Today, a guy at work told me that Linux will never catch on because there is a lack of virus software for it. I had to explain it to him, he still didn't believe me!
Did he not believe you when you said, "Linux doesn't have any anti-virus software because Linux is not popular enough yet to be the target of viruses"? Or was it because you told him that Linux is intrinsically safe from viruses. That's not true, and here's why:
Right now, most people running Linux know better than to do everything as root. As such, there is a logical separation between what the user can do, and what can damage the system (in that, little of what the user can do can damage the system). Also, right now, there aren't any e-mail apps that are as featureful (bugful, if you must) as Outlook, in that they won't automatically handle whatever attachments you get (you have to download the attachment and then load it up with whatever tool you use to view it). This is a bane when it comes to executable code (already been fixed in Outlook for some time -- people just don't patch), but it's a boon for everything else. It exemplifies a fundamental design difference between the Windows experience and most Linux GUI experiences -- being that Windows is very much "Document-centric". You don't open Word and then open a document. You don't open Excel and then open a spreadsheet. You just double-click on the document or spreadsheet, and Word (or WordPerfect, or Star Office, even, if that's how you have things set up) fires up and loads that document for you. Now, to get off of that tangent and back on to the original point -- as Linux grows in the desktop market (if Linux grows in the desktop market), more and more and more people will be running as root 24/7/365. What that means is that suddenly, viruses are very much dangerous. Or, users start clamoring for an e-mail app that has the same power as Outlook, at which point we get mail virii spread through Linux. Oh, sure, it won't affect you, but what about that guy at work?
The point? Linux is not intrinisically safe from viruses. It's "safe enough" right now, through a combination of obscurity (it's not worth the time to write a virus for it, as it'll see little spread) and security (though a virus could still trash a user's $HOME just fine, even if it's not running as root). Expect to see that change if Linux does penetrate further into the desktop market (this will take some time -- the Macintosh is fairly free from virii mainly due to the obscurity argument, so Linux would have to substantially overtake Apple's marketshare to make itself a target).
I have read lots of stuff but maybe I'm not reading the right things.
That would surely be the problem. Every distribution of linux has a manual (whether paper or electronic). As a newbie, it's a very good idea to read that manual. For instance, look here for all the redhat manuals. Start there. Read. Read more. If you get confused, try re-reading. If that doesn't help, ask a specific question on a newsgroup, at your local LUG, or on an IRC channel dedicated to this kind of thing (<shameless-plug>#Linux on the EFNet IRC network is pretty good, if you go in there with a specific question in mind</shameless-plug>). Learning to use Linux is 95% finding the right resources and 5% reading. Of course, 95% of the right resources are docs (manuals, books, FAQs, howtos), so you're going to be doing a lot of reading. If you can't bother with that, then don't bother with linux (note: this is not trying to be elitist, just stating the facts. feel free to flame me anyway, as I'm sure you all will).
And herein lies the BIGGEST problem in capitalism. A company should not be responsible to it's shareholders in any other way than simple honesty. Honestly market an honest product. No more, no less.
I'm sorry, but why don't you go invest money in a business (buy stock), and then see if you're happy that they're being "honest" while their stock plummets because they're not making any money? Oh, what's that? You wouldn't invest your money in such a company? Imagine that! Or, maybe you would invest your money in such a company. Luckily, capitalism has this nifty Darwin-esque "survival of the fittest" type of culture, wherein not only would your "honest" company not survive, you yourself would also be flat broke and not able to fund any other silly experiments in altruism.
Do whatever you can get away with, within the limits of the law, no matter how unethical it may be.
Let's reword that. How about, "Do what you must to make a profit, because without a profit you won't be doing anything shortly." The law is there to put limits on such behavior. "Ethics" has nothing to do with it until you get busted. Such is life.
And this "you're responsible for making profits for the shareholders at any cost" crap is the cause of it. It's forcing companies to act unethically, or get sued by greedy shareholders.
That's fine. If a company doesn't wish to be "enslaved" by their shareholders, they can simply stay private. There's nothing that says that all business must be pulbicly traded. Good luck surviving, though, when you have no venture capital and you sell no product because you're being "honest".
When you invest in a company, you are TAKING A RISK, just like betting on the horses. If that company buckles in a year, oh well. However, laws should remain that prevent a company from going public, grabbing as much shareholder money as they can, then the CEO buggering off with it all and screwing everyone.
Damn right you're taking a risk. And unlike when you bet on horses at the track, or drop chips at the blackjack table, you actually expect the businesses you're taking a risk on to attempt to maximize the value of your investment. Why would you "take a risk" on a sure-loss investment? Seems stupid to me. Oh, yeah, and there are laws that prevent a company from going public, grabbing VC, and skipping off to Mexico. That CEO would be guilty of embezzlement. Of course, there's nothing stopping the entire company from throwing $50million parties with their $60million in venture capital for the year. That's not illegal, just stupid. And if you're stupid enough to invest in such a company, well...
...there are still a lot of devices that have no Windows 2000 drivers. I'll have to buy a new video card.I'll have to buy a new DVD player and decoder card. My USB webcam will no longer work.
nVidia has excellent support for Win2K (what? you're not using an nVidia video card? Sucks to be you, then), Sigma Designs has support for their Hollywood Plus MPEG2 decoder, my Pioneer DVD-ROMs (IDE and SCSI) have never had a problem, and my IBM Net Camera (USB) works perfectly. Of course, I'm using XP now, but all of that hardware worked in Win2K as well.
I really, really don't like Microsoft's abuse. I don't like things like the Registry, which is a database that frequently has errors that cannot be fixed with the tools Microsoft supplies. All settings for most programs are contained in the registry, and if there is bad error, it can be necessary to start over completely, and re-install all programs. For some people with a lot of programs, this can take 20 hours.
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way. In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of.ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
I don't like the artificial limitations which cause Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME to crash even though there is plenty of memory available.
Without those "artificial limitations", it's likely Win95 never would've seen the light of day. See, much of Windows 95's vaunted instability was due to Microsoft buckling under the pressure of their ISVs. Microsoft had actually removed most of the 16-bit code, and many nasty bugs. However, many ISVs told Microsoft that they weren't going to develop for Win95 immediately, since they felt that their Win3.x apps still had some life, and many OEMs and partners told Microsoft that they would not upgrade to Windows 95 unless some app (depends on the company what app that would be) was available. Thus, to be able to make Windows 95, it needed to have much better backwards-compatibility. Which meant re-introducing lots of nasty 16-bit code and a number of bugs that win3.x developers had come to rely upon. Was it wrong for them to do that? Yes, probably. But when you're a business, making money is important. Had they not, no money would be made. QED.
I don't like the sloppiness and built-in weak security. This has caused billions of dollars of grief for people all over the world.
Erm, choose the OS family you're speaking of. Yes, win9x had very weak security, and for a good reason -- it's a home system, and at the time win95 was written the internet wasn't so popular. Now, if you want to make the "billions of dollars" argument, you'll have to refer to NT, which is not win9x, and has some pretty impressive security features. Yes, there were problems, too (note that IIS is not considered part of the OS), but a lot of that (I'm not saying a majority, but a lot) came from admins who had no clue what they were doing when it came to NT security. My point? Pick one or the other -- either you're talking about win9x and the weak security argument holds up, or you're talking about NT and the "billions of dollars" argument could make a fair case, but not both.
I don't like the fact that the operating system re-configures itself without any notice to the user. When there is a problem with a connection, as there often is after a computer is moved, there is no notice that something has changed.
I'm assuming you're referring to the fact that Windows networking defaults to DHCP. Don't you think the same thing would happen on any other OS that uses DHCP to get an IP address?
Why does a man who has 70 billion dollars feel that he has to squeeze money from people? Why doesn't Bill Gates relax and make a good product? Does it really make all that much difference to him to make another billion?
Either you're very naive and have no clue how publicly-traded businesses work, or you're deliberately trolling. I'll assume the former, as it's up to the moderators to decide the latter. Okay, quick lesson in the economics of a publicly-traded coporation: That money Microsoft makes does not go directly into BillG's pocket. Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders to continue to be profitable. It does that by releasing product. In the cycle of product development, there comes a point where you have to call it "good enough" and release it so that you can sell it and a) recoup your R&D costs, and b) hopefully make a profit to keep your shareholders happy. This is what Microsoft does. Yes, Microsoft, just like any other group of developers in the world, would love to sit on a product until it's 100% perfect. Doing that, however, is economic suicide. I'm not even talking just the loss of a monopoly position. Microsoft can survive without that. I'm talking about disappearing off the face of the free market. You can't run a business designed around selling product without releasing product. It's just not possible.
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware and whether it's legally okay to trade it/hack it/despoil it in general?
When it's as simple as checking a box during installation (or 5 minutes on the phone, if don't have an internet connection), sends no personal data, and is very non-intrusive (you have to do some major hardware upgrades to force a re-activation, and XP doesn't need the customary yearly re-install like the win9x line), what's the problem? It's simply a company protecting their IP.
huge required
diskspace,
Yes, XP takes about 1GB of disk space for installation. But with 80GB drives running for $150USD (less, even!), that's roughly $1.88 worth of disk space. Stop living in the past.
enforced digital rights management,
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Care to explain?
sloppy support for MP3,
Bullshit. Windows Media Player never did encode mp3's at a bitrate higher than 64kbps, but it played them just fine. XP's version of WMP can encode at a higher rate if you pay $10 for an add-on pack, and it plays mp3's just as well as previous versions. As well, there's nothing stopping you from installing other apps to rip and play mp3s.
discontinued support for older games and applications
As far as older apps go, only things that relied on low-level system calls are broken (things like Norton Utilities, for instance). For games, I don't follow your reasoning at all. All the games I currently have run perfectly fine (even Quake1!). Hell, I can still run the old Commander Keen games just fine (no sound card sound, but that's simply because I'm lazy and it's nostalgic for me to use the PC speaker for those games). Yes, XP is based on Windows 2000, and yes, Windows 2000 did have some compatibility problems with games. That's fine, as Win2K was not aimed at the gaming public. Microsoft made a concerted effort to make sure many older games work well in XP. You may have to update your video driver (the native nVidia drivers don't like OpenGL, for instance, though if you get nVidia's latest release it works fine), but if you're a gamer you do that already.
and more
Care to list more so I can debunk those as well?
If you're going to bash something, please at least try using it so that you have something on which to base your arguments. You seem to be regurgitating the same old arguments that have been thoroughly disproved over and over again. At the very least, get creative if you're going to make up stuff.
Being an adrenaline junkie is NOT superior to being a gaming addict.
You're right. Being any kind of junkie is not superior to being any kind of addict (wherein junkie is a euphemism for addict). I was just trying to make the point that there are better sources of adrenaline and endorphines than gaming (the original poster was asserting that gaming was addictive due to the release of such hormones, which I'm sure it is).
Oh, yeah, and I'm not sure I'd call having sex "extreme". Unless you're into kinky stuff, anyway. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Sometimes I get a great high from running that lasts awhile.
<sarcasm>Nah, that's just from smoking too much marijuana -- it gets stored in your fat cells, so that when you burn that fat, you get high.</sarcasm> It's sarcasm, in that I'm being a facetious asshole, but it's still a true scenario.
You want a real endorphine (correct spelling) rush? Get off your computer/video game console and go out and do something. Ride a bike down a mountain. Take your car to the race track. Pierce your nipples. Have sex. The adrenaline and endorphine rush you get from those kinds of activities FAR outweighs anything you'll get from a video game, no matter how good that game is. I do agree that such a rush is addictive, however. Just not in the amounts you'd get from playing a game.
And you assert that 90% of commercial code isn't crap as well?
Certainly not, but I do assert that it's a different kind of crap. Most commercial software has some form of formal testing that is geared at handling QA issues. Research code tends to be tested to the point of, "Does this work well enough for me to get my masters degree?", and that's it.
Mosaic was spawned from the cradle of UofI Champagne-Urbana. Or do people honestly believe that MA would have written it without the education or the advisors?
This I know, having matriculated there myself. However, did you ever use Mosaic? It was a huge pile of crap. Very awful software that would break for no apparent reason at all. Mr. Andreeson et al did not make it better until forming Netscape (at which point they re-wrote Mosaic, for practical reasons -- they didn't have the copyright to that code, and it would've needed it anyway. Look at IE versions 1.x and 2.x. They were pretty much a Microsoft-branded Mosaic.)
This whole "companies always make better software than universities" camp needs to get a wakeup call.
You're missing the point. The judgement of "better" is irrelevant, really, as "good" for each camp is completely different. University work tends to err on the side of "correct at all costs", which often means it only works on certain configurations of hardware (not too unexpectedly, considering few research projects go through the kind of testing that quality commercial software does). Commercial software tends more towards "Make it work, then make it pretty -- if we have time". Deadlines are real in the commercial sector (they are in academia, as well, but generally not when you're talking about thesis work -- the deadline is "when it's done". And you've seen how well "when it done" works in the real world -- Duke Nukem Forever is 5 years in the making with no end in sight...).
I'll remember that the next time the US Navy has a blue screen of death
Windows NT (and Windows 2000, and Linux, and *BSD, and...) was never intended for mission-critical applications. Enough said.
How much time and money has Nimda or Code Red or any of the other electronic nuisances cost us? And all because of a "feature" of a class of operating system that has no executable bit and thinks that remote, no-check, executable code is acceptable rather than a rewrite. Painful to rewrite? Yes. Possibly crippling to Microsoft? Probably. Would benefit a lot of people to fix the cart with the square wheels. Maybe.
Fixed already? Yes. You're falling into exactly the fallacy that Joel was arguing against in his interview -- that the only way to fix something is to rewrite it. Note that I believe he meant "rewrite" more in the sense of the overall project. A well-designed project can easily have many modules re-written over and over again and suffer no problems as long as interfaces are adhered to. You're talking about throwing the baby out with the bath water.
You realize that NT has the ability to use compatibility layers, correct? For instance, NT4 had kernel-level compatibility layers for win3.x, OS/2, and POSIX. The file you're referring to would be part of the OS/2 compatibility layer.
Anyhow, I think he speaks horrible advice from a computer science standpoint. "It dosen't matter how bad, buggy, cludgy, and crufty a code base is, never ever rewrite it". If you don't understand what the code is, if it's impossible to read, don't worry! that's the sign of good code!
And this is the difference between academic code and commercial code. Ever looked at 90% of the research projects from graduate students? Most of them barely work, or only work on one specific set of hardware (and not anything else), or require a huge set of work-arounds to get the code up and running. The reason for this is because this is theoretical work. It doesn't matter how well it works (well, unless your thesis is on optimization, but that's different), only that it works well enough to demonstrate your research. Commercial software is the complete opposite. It has to work, and work well, on many different configurations of hardware, and many different versions of software (Windows 95 vs 98 vs 98se vs ME vs XP, Windows NT4 vs 2K vs XP, Mac OS 7.x vs 8.x vs 9.x vs OS X, and so on), or your potential customers aren't going to buy it.
It speaks alot of Microsoft's tactics, do whatever it is that takes the absolute least effort possible, and charge as much as you possibly can for it. All of those other companies failed because they were focused on quality, whilst they were focused on nothing the bottom line.
You didn't read the interview, did you? One of the main points in there was that by throwing away your old code and re-writing from scratch, you're throwing away years of experience and bug fixes. To use the example he gave of the nasty function that was supposed to do something simple but had a whole bunch of seemingly useless extra crap in it, the point was that all those extra little things that you'd throw away in a rewrite were necessary bug fixes. You throw them away, and unless you wrote those bugfixes in the first place (not likely, and even if you did, not likely you would remember), you lose all that information. That means that your new, "cleaner" version is very likely going to have similar bugs. Perhaps even the same bugs you fixed in your older, crufty code. Rewriting your code from the ground up is not focusing on "quality" (it may be focusing on "quality of code", which is a pretty useless standard so long as your code is proprietary), but instead focusing on "triviality". The bottom line is that in business (any business, not just the software development business), the bottom line is what's important. If you don't like that, stick to academia. You'll be happier there, and your potential peers in the commercial arena will be happier having you there.
I remember a story about JD Rockefeller. He was touring one of his oil works, and he saw someone soldering the oil cans shut. He asked him how much solder he uses on each can. The man told him, something like 48. Rockefeller said "from now on, use 36". That's exactly the type of cutting corners companies like Microsoft do. THat's not good for the customers, it's not good for society, and it's not good capatilism.
Irrelevant red herring, and a bad example to boot. You're equating a potentially dangerous situation (in your example, less solder means a less solid joint, which means the oil could leak) with a harmless situation (reusing your old code, crufty as it is). In one case you're making a conscious decision to be less safe, while in the other you're making a conscious decision to leverage the work that's already been done.
As I said, I don't think you read the article. If it makes financial sense (you will sell enough copies to recoup your extra development cost and extended time to market), then there's nothing wrong with re-writing code (though Joel did suggest looking at the old codebase while writing the new, so that you won't miss any of those one-off bug fixes that are neccessary but are also the source of the cruft). The problem is that it rarely makes much sense. Especially when you're in a competitive market (as all the examples he gave were -- when you're competing against Microsoft, the worst possible thing you can do is be more concerned about code quality than making a featureful, useable product that's available quickly).
As a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team, Joel designed Excel Basic and drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy.
At Microsoft, the job title of Program Manager is given to the people that design the software. They dream it up, write the specs, hold countless meetings, and basically lay the path for the developers to follow. The developers (Software Design Engineer) are tasked with actually programming that software (and thus would be considered "programmers"). Just to round out the roster, the Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET) write the testing suites used by the test teams, and the Software Test Engineers apply those suites to the code following a test plan that they create. In that heirarchy, only the SDE and SDET jobs could be accurately described as "programmers".
Note that this is actually not so cut and dried, wherein SDEs often do design work and test work, and SDETs often do the work of SDTs. PMs don't program, however (well, aside from javascript&html prototypes, anyway).
The point? Calling this Joel an ex-Microsoft programmer is misleading, because he was not. However, the position he held at Microsoft actually lends more credence to his views on design than if he were actually an ex-programmer, as part of the job description of a program manager is doing software design.
Not write software without thinking about security?
Already being done. Microsoft has learned there lesson, it seems. A third-party security review, available here (PDF file) of the.NET framework has shown that it's pretty darn secure (yes, Microsoft commissioned the review. Conspiracy theories can now commence.) (though as with anything, if the developers writing.NET services don't employ the security features available in.NET, it won't mean much. Microsoft is taking this seriously, but it'll be up to third parties to use the provided security framework). Office XP has many features with security in mind, such as the default and automatic stripping of malicious scripts and attachments in Outlook XP. Windows XP includes a built-in firewall, which while fairly primitve (it's essentially a packet filter, on par with ipchains or iptables, and not a more powerful proxy firewall), is a good step for home users who would otherwise not install anything like Black Ice Defender or other firewall products.
You can't change the past, but you can change the future. Microsoft has provided security hotfixes for their mistakes in the past, and are working with security in mind for current and future products. Don't sell them short based on years-old work. Look at what they're currently doing.
As these kinds of worms become more and more common, one has to wonder what more can Microsoft do? They've already released hotfixes that address the problems (Outlook XP strips attachments by default, older versions have fixes that do the same). Short of force-feeding the patches to users (which itself would garner a huge outcry), what more can be done?
I wasn't questioning his numbers on the prices for the Playstation, Japanese and American (or Canadian, as he seems to be). My point was that his numbers don't add up. 80 yen to the dollar at roughly $500 USD is close to 39,800. But 110 yen to the dollar at the same 39800 yen makes for $363USD, which is a bit more than $299 USD. I'm sure Gord is a great guy and all, and smart, but he should stick to what he knows -- renting and selling games. Speculating on the business of creating and selling (in the sense that the manufacturer sells to retailers, not retailers to customers) hardware in the video game industry is apparently an area in which he has little experience, unless he happened to work for the business unit of Sega or Sony or similar at some point in the recent past. And it wouldn't hurt if his numerical examples would add up properly.
Gord is a nut, and is little more than a Sony apologist. His math doesn't add up. If a PSX sold for the equivalent of $500USD in Japan when the exchange rate was 80:1 yen:dollar, and Sony was selling it for $299 in the US when the yen was 110:1, that means that the PSX was still going for the equivalent of $363USD in Japan. Now, assuming that in Japan Sony was selling at a break-even price point because apparently the Japanese have more expendable income (and well they should, if his numbers on Japanese minimum wage are correct, which I doubt), then Sony was still taking a $64USD hit per PSX sold in the States. And that's not the only math that doesn't work right. It would also be nice of Gord would cite where some of his numbers come from. He asserts that Sony makes $6/game on licensing revenue for the PS2, which seems exceedingly low to me. Anyway, several sources I trust more than Gord (and like Gord, I won't bother citing them as a) this was a year ago, and so I'm not going to bother digging up the articles, and b) like anybody that listens to Gord would care anyway) stated last year during the PS2 launch that a bundling ratio of somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8 games per PS2 was necessary for Sony to break even (or fewer games and more accessories, which are often-times Sony first-party accessories, and thus make Sony more cash). They weren't doing nearly that well.
You're right that the Linux kit can be sold for whatever Sony wishes, and you'd better believe they're going to try to make a healthy profit off of them (they're low-demand items, so the prices have to be higher to allow them to continue to be made).
<rant>God damned hippy bleeding-heart liberal socialist bastards. Everytime there's something you don't like or agree with, you start shouting, "There should be a law!", and, "Let's outlaw that!" But as soon as something you feel is vital is threatened by law (oh, I dunno, say anything threatened by the DMCA?), you start whining about government. You can't have it both ways.</rant>
And on a side note, Outlook has had patches that will strip executable content from messages (Outlook XP does this by default). Outlook is a very good PIM app (it's more than just e-mail. Perhaps you're thinking of Outlook Express?), and there's really nothing that compares (okay, so Evolution has pretty much copied the look&feel straight from Outlook, but it's beta software, and still doesn't support all that Outlook does).
If you're stupid enough to give this group of degenerate skript kiddies your credit card, does it really matter whether you use the net or the phone? They're going to scam you anyway.
There are _many_ PC systems which have CPU's on separate cards, which can be upgaded to dual or across processor generations.
Perhaps you're referring to hot-swappable server hardware, which I was not (note that I was talking about consumer-grade Apple hardware, so when comparing it to a "PC", it's common sense to assume consumer-grade Intel-compatible hardware). As far as your standard Intel- or AMD-compatible hardware you can buy, your motherboard determines the number and generation of CPU(s) you can use.
Modifying a machine to be dual processor without swapping out the motherboard? Anyone have any more info on this? The article was kinda skimpy on the details, it assumed we knew already.
This is a by-product of the PPC architecture used by Apple. You're thinking in a PC mindframe, where the CPU sockets are built directly onto the motherboard, and to do a dual setup you need a mobo that supports two CPUs. A Macintosh is different. The CPU is on a separate card. The dual CPU card is the same as a single CPU card, but with two CPUs on it. It connects to the motherboard in exactly the same way. Now, I've never taken a mac apart or done a CPU upgrade, so I don't have much authority here, but that is the gist of how it's done. PC architecture vs. Mac architecture.
His arguments boil down to nothing more than, "The GameCube is not a PlayStation 2, and so it's doomed to fail." That is exactly what he predicted about the XBox, as well. From all indications, it appears that both the XBox and the GameCube are doing well and going strong. Of course they're not PlayStation 2's. Hell, that'd really suck if they were. They're different, and while both are technologically better, it's going to come down to games. And both the GameCube and the XBox have great games out now (Super Monkey Ball for the GC; DOA3, Amped, and Halo (just to name a few) for the XBox), with many more on the horizon (Super Smash Bros. Melee out shortly for the GCN, MGS X and GTA3 waiting in the wings for XBox. Plus Soul Calibur 2 for the XBox come next spring-ish, and Obi-Wan here within a week, and...). Just because Gord owns a video game sales/rental store doesn't necessarily make him an authority on anything more than the buying habits of his surrounding community concerning video games. (as an example of this, many people here have said that they can't find an XBox to buy, while others have said the shelves at their local Target are virtually overflowing. Same for the GameCube. Some of us can't find either (got my XBox pre-order, holding off on the GCN for a while anyway, so it doesn't matter). All this shows is that certain things sell better in certain areas, most likely due to the amount of advertising and hype given locally to those items.)
I love the way the initial shipment of XBoxes keeps decreasing in the eyes of the/. posters. First it was 350,000 units, then 300,000, and now it's only 200,000. And still Microsoft hasn't released numbers yet, so all of those are pure speculation. I'm guessing that the shipment was closer to the 350,000 mark, if not higher. As well, Microsoft is shipping 100,000 units per week through the holiday season.
Anyway, let's just wait until Microsoft releases some numbers before we go speculating too much, eh?
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Did he not believe you when you said, "Linux doesn't have any anti-virus software because Linux is not popular enough yet to be the target of viruses"? Or was it because you told him that Linux is intrinsically safe from viruses. That's not true, and here's why:
Right now, most people running Linux know better than to do everything as root. As such, there is a logical separation between what the user can do, and what can damage the system (in that, little of what the user can do can damage the system). Also, right now, there aren't any e-mail apps that are as featureful (bugful, if you must) as Outlook, in that they won't automatically handle whatever attachments you get (you have to download the attachment and then load it up with whatever tool you use to view it). This is a bane when it comes to executable code (already been fixed in Outlook for some time -- people just don't patch), but it's a boon for everything else. It exemplifies a fundamental design difference between the Windows experience and most Linux GUI experiences -- being that Windows is very much "Document-centric". You don't open Word and then open a document. You don't open Excel and then open a spreadsheet. You just double-click on the document or spreadsheet, and Word (or WordPerfect, or Star Office, even, if that's how you have things set up) fires up and loads that document for you. Now, to get off of that tangent and back on to the original point -- as Linux grows in the desktop market (if Linux grows in the desktop market), more and more and more people will be running as root 24/7/365. What that means is that suddenly, viruses are very much dangerous. Or, users start clamoring for an e-mail app that has the same power as Outlook, at which point we get mail virii spread through Linux. Oh, sure, it won't affect you, but what about that guy at work?
The point? Linux is not intrinisically safe from viruses. It's "safe enough" right now, through a combination of obscurity (it's not worth the time to write a virus for it, as it'll see little spread) and security (though a virus could still trash a user's $HOME just fine, even if it's not running as root). Expect to see that change if Linux does penetrate further into the desktop market (this will take some time -- the Macintosh is fairly free from virii mainly due to the obscurity argument, so Linux would have to substantially overtake Apple's marketshare to make itself a target).
That would surely be the problem. Every distribution of linux has a manual (whether paper or electronic). As a newbie, it's a very good idea to read that manual. For instance, look here for all the redhat manuals. Start there. Read. Read more. If you get confused, try re-reading. If that doesn't help, ask a specific question on a newsgroup, at your local LUG, or on an IRC channel dedicated to this kind of thing (<shameless-plug>#Linux on the EFNet IRC network is pretty good, if you go in there with a specific question in mind</shameless-plug>). Learning to use Linux is 95% finding the right resources and 5% reading. Of course, 95% of the right resources are docs (manuals, books, FAQs, howtos), so you're going to be doing a lot of reading. If you can't bother with that, then don't bother with linux (note: this is not trying to be elitist, just stating the facts. feel free to flame me anyway, as I'm sure you all will).
I'm sorry, but why don't you go invest money in a business (buy stock), and then see if you're happy that they're being "honest" while their stock plummets because they're not making any money? Oh, what's that? You wouldn't invest your money in such a company? Imagine that! Or, maybe you would invest your money in such a company. Luckily, capitalism has this nifty Darwin-esque "survival of the fittest" type of culture, wherein not only would your "honest" company not survive, you yourself would also be flat broke and not able to fund any other silly experiments in altruism.
Let's reword that. How about, "Do what you must to make a profit, because without a profit you won't be doing anything shortly." The law is there to put limits on such behavior. "Ethics" has nothing to do with it until you get busted. Such is life.
That's fine. If a company doesn't wish to be "enslaved" by their shareholders, they can simply stay private. There's nothing that says that all business must be pulbicly traded. Good luck surviving, though, when you have no venture capital and you sell no product because you're being "honest".
Damn right you're taking a risk. And unlike when you bet on horses at the track, or drop chips at the blackjack table, you actually expect the businesses you're taking a risk on to attempt to maximize the value of your investment. Why would you "take a risk" on a sure-loss investment? Seems stupid to me. Oh, yeah, and there are laws that prevent a company from going public, grabbing VC, and skipping off to Mexico. That CEO would be guilty of embezzlement. Of course, there's nothing stopping the entire company from throwing $50million parties with their $60million in venture capital for the year. That's not illegal, just stupid. And if you're stupid enough to invest in such a company, well ...
nVidia has excellent support for Win2K (what? you're not using an nVidia video card? Sucks to be you, then), Sigma Designs has support for their Hollywood Plus MPEG2 decoder, my Pioneer DVD-ROMs (IDE and SCSI) have never had a problem, and my IBM Net Camera (USB) works perfectly. Of course, I'm using XP now, but all of that hardware worked in Win2K as well.
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way. In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
Without those "artificial limitations", it's likely Win95 never would've seen the light of day. See, much of Windows 95's vaunted instability was due to Microsoft buckling under the pressure of their ISVs. Microsoft had actually removed most of the 16-bit code, and many nasty bugs. However, many ISVs told Microsoft that they weren't going to develop for Win95 immediately, since they felt that their Win3.x apps still had some life, and many OEMs and partners told Microsoft that they would not upgrade to Windows 95 unless some app (depends on the company what app that would be) was available. Thus, to be able to make Windows 95, it needed to have much better backwards-compatibility. Which meant re-introducing lots of nasty 16-bit code and a number of bugs that win3.x developers had come to rely upon. Was it wrong for them to do that? Yes, probably. But when you're a business, making money is important. Had they not, no money would be made. QED.
Erm, choose the OS family you're speaking of. Yes, win9x had very weak security, and for a good reason -- it's a home system, and at the time win95 was written the internet wasn't so popular. Now, if you want to make the "billions of dollars" argument, you'll have to refer to NT, which is not win9x, and has some pretty impressive security features. Yes, there were problems, too (note that IIS is not considered part of the OS), but a lot of that (I'm not saying a majority, but a lot) came from admins who had no clue what they were doing when it came to NT security. My point? Pick one or the other -- either you're talking about win9x and the weak security argument holds up, or you're talking about NT and the "billions of dollars" argument could make a fair case, but not both.
I'm assuming you're referring to the fact that Windows networking defaults to DHCP. Don't you think the same thing would happen on any other OS that uses DHCP to get an IP address?
Either you're very naive and have no clue how publicly-traded businesses work, or you're deliberately trolling. I'll assume the former, as it's up to the moderators to decide the latter. Okay, quick lesson in the economics of a publicly-traded coporation: That money Microsoft makes does not go directly into BillG's pocket. Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders to continue to be profitable. It does that by releasing product. In the cycle of product development, there comes a point where you have to call it "good enough" and release it so that you can sell it and a) recoup your R&D costs, and b) hopefully make a profit to keep your shareholders happy. This is what Microsoft does. Yes, Microsoft, just like any other group of developers in the world, would love to sit on a product until it's 100% perfect. Doing that, however, is economic suicide. I'm not even talking just the loss of a monopoly position. Microsoft can survive without that. I'm talking about disappearing off the face of the free market. You can't run a business designed around selling product without releasing product. It's just not possible.
When it's as simple as checking a box during installation (or 5 minutes on the phone, if don't have an internet connection), sends no personal data, and is very non-intrusive (you have to do some major hardware upgrades to force a re-activation, and XP doesn't need the customary yearly re-install like the win9x line), what's the problem? It's simply a company protecting their IP.
Yes, XP takes about 1GB of disk space for installation. But with 80GB drives running for $150USD (less, even!), that's roughly $1.88 worth of disk space. Stop living in the past.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Care to explain?
Bullshit. Windows Media Player never did encode mp3's at a bitrate higher than 64kbps, but it played them just fine. XP's version of WMP can encode at a higher rate if you pay $10 for an add-on pack, and it plays mp3's just as well as previous versions. As well, there's nothing stopping you from installing other apps to rip and play mp3s.
As far as older apps go, only things that relied on low-level system calls are broken (things like Norton Utilities, for instance). For games, I don't follow your reasoning at all. All the games I currently have run perfectly fine (even Quake1!). Hell, I can still run the old Commander Keen games just fine (no sound card sound, but that's simply because I'm lazy and it's nostalgic for me to use the PC speaker for those games). Yes, XP is based on Windows 2000, and yes, Windows 2000 did have some compatibility problems with games. That's fine, as Win2K was not aimed at the gaming public. Microsoft made a concerted effort to make sure many older games work well in XP. You may have to update your video driver (the native nVidia drivers don't like OpenGL, for instance, though if you get nVidia's latest release it works fine), but if you're a gamer you do that already.
Care to list more so I can debunk those as well?
If you're going to bash something, please at least try using it so that you have something on which to base your arguments. You seem to be regurgitating the same old arguments that have been thoroughly disproved over and over again. At the very least, get creative if you're going to make up stuff.
Works fine in mine. Perhaps you ought to try using a modern browser?
You're right. Being any kind of junkie is not superior to being any kind of addict (wherein junkie is a euphemism for addict). I was just trying to make the point that there are better sources of adrenaline and endorphines than gaming (the original poster was asserting that gaming was addictive due to the release of such hormones, which I'm sure it is).
Oh, yeah, and I'm not sure I'd call having sex "extreme". Unless you're into kinky stuff, anyway. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
<sarcasm>Nah, that's just from smoking too much marijuana -- it gets stored in your fat cells, so that when you burn that fat, you get high.</sarcasm> It's sarcasm, in that I'm being a facetious asshole, but it's still a true scenario.
You want a real endorphine (correct spelling) rush? Get off your computer/video game console and go out and do something. Ride a bike down a mountain. Take your car to the race track. Pierce your nipples. Have sex. The adrenaline and endorphine rush you get from those kinds of activities FAR outweighs anything you'll get from a video game, no matter how good that game is. I do agree that such a rush is addictive, however. Just not in the amounts you'd get from playing a game.
Oops, silly fingers. SDT == Sexually Dransmitted Tisease. STE == Software Test Engineer.
Certainly not, but I do assert that it's a different kind of crap. Most commercial software has some form of formal testing that is geared at handling QA issues. Research code tends to be tested to the point of, "Does this work well enough for me to get my masters degree?", and that's it.
This I know, having matriculated there myself. However, did you ever use Mosaic? It was a huge pile of crap. Very awful software that would break for no apparent reason at all. Mr. Andreeson et al did not make it better until forming Netscape (at which point they re-wrote Mosaic, for practical reasons -- they didn't have the copyright to that code, and it would've needed it anyway. Look at IE versions 1.x and 2.x. They were pretty much a Microsoft-branded Mosaic.)
You're missing the point. The judgement of "better" is irrelevant, really, as "good" for each camp is completely different. University work tends to err on the side of "correct at all costs", which often means it only works on certain configurations of hardware (not too unexpectedly, considering few research projects go through the kind of testing that quality commercial software does). Commercial software tends more towards "Make it work, then make it pretty -- if we have time". Deadlines are real in the commercial sector (they are in academia, as well, but generally not when you're talking about thesis work -- the deadline is "when it's done". And you've seen how well "when it done" works in the real world -- Duke Nukem Forever is 5 years in the making with no end in sight ...).
Windows NT (and Windows 2000, and Linux, and *BSD, and ...) was never intended for mission-critical applications. Enough said.
Fixed already? Yes. You're falling into exactly the fallacy that Joel was arguing against in his interview -- that the only way to fix something is to rewrite it. Note that I believe he meant "rewrite" more in the sense of the overall project. A well-designed project can easily have many modules re-written over and over again and suffer no problems as long as interfaces are adhered to. You're talking about throwing the baby out with the bath water.
You realize that NT has the ability to use compatibility layers, correct? For instance, NT4 had kernel-level compatibility layers for win3.x, OS/2, and POSIX. The file you're referring to would be part of the OS/2 compatibility layer.
And this is the difference between academic code and commercial code. Ever looked at 90% of the research projects from graduate students? Most of them barely work, or only work on one specific set of hardware (and not anything else), or require a huge set of work-arounds to get the code up and running. The reason for this is because this is theoretical work. It doesn't matter how well it works (well, unless your thesis is on optimization, but that's different), only that it works well enough to demonstrate your research. Commercial software is the complete opposite. It has to work, and work well, on many different configurations of hardware, and many different versions of software (Windows 95 vs 98 vs 98se vs ME vs XP, Windows NT4 vs 2K vs XP, Mac OS 7.x vs 8.x vs 9.x vs OS X, and so on), or your potential customers aren't going to buy it.
You didn't read the interview, did you? One of the main points in there was that by throwing away your old code and re-writing from scratch, you're throwing away years of experience and bug fixes. To use the example he gave of the nasty function that was supposed to do something simple but had a whole bunch of seemingly useless extra crap in it, the point was that all those extra little things that you'd throw away in a rewrite were necessary bug fixes. You throw them away, and unless you wrote those bugfixes in the first place (not likely, and even if you did, not likely you would remember), you lose all that information. That means that your new, "cleaner" version is very likely going to have similar bugs. Perhaps even the same bugs you fixed in your older, crufty code. Rewriting your code from the ground up is not focusing on "quality" (it may be focusing on "quality of code", which is a pretty useless standard so long as your code is proprietary), but instead focusing on "triviality". The bottom line is that in business (any business, not just the software development business), the bottom line is what's important. If you don't like that, stick to academia. You'll be happier there, and your potential peers in the commercial arena will be happier having you there.
Irrelevant red herring, and a bad example to boot. You're equating a potentially dangerous situation (in your example, less solder means a less solid joint, which means the oil could leak) with a harmless situation (reusing your old code, crufty as it is). In one case you're making a conscious decision to be less safe, while in the other you're making a conscious decision to leverage the work that's already been done.
As I said, I don't think you read the article. If it makes financial sense (you will sell enough copies to recoup your extra development cost and extended time to market), then there's nothing wrong with re-writing code (though Joel did suggest looking at the old codebase while writing the new, so that you won't miss any of those one-off bug fixes that are neccessary but are also the source of the cruft). The problem is that it rarely makes much sense. Especially when you're in a competitive market (as all the examples he gave were -- when you're competing against Microsoft, the worst possible thing you can do is be more concerned about code quality than making a featureful, useable product that's available quickly).
From the interview's lead-in material:
At Microsoft, the job title of Program Manager is given to the people that design the software. They dream it up, write the specs, hold countless meetings, and basically lay the path for the developers to follow. The developers (Software Design Engineer) are tasked with actually programming that software (and thus would be considered "programmers"). Just to round out the roster, the Software Design Engineers in Test (SDET) write the testing suites used by the test teams, and the Software Test Engineers apply those suites to the code following a test plan that they create. In that heirarchy, only the SDE and SDET jobs could be accurately described as "programmers".
Note that this is actually not so cut and dried, wherein SDEs often do design work and test work, and SDETs often do the work of SDTs. PMs don't program, however (well, aside from javascript&html prototypes, anyway).
The point? Calling this Joel an ex-Microsoft programmer is misleading, because he was not. However, the position he held at Microsoft actually lends more credence to his views on design than if he were actually an ex-programmer, as part of the job description of a program manager is doing software design.
(Brief descriptions of all these job titles can be found at Microsoft's college site.)
Already being done. Microsoft has learned there lesson, it seems. A third-party security review, available here (PDF file) of the .NET framework has shown that it's pretty darn secure (yes, Microsoft commissioned the review. Conspiracy theories can now commence.) (though as with anything, if the developers writing .NET services don't employ the security features available in .NET, it won't mean much. Microsoft is taking this seriously, but it'll be up to third parties to use the provided security framework). Office XP has many features with security in mind, such as the default and automatic stripping of malicious scripts and attachments in Outlook XP. Windows XP includes a built-in firewall, which while fairly primitve (it's essentially a packet filter, on par with ipchains or iptables, and not a more powerful proxy firewall), is a good step for home users who would otherwise not install anything like Black Ice Defender or other firewall products.
You can't change the past, but you can change the future. Microsoft has provided security hotfixes for their mistakes in the past, and are working with security in mind for current and future products. Don't sell them short based on years-old work. Look at what they're currently doing.
As these kinds of worms become more and more common, one has to wonder what more can Microsoft do? They've already released hotfixes that address the problems (Outlook XP strips attachments by default, older versions have fixes that do the same). Short of force-feeding the patches to users (which itself would garner a huge outcry), what more can be done?
I wasn't questioning his numbers on the prices for the Playstation, Japanese and American (or Canadian, as he seems to be). My point was that his numbers don't add up. 80 yen to the dollar at roughly $500 USD is close to 39,800. But 110 yen to the dollar at the same 39800 yen makes for $363USD, which is a bit more than $299 USD. I'm sure Gord is a great guy and all, and smart, but he should stick to what he knows -- renting and selling games. Speculating on the business of creating and selling (in the sense that the manufacturer sells to retailers, not retailers to customers) hardware in the video game industry is apparently an area in which he has little experience, unless he happened to work for the business unit of Sega or Sony or similar at some point in the recent past. And it wouldn't hurt if his numerical examples would add up properly.
Gord is a nut, and is little more than a Sony apologist. His math doesn't add up. If a PSX sold for the equivalent of $500USD in Japan when the exchange rate was 80:1 yen:dollar, and Sony was selling it for $299 in the US when the yen was 110:1, that means that the PSX was still going for the equivalent of $363USD in Japan. Now, assuming that in Japan Sony was selling at a break-even price point because apparently the Japanese have more expendable income (and well they should, if his numbers on Japanese minimum wage are correct, which I doubt), then Sony was still taking a $64USD hit per PSX sold in the States. And that's not the only math that doesn't work right. It would also be nice of Gord would cite where some of his numbers come from. He asserts that Sony makes $6/game on licensing revenue for the PS2, which seems exceedingly low to me. Anyway, several sources I trust more than Gord (and like Gord, I won't bother citing them as a) this was a year ago, and so I'm not going to bother digging up the articles, and b) like anybody that listens to Gord would care anyway) stated last year during the PS2 launch that a bundling ratio of somewhere in the neighborhood of 6-8 games per PS2 was necessary for Sony to break even (or fewer games and more accessories, which are often-times Sony first-party accessories, and thus make Sony more cash). They weren't doing nearly that well.
You're right that the Linux kit can be sold for whatever Sony wishes, and you'd better believe they're going to try to make a healthy profit off of them (they're low-demand items, so the prices have to be higher to allow them to continue to be made).
<rant>God damned hippy bleeding-heart liberal socialist bastards. Everytime there's something you don't like or agree with, you start shouting, "There should be a law!", and, "Let's outlaw that!" But as soon as something you feel is vital is threatened by law (oh, I dunno, say anything threatened by the DMCA?), you start whining about government. You can't have it both ways.</rant>
And on a side note, Outlook has had patches that will strip executable content from messages (Outlook XP does this by default). Outlook is a very good PIM app (it's more than just e-mail. Perhaps you're thinking of Outlook Express?), and there's really nothing that compares (okay, so Evolution has pretty much copied the look&feel straight from Outlook, but it's beta software, and still doesn't support all that Outlook does).
If you're stupid enough to give this group of degenerate skript kiddies your credit card, does it really matter whether you use the net or the phone? They're going to scam you anyway.
No.
Perhaps you're referring to hot-swappable server hardware, which I was not (note that I was talking about consumer-grade Apple hardware, so when comparing it to a "PC", it's common sense to assume consumer-grade Intel-compatible hardware). As far as your standard Intel- or AMD-compatible hardware you can buy, your motherboard determines the number and generation of CPU(s) you can use.
This is a by-product of the PPC architecture used by Apple. You're thinking in a PC mindframe, where the CPU sockets are built directly onto the motherboard, and to do a dual setup you need a mobo that supports two CPUs. A Macintosh is different. The CPU is on a separate card. The dual CPU card is the same as a single CPU card, but with two CPUs on it. It connects to the motherboard in exactly the same way. Now, I've never taken a mac apart or done a CPU upgrade, so I don't have much authority here, but that is the gist of how it's done. PC architecture vs. Mac architecture.
Ignore the Gord.
His arguments boil down to nothing more than, "The GameCube is not a PlayStation 2, and so it's doomed to fail." That is exactly what he predicted about the XBox, as well. From all indications, it appears that both the XBox and the GameCube are doing well and going strong. Of course they're not PlayStation 2's. Hell, that'd really suck if they were. They're different, and while both are technologically better, it's going to come down to games. And both the GameCube and the XBox have great games out now (Super Monkey Ball for the GC; DOA3, Amped, and Halo (just to name a few) for the XBox), with many more on the horizon (Super Smash Bros. Melee out shortly for the GCN, MGS X and GTA3 waiting in the wings for XBox. Plus Soul Calibur 2 for the XBox come next spring-ish, and Obi-Wan here within a week, and ...). Just because Gord owns a video game sales/rental store doesn't necessarily make him an authority on anything more than the buying habits of his surrounding community concerning video games. (as an example of this, many people here have said that they can't find an XBox to buy, while others have said the shelves at their local Target are virtually overflowing. Same for the GameCube. Some of us can't find either (got my XBox pre-order, holding off on the GCN for a while anyway, so it doesn't matter). All this shows is that certain things sell better in certain areas, most likely due to the amount of advertising and hype given locally to those items.)
I love the way the initial shipment of XBoxes keeps decreasing in the eyes of the /. posters. First it was 350,000 units, then 300,000, and now it's only 200,000. And still Microsoft hasn't released numbers yet, so all of those are pure speculation. I'm guessing that the shipment was closer to the 350,000 mark, if not higher. As well, Microsoft is shipping 100,000 units per week through the holiday season.
Anyway, let's just wait until Microsoft releases some numbers before we go speculating too much, eh?