If you are going to buy pre-made computers with an operating system, what do you expect? The market for computers without an operating system is zero, so nobody sells them that way.
That's not even close to reality.
Any major company with a Microsoft site license has no need of a computer preinstalled with a Microsoft O/S. The first thing they will do with the equipment is wipe out whatever is there and install the offically approved corporate version.
The most vocal and most numerous of the Microsofties here say that the first thing one needs to do with a crapware infested preinstall is wipe it out and install from different media or from a pirated version.
Of the two work machines I have, there have been 6 microsoft license fees. 2 preinstalls (both wiped), 1 Microsoft Windows 2000 (enterprise site license), 2 Microsoft Windows XP (enterprise site license, 1 presumably an upgrade for the older box) and 2 Microsoft Vista (enterprise site license, unused as the company has not deployed Microsoft Vista). Neither of those machines run Microsoft Windows in any version today, thank God.
In Manila, you can walk into any commercial computer store and be offered a menu of choices that runs something like Microsoft Windows or Linux preinstalled and no O/S installed (Free DOS) at about a 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 ratio.
To say that there is *no* market for computers without a preinstalled O/S is disengenuous at best. Unless maybe you're suggesting that people in a 3rd world country are more tech-savvy than people in the United States. Are you?
Microsoft has built a business around selling people the same thing, over and over and over again regardless of whether it is being used or not. If that's OK with you, more power to you. Count me out please.
Perhaps its time to just firewall off Eastern Europe, Russia, and China and call it a day. Whitelist them when needed.
You are putting blame on the wrong shoulders.
I'll admit that I caught a virus once - it was a boot sector virus that some idiot brought into the office and infected a floppy disk that we used to boot to get at a stupid MS-DOS only configuration program for an ethernet card. Didn't do anything to me, my equipment was running Linux.
Perhaps it's time to firewall off Redmond, WA. It certainly would fix the problem.
... Then how will you extradite them if they're from someone where it wasn't illegal?... The US record for convicting people for computer crime is, historically, awful.... the "big fish". Or the
Your friendly local neighborhood spelling and grammar nazi is on to you. Pay up, or he'll get you too.
This post is as irrelevant as the one I responded to, please mod us both down. Thanks.
People always complain that R&D wastes money until they have no new products and the company goes under, or a new product comes out of the R&D department.
In the meantime, "R&D is blowing millions of dollars!"
All that is true, but... this is Microsoft who is determined to repeat all the mistakes of history without bothering to learn from the (other people's) past.
There are direct parallels of a sort with my camp. AT&T spent plenty on research, even going so far as funding development on experimental OSes like Multics and later in-house development. Unix, which started off as a toy to allow Ken Thompson to play a video game, was so well engineered that its core is still successful 4 decades later. They were so successful that they effectively killed off all the closed-source mini-computer OS competitors.
AT&T was technically and theoretically brilliant, but "they couldn't market eternal life and make a profit". Microsoft is the opposite. They can and did market junk and have it (establish and) take over the desktop.
What return on investment have Microsoft investors gotten on Microsoft's R&D?
Steve's prediction: Unix-derived systems will be around forever. There are too many breeding engineers with taste who can teach programming skills to their offspring. Can you say the same thing about Microsoft Windows, which will die when the company that produces it loses interest or dies?
Windows is dominant despite that because MS was in the right place at the right time to become so ubiquitous
Microsoft Windows became popular when there *were* many options to choose from. See the guis page on http://toastytech.com/ (This is a pro-Microsoft site, btw). See how the choices narrowed down over the years as Microsoft began to enforce their monopoly.
There was also a noticeable lack of competition on both of the other fronts. The first Macintosh was out late, late enough that the IBM PC gained critical mind and market share. It also was a joke compared to what we had come to expect from the Apple ][.
In the same time frame, AT&T was broken up and allowed to market Unix and... failed miserably. First, when AT&T attempted to market System V, they failed at any kind of a reasonable price point along with alienating their traditional allies by decoupling the C compiler. Second, the later lawsuit over the BSDs further hurt the market, especially in business. Third, the price points software vendors set where (PC|MS) DOS programs cost US$50 and the same version of the program for Unix cost US$500 was a clincher in moving people towards Microsoft.
In a free market, one could walk into a store selling computers and buy a machine running Linux. Strange how I can do that in Manila, but I cannot do that in San Jose.
An enforced monopoly does not imply anything other than the fact that the seller has a monopoly.
I agree with your conclusion, but not your logic. "One size does not fit all" is the first *crucial* step Microsoft took towards becoming ubiquitous. Once their monopoly was established, they could do anything they wanted and they did.
Distros are too fluid and there are too many of them anyway. This situation makes coding-for and independently distributing PC applications very confusing.
I'm not sure I'd want to buy an app from you with that kind of attitude. Pick a handful of sane distros, tie your app to specific releases and go with that. If I want your app, I will adjust my system to suit, though you're not going to want to target my sort of end user.
I used Omron's Wnn6 for *years* on Steve/Linux, my own custom Linux which changed practically every day.
I have noticed that in the last decade that Linux distros have descended into a.so dependency hell as every major package reinvents the wheel in their own fashion and then does not keep the interface stable.
The solution for a commercial app is to either static link against the specific versions of libraries they need, or put the specific.sos in a private directory and arrange to have them found first by ld.so.
I'm as disgusted by libc6's.sos as I was when I got frustrated by the problems with libc4 that I jumped to libc5. It's so easy to create.sos now that it is waaaay too abused.
But when it comes to higher-level stuff that end-users require, they complain about one-size-fits all. Frankly, that attitude says to me that the audio and video architectures in Linux-based desktops will continue to be slipshod and wobbly (unstable performance and unstable APIs), and you can forget about widespread adoption at the consumer level until either the Torvalds mentality dissipates or an Android moves into the desktop space.
Nice job of 'turfing./golfclap
If you want One Size Fits All, use Microsoft Vista and Be Happy! If you want something that does exactly what you need it to do, check us out first to see if we have a solution before going back to Microsoft Vista.
If this system is so superior, why haven't groups of people started working together to make it happen already? There is nothing stopping them.
There are too many people blinded by years of the Microsoft monopoly.
This is slashdot, so maybe we should have a car analogy. The Honda Accord is a good vehicle, Honda Accord has been rated #1 car in the world many, many times over the years. Let's standardize on that and have everyone purchase and drive Honda Accords. So, why aren't we all driving Honda Accords? (substitute any other model if Honda Accord does not suit you)?
ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL (says the man who once had half a dozen one size fits all Japanese slippers bought by his wife, none of which fit his gaijin feet, so I had to go barefooted in my own house)
In my experience Linux packages have terrible names, non-descriptive names, or both, and usually, worthless or no description.... So in practice, I usually have no idea what package(s) I need without extensive searching of the tubes, but maybe it's just my lack of experience.
It's just your lack of experience. But...
Then you'll have 5 different distros that use different but overlapping packages, with insufficient documentation to make a decision as to which you need.
I think you are trolling. Stay with Microsoft Windows Vista, drink your coolade, Be Happy!
(Good job though for getting that modded up to +4)
The kernel is not bloated, it's just that it comes with drivers for a shitload of hardware.
That _is_ the definition of bloated, since many people use a limited subset of PC-compatible hardware.
Is this a troll? The definition of bloated is useless features you will never use and needlessly wasteful code. Except that...
The number 1 issue raised against Linux here by the 'turfers and trolls is that it has more limited support for various devices and systems than Microsoft Windows. Generic kernels for distros are going to include drivers for as much hardware as they can just because it makes sense. They want it to boot on as many systems as possible.
Last year, it could be said that Linux ran on more different kinds of x86 systems than Microsoft Vista, not sure what it's like now.
If that's a bother for you, rebuild your own kernel and only include the stuff you absolutely need. Modularize everything (which the distros do anyway) and you can get a small kernel footprint.
Stock Linux *can* be run on embedded systems and the developers go after waste in the core system with a vengeance.
A kernel that will not boot a certain system is definitely 100% "bloat". If that's what you want to call it.
It's nice that you can just stick in almost any piece of kit and Linux detects it and runs with it. It would be nicer if all that cruft was cut out of the base kernel and drivers were available for download on demand rather than shipped with it.
The exotic drivers in Linux do not contribute bloat - they can built as loadable modules. The size of modern kernels first came from TCP stacks (my second home Unix box, System V/R2, had a kernel around 100k and although you could do all kinds of things with it, you could not plug a network card into it, I forget what size the kernel was on my first Unix box, probably about the same).
I've been through this sort of thing personally. When I started off as Mr. XEmacs, it was widely criticized (aside from the usual anti-Emacs venom) for being even more bloated than Stallman Emacs. So, I stripped everything not essential for basic editing and doing connections to a network out (so users could download on demand the emacs lisp modules they needed). The FIRST demand I got hit with was to have everything available in one download, which sort of defeated some of the purpose - every available unused emacs lisp package *does* consume resources.
You cannot please everyone and it's not worth it to try. I'm comfortable with the model that Linus has chosen, but I never had any say in it. He's endured flames from the very beginning for batching together all the Linux kernel source code in one package and resisted attempts to break it up. The way that Linux kernel development has turned out, I would say he is correct (cf Greg KH's recent introduction of half-baked drivers into the kernel.org's.src.tar.gz). I think that's a good thing.
On the other hand, I've had plenty of comments from people who were most happy they could trim their own XEmacs down. You can do the same thing with Linux too, the level of difficulty is about the same, but with a lot more risk than with an editor.
Oh and note for Twitter: I'm not a Linux guy simply because it's the kind of system I've dreamed about and supplied new code and bug fixes for most of my adult life, it's also because I've tracked development on linux-kernel off-and-on for over a decade now and I not only respect Linus for his coding skills, but also for his managerial skills. I am even more amazed that he has learned to balance his life and get married with children (and stay! married) and *continue* to lead.
Pipes (of a mangled sort)! Redirection! There was even a way to set your command-switch character to '-' instead of '/'! Yes, you could type: 'dir -w' for a wide listing... But then they never went any further, never changed the underlying CP/M-ness of the thing...
Indeed and the system calls introduced in 2.0 all had Unix style semantics. Sadly, 2.0 had a lot of bugs in that new code that made them barely usable.
But just to name one bug I found in DOS 2.0, if you descended into a subdirectory that textually was close to their fixed sized limit (128 I think) and tried to to `cd..' the system would take a text string (saved as the current directory) and append `/..' to it and do unexpected things.
The way COMMAND.COM dealt with pipelines was more remeniscent of VMS DCL than anything else. When did the VMS guys go to Microsoft? 1982 sounds way too soon.
COMMAND.COM also supported/dev/ as a prefix for DOS devices...
EVERYBODY who was somebody in those days was a Unix guy, so I wonder why they backtracked. Microsoft in my book went from the company that produced Apple Soft Basic (which was quite decent) to something that was buggy as hell and you had to pay for the bug fix release AND forego the developmental manuals that came with 2.0. Sleazy. Elune be praised that it was my work and roommate not me who paid for the only PC DOS pcs I ever had to use.
MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.
True except that they did not "write" Xenix. Xenix was a licensed fork from AT & T source code.
In another lifetime I once thought Microsoft was showing promise by bringing a Unix-like interface to PC DOS 2.0. Most of the code was half-assed and broken and I guess they kind of just left it that way.
Oh and for the folks whining about 6.1 aka Microsoft Windows 7 being a paid-for bug fix release over the previous one, that's really old news because PC DOS 2.1 was the same thing over 20 years ago. That was as much abuse as I could take from a company, but I guess others have different tolerances for pain.
Why not, if you are going to be doing NetBSD work?
Perhaps, but do they force you to use a Microsoft Windows box to do your work? That would be a show stopper for me.
Maybe 6.0/6.1 is better, but I did try out Microsoft Windows XP for awhile for educational purposes on a work machine and the only moments I truly enjoyed the experience were when I was turning the machine off and later installing RHEL over XP at the end of the time.
Mac OS X is not too bad, not great, but nothing beats KDE 3.5 for ease of use and development.
So because to me questing was boring as a priest me healing my way to 60 through instances in vanilla wow makes me an ebayer or inferior player?
NO! Perhaps what I wrote was unclear. "Ebayers betray themselves" is not related to the sentence above it. The specific example I'm thinking of was a level 70 in Shattrath who only had a level 40 ground mount and was begging for gold for mount money (and worse).
I had 150 fishing in SSC and with a aquadynamic fish attractor I could pull lurker too.
Good job!
If you even know what that means, though I'm pretty sure your one of those SOLO mmo players that just farms by themselves and does every quest listed on wowhead and thinks in their private little world they are the best at this game because they have ocd and cant drop a quest out of there log or works the AH like a job.
Um no, but I apologize if I offended you. Leveling up a priest by healing in groups sounds like a decent strategy. If you sold that character to someone who didn't want to level at all and that someone had no clue how to heal in groups (likeliest), that would be the give-a-away.
(I only know about the Lurker fishing because I'm a wanker who wants to learn every cooking recipe and get the Salty title. Get your facts straight!:-)
So essentially, you did it the hard way and hence feel that everyone else should also do so.
Um, that's not a personal opinion, it's the rules of the game you have to agree to before you are allowed to play.
Does there need to be a long, tedious grind before a payoff to make the payoff worthwhile?
Irrelevant, but go ahead...
I would say not... but if I'd put a lot of time and sustained effort into reaching a reward, then it was changed so that you could get the same thing with much less time put in, I'd be paying less attention to how it makes the fun part arrive quicker (ostensibly a good thing) and more focused on how unfair it is that I had to put in more time to get the thing than everyone else after me.
This makes no sense. WoW is an MMORPG that has so many different facets to the game it has become the 900lb gorilla in gaming. You want to fish in Northrend? Fine, learn how to fish and spend the time leveling the skill. It's taking unfair advantage of the players who abided by the rules to do it any other way.
Where the lead-up part is itself fun, or challenging (because overcoming challenges is fun for some... myself included btw) then it's a non-issue, so I'm not suggesting a "click here to win" button, but endless false challenges like the stereotype "kill 10 boars" really are just there to bulk the game out.
I'm totally confused now. I agree fully with the first part of that statement. But by supporting the glider you ARE suggesting a "click here to win" button.
Do not confuse my support of Blizzard for their game with support of how they went about protecting me. I am not at all happy about this court case other than the fact that they whipped the glider guy. He DESERVED to lose and he did./spit and/hug on his corpse.
The problem with WoW and the grind factor is generally in the systems (Battlegrounds are a prime example) where the criteria are a simple "participate in some way in 25 games of Arathi Basin and 25 games of Warsong Gulch in order to buy your shiny boots". The player wants the boots because they're a PvE upgrade, but they have no interest in PvP and a more fun option for the player is to just load a bot and go do something else until their boots are handed to them.
Yes, that's an excellent example. It's also been addressed post level 80 too. I got my PvP equipment upgrades in a couple weeks of doing Wintergrasp.
I haven't seen anyone argue a case FOR bots that Blizzard hasn't addressed over the 2+ years I've been playing WoW (my first and only MMORPG). I struggled for a long time saving up enough gold for my first epic flyer, then along came Quel'Danas.
The end of WoW is more than likely going to be due to Blizzard trying to please everyone and end up not pleasing enough people to stay profitable. Fortunately, that doesn't appear to be any time soon.:-)
Does anyone else on a raid with you know whether you botted or whether you manually clicked your way to high rating for fishing or killing large numbers of low level mobs?
I used those specific examples because they were being used to justify botting.
Then why are *you* so affected by what others do that you cannot know or detect?
Because I've obtained the skills to fish (and cook the fish) under the rules and I have to compete in the AH with those who have not.
The achievement system actually works quite well for some of this. Those who have achieved their levels by powerleveling through instances are easily identified. Ebayers betray themselves.
The first time I *knew* I was confronting bots was when I was trying to obtain some Felcloth to make Mooncloth bags. The area was being farmed by two hordies. No problem, I can wait for my turn. Over the next three days I came back at as many different times of the day as I could manage with a work & family schedule and the same two characters were there killing everything. So I had to give up and move on.
Yes, it *can* be detected and it *does* affect people. Botting is griefing, not playing the game.
I'm intrigued by this. You mean Blizzard deleted characters that your wife had levelled on official servers? Or that they deleted characters she'd created on a private server (which would be nigh impossible unless they were _running_ the private server)?
The ones run on the private server, apparently.
The phraseology is confusing too - a "legal WoW account" is your account with Blizzard which lets you access official servers, and as they tell you every 5 seconds, you should never give your account details to anyone.
She got an in-game mail nasty gram the first time she connected to a real server after accessing the private server.
Take a look at your WoW WTF directory some time. It stores details about every account/character that that WoW installation has accessed.
Personally, I think that if a game has enough of a grind factor that a bot can do it better than a human, then either the gameplay needs to be made more complex, or the option to bot should be included explicitly.
That argument makes no sense.
The problems with quests in the old world are typified by the Dream Dust quest. http://thottbot.com/q1116 The mobs that drop the quest items are in a tiny area of Swamp of Sorrows and at best there are only 3 or 4 spawned at a time. To make matters worse, the same mobs drop a very rare dragon vanity pet AND can be skinned for a rare and valuable leather. That's probably the poorest designed quest in the game.
Equally frustrating are the satyrs in Felwood that drop Felcloth (used to make Mooncloth by tailors and 16 slot bags), quite valuable even post BC because the other (easier to obtain) Netherweave 16 slot bag is BoP and the Mooncloth bag is BoE.
As a matter of fact though, I do not see how the game designer can completely avoid creating areas like that. Rare items are supposed to be well um, rare. It doesn't justify planting a bot in the right area and thus griefing everyone else in the realm. IMO.
The cost of mounts drives the cost of everything else.
That part is true.
Remove that ridiculous cost, which, under point of fact, only allows people who play 24/7/365 to get what they need to progress, and people wouldn't get a bot to let them keep up with other people while they slept and worked.
Blizzard has consistently been lowering the cost of mounts and making it easier to Get Rich Quick under the rules. Pre WotLK, it was possible to make ~300g per day just doing daily quests. It's more now at the level 80 cap. At that rate, you have your epic flyer in less than 3 weeks, playing only a few hours a night.
In my experience, those who are complaining the most about prices are the ones who are constantly purchasing armor and weapon upgrades in the auction house every few levels. PvE leveling content has been nerfed to an extent that makes that maybe the most stupid strategy in the game.
I do not think the prices of the top items are ridiculous, nor do I think they are unobtainable unless you play non-stop. I do plan on buying one piece of the Kirin Tor jewelry and paying an engineer friend to make me a motorcycle mount, but after I've finished leveling up my other characters. It will take me several months to do that since I do not have that much time to play, but that does not bother me at all.
It's about preventing you from using stuff you legitimately bought in new and interesting ways, so they can sell it to you again in those new and interesting ways. Or it's about preventing you from doing something that damages them in a completely unrelated way, if they can.
It's about taking control away from the consumer, and putting it back in the hands of the publisher.
Another stupid argument. Most of us bought WoW to play a game under a fair playing field. "The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few" or something like that.
That's a straw man argument. Blizzard only deletes characters used on an alternate server when you connect to their servers, not the account. Think of it as a successful operation to remove a cancerous tumor.
If you can't tell that I'm using a bot from the stream of bits being sent to the server, then I am in the privacy of my own home. My hardware, my rules.
They did not go after the bot users, they went after the bot. See my earlier post regarding what happened after my wife unwittingly used a "private" server. Nothing, other than deletion of the character.
This is not a simple case of users breaching a contract with a product, but a product that BY DESIGN is TO BE USED FOR breaching a contract.
Yes. That's an important distinction and very clearly separates things like VMWare.
Just how far does anyone think a business would get if its only product was a home burglary or auto theft convenience kit? "Break into any car and be driving away in 30 seconds or less... OR YOUR MONEY BACK!!!" Yup, sounds like a winner.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, would it be as much fun to either:
a) Beat a pedestrian to a pulp and take their cash
or
b) Ask nicely and have a random chance of getting a small amount of cash
I find myself strangely attracted to the "Maintaining Discipline" daily - http://thottbot.com/q13422 does that make me bad?
If you are going to buy pre-made computers with an operating system, what do you expect? The market for computers without an operating system is zero, so nobody sells them that way.
That's not even close to reality.
Any major company with a Microsoft site license has no need of a computer preinstalled with a Microsoft O/S. The first thing they will do with the equipment is wipe out whatever is there and install the offically approved corporate version.
The most vocal and most numerous of the Microsofties here say that the first thing one needs to do with a crapware infested preinstall is wipe it out and install from different media or from a pirated version.
Of the two work machines I have, there have been 6 microsoft license fees. 2 preinstalls (both wiped), 1 Microsoft Windows 2000 (enterprise site license), 2 Microsoft Windows XP (enterprise site license, 1 presumably an upgrade for the older box) and 2 Microsoft Vista (enterprise site license, unused as the company has not deployed Microsoft Vista). Neither of those machines run Microsoft Windows in any version today, thank God.
In Manila, you can walk into any commercial computer store and be offered a menu of choices that runs something like Microsoft Windows or Linux preinstalled and no O/S installed (Free DOS) at about a 1/3 - 1/3 - 1/3 ratio.
To say that there is *no* market for computers without a preinstalled O/S is disengenuous at best. Unless maybe you're suggesting that people in a 3rd world country are more tech-savvy than people in the United States. Are you?
Microsoft has built a business around selling people the same thing, over and over and over again regardless of whether it is being used or not. If that's OK with you, more power to you. Count me out please.
Perhaps its time to just firewall off Eastern Europe, Russia, and China and call it a day. Whitelist them when needed.
You are putting blame on the wrong shoulders.
I'll admit that I caught a virus once - it was a boot sector virus that some idiot brought into the office and infected a floppy disk that we used to boot to get at a stupid MS-DOS only configuration program for an ethernet card. Didn't do anything to me, my equipment was running Linux.
Perhaps it's time to firewall off Redmond, WA. It certainly would fix the problem.
... Then how will you extradite them if they're from someone where it wasn't illegal? ... The US record for convicting people for computer crime is, historically, awful. ... the "big fish". Or the
Your friendly local neighborhood spelling and grammar nazi is on to you. Pay up, or he'll get you too.
This post is as irrelevant as the one I responded to, please mod us both down. Thanks.
So many of the old research powerhouses have now fallen (Bell Labs is a mere shadow of its former self ...
You're right and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better, I'm afraid.
People always complain that R&D wastes money until they have no new products and the company goes under, or a new product comes out of the R&D department.
In the meantime, "R&D is blowing millions of dollars!"
All that is true, but ... this is Microsoft who is determined to repeat all the mistakes of history without bothering to learn from the (other people's) past.
There are direct parallels of a sort with my camp. AT&T spent plenty on research, even going so far as funding development on experimental OSes like Multics and later in-house development. Unix, which started off as a toy to allow Ken Thompson to play a video game, was so well engineered that its core is still successful 4 decades later. They were so successful that they effectively killed off all the closed-source mini-computer OS competitors.
AT&T was technically and theoretically brilliant, but "they couldn't market eternal life and make a profit". Microsoft is the opposite. They can and did market junk and have it (establish and) take over the desktop.
What return on investment have Microsoft investors gotten on Microsoft's R&D?
Steve's prediction: Unix-derived systems will be around forever. There are too many breeding engineers with taste who can teach programming skills to their offspring. Can you say the same thing about Microsoft Windows, which will die when the company that produces it loses interest or dies?
Windows is dominant despite that because MS was in the right place at the right time to become so ubiquitous
Microsoft Windows became popular when there *were* many options to choose from. See the guis page on http://toastytech.com/ (This is a pro-Microsoft site, btw). See how the choices narrowed down over the years as Microsoft began to enforce their monopoly.
There was also a noticeable lack of competition on both of the other fronts. The first Macintosh was out late, late enough that the IBM PC gained critical mind and market share. It also was a joke compared to what we had come to expect from the Apple ][.
In the same time frame, AT&T was broken up and allowed to market Unix and ... failed miserably. First, when AT&T attempted to market System V, they failed at any kind of a reasonable price point along with alienating their traditional allies by decoupling the C compiler. Second, the later lawsuit over the BSDs further hurt the market, especially in business. Third, the price points software vendors set where (PC|MS) DOS programs cost US$50 and the same version of the program for Unix cost US$500 was a clincher in moving people towards Microsoft.
In a free market, one could walk into a store selling computers and buy a machine running Linux. Strange how I can do that in Manila, but I cannot do that in San Jose.
An enforced monopoly does not imply anything other than the fact that the seller has a monopoly.
I agree with your conclusion, but not your logic. "One size does not fit all" is the first *crucial* step Microsoft took towards becoming ubiquitous. Once their monopoly was established, they could do anything they wanted and they did.
Distros are too fluid and there are too many of them anyway. This situation makes coding-for and independently distributing PC applications very confusing.
I'm not sure I'd want to buy an app from you with that kind of attitude. Pick a handful of sane distros, tie your app to specific releases and go with that. If I want your app, I will adjust my system to suit, though you're not going to want to target my sort of end user.
I used Omron's Wnn6 for *years* on Steve/Linux, my own custom Linux which changed practically every day.
I have noticed that in the last decade that Linux distros have descended into a .so dependency hell as every major package reinvents the wheel in their own fashion and then does not keep the interface stable.
The solution for a commercial app is to either static link against the specific versions of libraries they need, or put the specific .sos in a private directory and arrange to have them found first by ld.so.
I'm as disgusted by libc6's .sos as I was when I got frustrated by the problems with libc4 that I jumped to libc5. It's so easy to create .sos now that it is waaaay too abused.
But when it comes to higher-level stuff that end-users require, they complain about one-size-fits all. Frankly, that attitude says to me that the audio and video architectures in Linux-based desktops will continue to be slipshod and wobbly (unstable performance and unstable APIs), and you can forget about widespread adoption at the consumer level until either the Torvalds mentality dissipates or an Android moves into the desktop space.
Nice job of 'turfing. /golfclap
If you want One Size Fits All, use Microsoft Vista and Be Happy! If you want something that does exactly what you need it to do, check us out first to see if we have a solution before going back to Microsoft Vista.
If this system is so superior, why haven't groups of people started working together to make it happen already? There is nothing stopping them.
There are too many people blinded by years of the Microsoft monopoly.
This is slashdot, so maybe we should have a car analogy. The Honda Accord is a good vehicle, Honda Accord has been rated #1 car in the world many, many times over the years. Let's standardize on that and have everyone purchase and drive Honda Accords. So, why aren't we all driving Honda Accords? (substitute any other model if Honda Accord does not suit you)?
ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL (says the man who once had half a dozen one size fits all Japanese slippers bought by his wife, none of which fit his gaijin feet, so I had to go barefooted in my own house)
In my experience Linux packages have terrible names, non-descriptive names, or both, and usually, worthless or no description. ...
So in practice, I usually have no idea what package(s) I need without extensive searching of the tubes, but maybe it's just my lack of experience.
It's just your lack of experience. But ...
Then you'll have 5 different distros that use different but overlapping packages, with insufficient documentation to make a decision as to which you need.
I think you are trolling. Stay with Microsoft Windows Vista, drink your coolade, Be Happy!
(Good job though for getting that modded up to +4)
The kernel is not bloated, it's just that it comes with drivers for a shitload of hardware.
That _is_ the definition of bloated, since many people use a limited subset of PC-compatible hardware.
Is this a troll? The definition of bloated is useless features you will never use and needlessly wasteful code. Except that ...
The number 1 issue raised against Linux here by the 'turfers and trolls is that it has more limited support for various devices and systems than Microsoft Windows. Generic kernels for distros are going to include drivers for as much hardware as they can just because it makes sense. They want it to boot on as many systems as possible.
Last year, it could be said that Linux ran on more different kinds of x86 systems than Microsoft Vista, not sure what it's like now.
If that's a bother for you, rebuild your own kernel and only include the stuff you absolutely need. Modularize everything (which the distros do anyway) and you can get a small kernel footprint.
Stock Linux *can* be run on embedded systems and the developers go after waste in the core system with a vengeance.
A kernel that will not boot a certain system is definitely 100% "bloat". If that's what you want to call it.
It's nice that you can just stick in almost any piece of kit and Linux detects it and runs with it. It would be nicer if all that cruft was cut out of the base kernel and drivers were available for download on demand rather than shipped with it.
The exotic drivers in Linux do not contribute bloat - they can built as loadable modules. The size of modern kernels first came from TCP stacks (my second home Unix box, System V/R2, had a kernel around 100k and although you could do all kinds of things with it, you could not plug a network card into it, I forget what size the kernel was on my first Unix box, probably about the same).
I've been through this sort of thing personally. When I started off as Mr. XEmacs, it was widely criticized (aside from the usual anti-Emacs venom) for being even more bloated than Stallman Emacs. So, I stripped everything not essential for basic editing and doing connections to a network out (so users could download on demand the emacs lisp modules they needed). The FIRST demand I got hit with was to have everything available in one download, which sort of defeated some of the purpose - every available unused emacs lisp package *does* consume resources.
You cannot please everyone and it's not worth it to try. I'm comfortable with the model that Linus has chosen, but I never had any say in it. He's endured flames from the very beginning for batching together all the Linux kernel source code in one package and resisted attempts to break it up. The way that Linux kernel development has turned out, I would say he is correct (cf Greg KH's recent introduction of half-baked drivers into the kernel.org's .src.tar.gz). I think that's a good thing.
On the other hand, I've had plenty of comments from people who were most happy they could trim their own XEmacs down. You can do the same thing with Linux too, the level of difficulty is about the same, but with a lot more risk than with an editor.
Oh and note for Twitter: I'm not a Linux guy simply because it's the kind of system I've dreamed about and supplied new code and bug fixes for most of my adult life, it's also because I've tracked development on linux-kernel off-and-on for over a decade now and I not only respect Linus for his coding skills, but also for his managerial skills. I am even more amazed that he has learned to balance his life and get married with children (and stay! married) and *continue* to lead.
Pipes (of a mangled sort)! Redirection! There was even a way to set your command-switch character to '-' instead of '/'! Yes, you could type: 'dir -w' for a wide listing... But then they never went any further, never changed the underlying CP/M-ness of the thing...
Indeed and the system calls introduced in 2.0 all had Unix style semantics. Sadly, 2.0 had a lot of bugs in that new code that made them barely usable.
But just to name one bug I found in DOS 2.0, if you descended into a subdirectory that textually was close to their fixed sized limit (128 I think) and tried to to `cd ..' the system would take a text string (saved as the current directory) and append `/..' to it and do unexpected things.
The way COMMAND.COM dealt with pipelines was more remeniscent of VMS DCL than anything else. When did the VMS guys go to Microsoft? 1982 sounds way too soon.
COMMAND.COM also supported /dev/ as a prefix for DOS devices ...
EVERYBODY who was somebody in those days was a Unix guy, so I wonder why they backtracked. Microsoft in my book went from the company that produced Apple Soft Basic (which was quite decent) to something that was buggy as hell and you had to pay for the bug fix release AND forego the developmental manuals that came with 2.0. Sleazy. Elune be praised that it was my work and roommate not me who paid for the only PC DOS pcs I ever had to use.
MS is no stranger to Unix, they wrote Xenix long ago.
True except that they did not "write" Xenix. Xenix was a licensed fork from AT & T source code.
In another lifetime I once thought Microsoft was showing promise by bringing a Unix-like interface to PC DOS 2.0. Most of the code was half-assed and broken and I guess they kind of just left it that way.
Oh and for the folks whining about 6.1 aka Microsoft Windows 7 being a paid-for bug fix release over the previous one, that's really old news because PC DOS 2.1 was the same thing over 20 years ago. That was as much abuse as I could take from a company, but I guess others have different tolerances for pain.
I hear Microsoft is good to work for.
Why not, if you are going to be doing NetBSD work?
Perhaps, but do they force you to use a Microsoft Windows box to do your work? That would be a show stopper for me.
Maybe 6.0/6.1 is better, but I did try out Microsoft Windows XP for awhile for educational purposes on a work machine and the only moments I truly enjoyed the experience were when I was turning the machine off and later installing RHEL over XP at the end of the time.
Mac OS X is not too bad, not great, but nothing beats KDE 3.5 for ease of use and development.
So because to me questing was boring as a priest me healing my way to 60 through instances in vanilla wow makes me an ebayer or inferior player?
NO! Perhaps what I wrote was unclear. "Ebayers betray themselves" is not related to the sentence above it. The specific example I'm thinking of was a level 70 in Shattrath who only had a level 40 ground mount and was begging for gold for mount money (and worse).
I had 150 fishing in SSC and with a aquadynamic fish attractor I could pull lurker too.
Good job!
If you even know what that means, though I'm pretty sure your one of those SOLO mmo players that just farms by themselves and does every quest listed on wowhead and thinks in their private little world they are the best at this game because they have ocd and cant drop a quest out of there log or works the AH like a job.
Um no, but I apologize if I offended you. Leveling up a priest by healing in groups sounds like a decent strategy. If you sold that character to someone who didn't want to level at all and that someone had no clue how to heal in groups (likeliest), that would be the give-a-away.
(I only know about the Lurker fishing because I'm a wanker who wants to learn every cooking recipe and get the Salty title. Get your facts straight! :-)
So essentially, you did it the hard way and hence feel that everyone else should also do so.
Um, that's not a personal opinion, it's the rules of the game you have to agree to before you are allowed to play.
Does there need to be a long, tedious grind before a payoff to make the payoff worthwhile?
Irrelevant, but go ahead ...
I would say not... but if I'd put a lot of time and sustained effort into reaching a reward, then it was changed so that you could get the same thing with much less time put in, I'd be paying less attention to how it makes the fun part arrive quicker (ostensibly a good thing) and more focused on how unfair it is that I had to put in more time to get the thing than everyone else after me.
This makes no sense. WoW is an MMORPG that has so many different facets to the game it has become the 900lb gorilla in gaming. You want to fish in Northrend? Fine, learn how to fish and spend the time leveling the skill. It's taking unfair advantage of the players who abided by the rules to do it any other way.
Where the lead-up part is itself fun, or challenging (because overcoming challenges is fun for some... myself included btw) then it's a non-issue, so I'm not suggesting a "click here to win" button, but endless false challenges like the stereotype "kill 10 boars" really are just there to bulk the game out.
I'm totally confused now. I agree fully with the first part of that statement. But by supporting the glider you ARE suggesting a "click here to win" button.
Do not confuse my support of Blizzard for their game with support of how they went about protecting me. I am not at all happy about this court case other than the fact that they whipped the glider guy. He DESERVED to lose and he did. /spit and /hug on his corpse.
The problem with WoW and the grind factor is generally in the systems (Battlegrounds are a prime example) where the criteria are a simple "participate in some way in 25 games of Arathi Basin and 25 games of Warsong Gulch in order to buy your shiny boots". The player wants the boots because they're a PvE upgrade, but they have no interest in PvP and a more fun option for the player is to just load a bot and go do something else until their boots are handed to them.
Yes, that's an excellent example. It's also been addressed post level 80 too. I got my PvP equipment upgrades in a couple weeks of doing Wintergrasp.
I haven't seen anyone argue a case FOR bots that Blizzard hasn't addressed over the 2+ years I've been playing WoW (my first and only MMORPG). I struggled for a long time saving up enough gold for my first epic flyer, then along came Quel'Danas.
The end of WoW is more than likely going to be due to Blizzard trying to please everyone and end up not pleasing enough people to stay profitable. Fortunately, that doesn't appear to be any time soon. :-)
Does anyone else on a raid with you know whether you botted or whether you manually clicked your way to high rating for fishing or killing large numbers of low level mobs?
I used those specific examples because they were being used to justify botting.
Then why are *you* so affected by what others do that you cannot know or detect?
Because I've obtained the skills to fish (and cook the fish) under the rules and I have to compete in the AH with those who have not.
The achievement system actually works quite well for some of this. Those who have achieved their levels by powerleveling through instances are easily identified. Ebayers betray themselves.
The first time I *knew* I was confronting bots was when I was trying to obtain some Felcloth to make Mooncloth bags. The area was being farmed by two hordies. No problem, I can wait for my turn. Over the next three days I came back at as many different times of the day as I could manage with a work & family schedule and the same two characters were there killing everything. So I had to give up and move on.
Yes, it *can* be detected and it *does* affect people. Botting is griefing, not playing the game.
I'm intrigued by this. You mean Blizzard deleted characters that your wife had levelled on official servers? Or that they deleted characters she'd created on a private server (which would be nigh impossible unless they were _running_ the private server)?
The ones run on the private server, apparently.
The phraseology is confusing too - a "legal WoW account" is your account with Blizzard which lets you access official servers, and as they tell you every 5 seconds, you should never give your account details to anyone.
She got an in-game mail nasty gram the first time she connected to a real server after accessing the private server.
Take a look at your WoW WTF directory some time. It stores details about every account/character that that WoW installation has accessed.
Personally, I think that if a game has enough of a grind factor that a bot can do it better than a human, then either the gameplay needs to be made more complex, or the option to bot should be included explicitly.
That argument makes no sense.
The problems with quests in the old world are typified by the Dream Dust quest. http://thottbot.com/q1116 The mobs that drop the quest items are in a tiny area of Swamp of Sorrows and at best there are only 3 or 4 spawned at a time. To make matters worse, the same mobs drop a very rare dragon vanity pet AND can be skinned for a rare and valuable leather. That's probably the poorest designed quest in the game.
Equally frustrating are the satyrs in Felwood that drop Felcloth (used to make Mooncloth by tailors and 16 slot bags), quite valuable even post BC because the other (easier to obtain) Netherweave 16 slot bag is BoP and the Mooncloth bag is BoE.
As a matter of fact though, I do not see how the game designer can completely avoid creating areas like that. Rare items are supposed to be well um, rare. It doesn't justify planting a bot in the right area and thus griefing everyone else in the realm. IMO.
The cost of mounts drives the cost of everything else.
That part is true.
Remove that ridiculous cost, which, under point of fact, only allows people who play 24/7/365 to get what they need to progress, and people wouldn't get a bot to let them keep up with other people while they slept and worked.
Blizzard has consistently been lowering the cost of mounts and making it easier to Get Rich Quick under the rules. Pre WotLK, it was possible to make ~300g per day just doing daily quests. It's more now at the level 80 cap. At that rate, you have your epic flyer in less than 3 weeks, playing only a few hours a night.
In my experience, those who are complaining the most about prices are the ones who are constantly purchasing armor and weapon upgrades in the auction house every few levels. PvE leveling content has been nerfed to an extent that makes that maybe the most stupid strategy in the game.
I do not think the prices of the top items are ridiculous, nor do I think they are unobtainable unless you play non-stop. I do plan on buying one piece of the Kirin Tor jewelry and paying an engineer friend to make me a motorcycle mount, but after I've finished leveling up my other characters. It will take me several months to do that since I do not have that much time to play, but that does not bother me at all.
It's about preventing you from using stuff you legitimately bought in new and interesting ways, so they can sell it to you again in those new and interesting ways. Or it's about preventing you from doing something that damages them in a completely unrelated way, if they can.
It's about taking control away from the consumer, and putting it back in the hands of the publisher.
Another stupid argument. Most of us bought WoW to play a game under a fair playing field. "The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few" or something like that.
That's a straw man argument. Blizzard only deletes characters used on an alternate server when you connect to their servers, not the account. Think of it as a successful operation to remove a cancerous tumor.
If you can't tell that I'm using a bot from the stream of bits being sent to the server, then I am in the privacy of my own home. My hardware, my rules.
They did not go after the bot users, they went after the bot. See my earlier post regarding what happened after my wife unwittingly used a "private" server. Nothing, other than deletion of the character.
This is not a simple case of users breaching a contract with a product, but a product that BY DESIGN is TO BE USED FOR breaching a contract.
Yes. That's an important distinction and very clearly separates things like VMWare.
Just how far does anyone think a business would get if its only product was a home burglary or auto theft convenience kit? "Break into any car and be driving away in 30 seconds or less ... OR YOUR MONEY BACK!!!" Yup, sounds like a winner.