see how often "their programs and OS continue to crash for no apparent reason". You must be firmly living in the past if you believe that is in any way still the case. Either that or you've not used Microsoft software for a while, which makes you unqualified to comment at best (and a troll at worst, but I'll ignore that part since I'm feeding the trolls here).
You can still install java, and will be prompted to do so the first time you load a page with a java applet (there are so few of those, and even fewer end-user java apps, I could see the average user going for years without ever knowing or caring that they don't have java installed). Pushing .NET is not necessarily a bad thing, as they're actually going for setting a standard the right way -- through a standards body (Sun's bailed on that process no less than three times). "MSN passwords" are only necessary if you use MSN. Assuming you mean Passport passwords for the Windows Messenger (which is different than the MSN Messenger), that's different -- the system prompts, but you can say "No" and it'll leave you alone.
I understand paranoia and conspiracy theories can be fun, but every now and then you need to step back into reality and realize that everybody is not out to get you, least of all Microsoft.
There is a very big difference between "transparent" and "translucent". The former means that light passes through the material almost completely unchanged (a certain amount of distortion is okay, but the point is that you can make out what's behind it). Translucent means that light is transmitted, but it's diffuse and you can't make out what's behind the material. This concrete is translucent. It's not transparent (read the article).
Sounds like the history of the world, to me. Some visionary dreams up some idealistic yet flawed and unworkable ideology (Marx, for instance). Some people get it in their heads to implement this ideology (Russian Bolsheviks). Because the ideology is based completely on flawed hypotheses and assumptions, it's not workable in the form the original visionary envisioned. So it gets perverted and changed (Soviet Russia). And then years later, other idealistic individuals complain that the implementation was flawed, rather than realizing it was the original idea that was flawed to begin with. So of course the implementation of Free Software is so far gone from the "ideals of RMS". Yet the ideals of RMS are flawed, so the implementation is only doing the best it can with what it has to work with.
Quite a few people still buy Delphi. Delphi users moving to C++ often buy C++ Builder. Otherwise, most everybody else chooses Visual Studio. So, I could see a case made for opening C++ Builder, but not Delphi (which happens to fall under "their Windows products").
Red herring. Your analogy makes no sense. The equivalent to having multiple sedans on the market is not having the same game on multiple platforms, but instead having multiple games to chose from. Quake3 on Windows or Quake3 on linux is still a Toyota Camry, but what if I want RTCW (or a Chevy Impala)? A better analogy would be something stupid, like having a Toyota Camry with a Toyota engine, and a Toyota Camry with a Ford engine. For all intents and purposes the two will drive the same, but what's under the hood is quite different. And, that scenario doesn't exist in the automotive world.
Drawing analogies between the technology world and the automotive industry never works out well. Let's try not to do that any more, shall we?
What version of DirectX was your friend using? How did he write his code? First off, DirectX has gone through many changes since its inception years ago. It went from truly horrible, to passably decent (around DX5) to pretty darned good (DX7 time frame) to awesome (DX8). DirectX 3 is very much different than DX 5, is very much different than DX8. They're all backwards compatible, but if you're targetting DX8 and writing like you're targetting DX3, then you're not targetting DX8 at all.
Also, since DirectX is very much about COM, there are plenty of ways to make it easier on the programmer. For example, ATL takes most of the pain out of COM programming. The various smart pointer classes relieve you of the tedious details of querying interfaces, making sure you properly ref count (AddRef and Release), and cleaning up your pointers when you're done. And if your friend was trying to slog through DX using pure C code (yes, it's possible), no wonder he thought it was nasty.
SDL is nice, yes, but it pales in comparison to DirectX. That shouldn't reflect poorly on SDL, since SDL is developed by a very small number of people with a very limited budget, when compared to DirectX (not to mention that SDL for win32 wouldn't even exist without DirectX, as it's just a portability layer over DX code). If your goal is an easily portable game, SDL and OpenGL are very good choices. If your goal is to make the best game you can on one platform (okay, two platforms if you consider that porting from win32 to XBox isn't too difficult as long as you're using DX), then DirectX is the way to go.
Yeah, figures I'd screw up the office locations. I never was a big fan of ION Storm (even though I did buy Deus Ex and Anachronox). The important part is that the office where theRomero and Tom Hall worked was the one that folded, while the office where Warren Specter worked (and which pumped out ION Storm's only really successful game) did not. Aside from that, the rest of my post is correct, and I would assume that's why I got rated as informative.
theRomero was on the Quake team. Deus Ex, however, was done by the awesome, ever-so-talented Warren Specter. Deus Ex was also done at the ION Storm Dallas (or wherever it was -- not Austin, where theRomero was) office, which was not closed. Instead, it went for some name change, I don't remember what. That same studio is now working on Thief 3, as well as Deus Ex 2. ION Storm Austin is gone. Dead. Finito. Tom Hall (also an ex-id guy, sucked into ION Storm by theRomero, made the moderately successful yet still fun Anachronox) and theRomero started Monkeystone Games, where they make games for various handhelds. They already have one game out for the PocketPC, something about a delivery boy. Maybe theRomero is learning, since this game was done in a matter of months, rather than years.
And remember, "Design is Law!" Oh, yeah, and theRomero has cut his hair. He's no longer sexy.