Oh twitter, you're going to love this. Here's an article by the guy that actually writes this stuff for your operating system. I'd like you to go through that article and please share with us where the guy that actually writes the stuff blames Bill Gates or "M$" for how ACPI works (or not). As opposed to just the general sense of "this stuff is hard" I get from it.
Once you're done getting an education, I'd like for you to explain how "M$" allegedly sabotaged ACPI on Linux. You pointed to an eight-year old email from Bill Gates that, if anything, proves Microsoft did not do anything to impact the implementation of ACPI in Linux. Seriously, just in case your FSF distortion field is turned up too high, that's exactly what you are proving by linking to that email. You have ACPI in Linux. It might be as broken as it is on Windows, but you have it. You realize that, yes? God, please tell me you realize that?
LinuxBIOS or other free software implementations are much better.
Yes, that's been a great success. Are you working on this or other standard to replace all the "shit" Microsoft has given you so far? How's that going?
I'm surprised Bill was dumb enough to document his intent.
What you are implying is action. I asked for you to document how Microsoft "screwed" Linux power management with ACPI, possibly screwing themselves (if I follow your logic) in the process, since Windows contains an ACPI implementation. You made an assertion, and now you need to prove it. As always, it's that simple. Claiming that ACPI has too many pages is hardly proof of anything other than that stuff is hard to do in software rather than hardware. Unless you're an expert in the field and would like to clarify that for me. Oh, that would be great.
Other than that what you have is an 8-year old email that proves absolutely nothing but is great as a bullet point in your infantile "I hate teh M$ Windoze" rants.
The BSoD is being caused by a driver, most likely the video one. Userspace applications cannot cause Windows to bluescreen, not since NT4 was released in the mid-90s. An application might be the vector for the fault, but it's not the ultimate cause.
VideoLAN works fine on Vista with just about any format I've tried, which includes older MOVs and Real videos. So does MediaPlayer Classic and the YouTube-style streaming Flash video.
This has nothing to do with "DRM", and seriously, Apple software for Windows has always sucked rocks. But I'm sure that if you're masochistic enough to use QuickTime on a PC if you get a good video driver your problems should be solved.
That's an interesting email from 1999. Myself, I've been known to send emails to the tone of "how can we prevent the competition from leeching on our multi-million dollar R&D investment with our technology partners", but OK.
Would you like to point me to the follow up email from Eric Rudder that says "Hi Bill - As you requested, we've made the ACPI extensions specific to Windows so no one else can implement them. Cheers!" I can't seem to find it.
The Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification is an open industry standard first released in December 1996 developed by HP, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix and Toshiba that defines common interfaces for hardware recognition, motherboard and device configuration and power management.
Now, ACPI has its shortcomings. It's complicated. It might not be your ideal of a standard. But it is an open standard, which Linux indeed implements. It might be broken in some ways in Linux as it is in Windows, but implemented it is. It's an important standard because it takes hardware out of the equation, which is important for a general OS that's supposed to support a wide range of it.
I still use APM for the most part
Really? That's also a Microsoft-defined standard (along with Intel):
Advanced Power Management (APM) is an API developed by Intel and Microsoft
Is that standard "shit" as well? And if you all these standards from Microsoft are "shit", then why do you use them at all? You use Linux, right? Why don't you come up with your own standard and give it to the free software world so they can stop using all these "shit" open standards that Microsoft has bothered to make open for anyone to use? Which reminds me, I'd love to see that other email about ACPI I mentioned. Thanks.
HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE NIGERIAN ELECTORAL COMISSION, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO MONITOR THE ELECTION. IN RETURNS, WE SHALL TRANSFER THE SUM OF $47,500,000.00 (FORTY SEVEN MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) INTO YOUR ACCOUNTS. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT FIVE YEARS (5) AGO BY A FOREIGN TEXTING CONTRACTOR. THIS ACTION WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA APEX BANK.
It says a lot about you and about Slashdot that you can hop on an article about someone hacking OS X, do your "M$ Windoze" routine and then get modded up for it. Seriously though, I'm sure that once Taco figures out his MySQL problems he'll have a tasty Microsoft FUD story for you to comment on. I suggest you wait for that?
You were given a link, obviously, and an explanation, but as usual you prefer to play the flocktard and ignore reality. It's always more convenient to wrap yourself in your Stallman blanket. When are you going to stop "evangelizing" and start thinking for a change?
I don't trust you.
BTW, I predict it's just a matter of time before the mod pool wises up to your sockpuppet account and starts dishing out the love you get with your "normal" account.
Microsoft should stop providing so much information in their advisories. Or better yet, stop issuing them altogether. Oh, wait. They used to do that, and that proved unpopular.
Maybe they should do what Mozilla does, which is to "hide" vulnerabilities until they either patch them or feel that a sufficient number of people have applied the patch (which is of course the other problem). Of course, like with Blaster for example, you can release a patch and 30 days later the exploit nails all the people who didn't bother to fucking patch.
I can see some people's heads exploding with this one.
No, what you are knocking it the quality of Debian packages. That's only something that can be done in ignorance or malice.
No, he's not. Why don't you address his point instead of feigning outrage? You said there are 18 bazillion "packages" in the Debian repos, and implied that has some sort of significance. There must be tens of thousands of Windows applications out there but I don't use that to prop up some unrelated point about Windows.
Stop using those useless arguments or be prepared to defend them. Fair enough, isn't it?
not every "application" ever written survives the M$ upgrade cycle
It's damn time "M$" stopped compromising security in the name of backwards compatibility, if that's what you're implying. And yes, it sucks that users will get all those UAC prompts. But it's either that or continue along as usual. Upgrade to a version of your app that doesn't think it owns the machine, switch to something else or stop whining.
Now, if you'd like to point out a number of applications that didn't "survive" the "M$" upgrade cycle before, and then contrast that with a set of Linux-specific software like drivers that don't break from one kernel point release to another, I'll be hapy to concede your point.
When I buy a product in a store, I OWN that product. I don't have to agree to *anything* as to how I use it.
A "product" that is made up of nothing more than intellectual creative property is not a "product" and so your definition simply does not apply. It does not apply to music or movies or books or software. It applies to pliers and ceramic mugs.
The people who wanted to protect their "ephemeral" creations decided they could treat them the same exact way they treat a pen or a sack of sand, and then simply stacked up artificial restrictions on top of that. These restrictions proved useless because they simply didn't see the digital age coming along (not that anybody else did of course). So while I agree with you that the system is broken in many ways, making bogus emotional arguments like these doesn't help much, either.
supposedly exploited module... I'm sure this little problem
We've entered the spin zone!
will be fixed quickly
Just like any problem with "Windoze", if you bother to patch.
it's filled with FUD about free software
Of course, all this is "FUD"
so Windoze away
Yes, do the "oooh, look over there M$ Windoze sux!" routine. Better get it polished up though - you better get used to this being more and more prevalent and you'll have to do a lot better than these. It shouldn't detract from the quality of Linux at all, it's just reality. But people like you just have to spin it to hell because you feel like you're losing your security blanket.
BTW mods, "Erris" here is a sockpuppet of twitter, and he's been astroturfing his own posts all day to rack up some karma.
Except that this particular driver is mostly open source, and the flaw happens to be in that portion, which is probably why Debian patched it so quickly (December). But either distros are not offering downstream updates or people are not patching. Kinda like "Windoze" update. I guess it doesn't really matter what OS you're using if you don't patch.
Interesting also that a flaw in a driver can cause the whole machine to be compromised. IIRC you've said yourself in the past that this is a "Windoze"-only "feature", it was explained to you how drivers work in Linux and you of course chose to ignore logic and common sense in favor of mindless advocacy.
This is why it's important to distinguish between "Linux" and "Free Software".... nonsense like the popularity argument and other FUD presented in PC World.
I don't see how this is relevant or even how it makes any sense at all.
BTW, how come you're posting with both accounts today?
You've reported this previously, with the same FUD "OMG MS IS TEH EVILZ" slant designed to outrage everyone into an ad-impression frenzy. TFA points out (not that you did) that this refers to virtualization, and does not apply to dual-booting. The restriction applies to Windows-on-Windows as much as it does on the Mac or any other OS. One might argue that the restriction is "bad", but it's very different from the "Microsoft sticks it to poor Mac users on purpose" summary. If you don't agree to the EULA, then don't use Windows. It's that simple.
Really, how many times are you planning to run this "story"? Maybe the plan is to stop once the FUD meme is spread to your satisfaction likealltheothersbefore?
There are enough things to criticize Microsoft over. These FUD campaigns are going to backfire one of these days. You can only claim you're being FUD'ed for so long before everyone realizes you're no better.
Of course Imus is free to say whatever he wants; but of course, people are just as free to disapprove of it, and - and this is important - the station he worked for is just as free to fire him for it.
That's exactly what I thought about the whole Dixie Chicks thing. You can say whatever the hell you want, just be aware that because you function in the court of public opinion, if you insult a large enough segment of them you'll probably have to deal with the consecuences. Of course that wasn't a popular POV at the time, since the were "so clearly" being "victimized" by the vast right-wing conspiracy or something like that.
Extrapolating the group of people who read that blog to "the most hated company in america" just blows my mind. You wouldn't work for "The Consumerist" by any chance, right?
I have a sneaking suspicion Microsoft wasn't that interested in DoubleClick. But they wanted to make damn sure that Google overpaid for it.
Well, in any event if Microsoft had outbid Google everyone would be up in froth screaming that they can't innovate, compete, etc. and they have to buy everyting. So it's just as well.
It's just a different paradigm and mindset. They both have their unique advantages and shortcomings. Get a good IDE, a good framework and some Dr. Pepper and you can probably pull it off once you "grok" the shifts.
Having said that, a web application will never have the level of control that a forms-based one has, no matter how fancy your JavaScript is. Truth is, the browser is a crappy platform no matter how you look at it. The web illuminati proclaimed the desktop dead ten years ago and now again on the tails of GMail and the half million good and bad "rich" applications developed apparently for the specific purpose of showcasing how utterly screwed up the browser as a platform is.
But if you work for a living you probably have to go with the flow, so "Ajax" it is until the next fad comes around. Personally I think Java/.NET/Mono and the like with a good forms front end and a really powerful matching backend infrastructure is going to be the next big thing along with XCOPY deployment and zero impact installs. CPUs and memory are catching up to managed frameworks and writing a web service (or a client) is laughably simple now (I remember hand-coding my WSDL and walking in the snow uphill both ways, etc).
In any case, the fun part is being int he middle of it all =)
Slashdot Mirror
Once you're done getting an education, I'd like for you to explain how "M$" allegedly sabotaged ACPI on Linux. You pointed to an eight-year old email from Bill Gates that, if anything, proves Microsoft did not do anything to impact the implementation of ACPI in Linux. Seriously, just in case your FSF distortion field is turned up too high, that's exactly what you are proving by linking to that email. You have ACPI in Linux. It might be as broken as it is on Windows, but you have it. You realize that, yes? God, please tell me you realize that?
Yes, that's been a great success. Are you working on this or other standard to replace all the "shit" Microsoft has given you so far? How's that going?
I'm surprised Bill was dumb enough to document his intent.
What you are implying is action. I asked for you to document how Microsoft "screwed" Linux power management with ACPI, possibly screwing themselves (if I follow your logic) in the process, since Windows contains an ACPI implementation. You made an assertion, and now you need to prove it. As always, it's that simple. Claiming that ACPI has too many pages is hardly proof of anything other than that stuff is hard to do in software rather than hardware. Unless you're an expert in the field and would like to clarify that for me. Oh, that would be great.
Other than that what you have is an 8-year old email that proves absolutely nothing but is great as a bullet point in your infantile "I hate teh M$ Windoze" rants.
VideoLAN works fine on Vista with just about any format I've tried, which includes older MOVs and Real videos. So does MediaPlayer Classic and the YouTube-style streaming Flash video.
This has nothing to do with "DRM", and seriously, Apple software for Windows has always sucked rocks. But I'm sure that if you're masochistic enough to use QuickTime on a PC if you get a good video driver your problems should be solved.
Oh yeah.
Bill Gate's memo
That's an interesting email from 1999. Myself, I've been known to send emails to the tone of "how can we prevent the competition from leeching on our multi-million dollar R&D investment with our technology partners", but OK.
Would you like to point me to the follow up email from Eric Rudder that says "Hi Bill - As you requested, we've made the ACPI extensions specific to Windows so no one else can implement them. Cheers!" I can't seem to find it.
Oh, wait - here's ACPIfor Linux and ACPI for FreeBSD. Indeed, here's a quote from the WP entry:
Now, ACPI has its shortcomings. It's complicated. It might not be your ideal of a standard. But it is an open standard, which Linux indeed implements. It might be broken in some ways in Linux as it is in Windows, but implemented it is. It's an important standard because it takes hardware out of the equation, which is important for a general OS that's supposed to support a wide range of it.
I still use APM for the most part
Really? That's also a Microsoft-defined standard (along with Intel):
Is that standard "shit" as well? And if you all these standards from Microsoft are "shit", then why do you use them at all? You use Linux, right? Why don't you come up with your own standard and give it to the free software world so they can stop using all these "shit" open standards that Microsoft has bothered to make open for anyone to use? Which reminds me, I'd love to see that other email about ACPI I mentioned. Thanks.
So much for that deal with Satan specifying he could take me the day a post with a goatse link on Slashdot was modded +5...
Actually I'd go so far as branding it human freedom, which Cubans mostly lack.
It says a lot about you and about Slashdot that you can hop on an article about someone hacking OS X, do your "M$ Windoze" routine and then get modded up for it. Seriously though, I'm sure that once Taco figures out his MySQL problems he'll have a tasty Microsoft FUD story for you to comment on. I suggest you wait for that?
You were given a link, obviously, and an explanation, but as usual you prefer to play the flocktard and ignore reality. It's always more convenient to wrap yourself in your Stallman blanket. When are you going to stop "evangelizing" and start thinking for a change?
I don't trust you.
BTW, I predict it's just a matter of time before the mod pool wises up to your sockpuppet account and starts dishing out the love you get with your "normal" account.
Maybe they should do what Mozilla does, which is to "hide" vulnerabilities until they either patch them or feel that a sufficient number of people have applied the patch (which is of course the other problem). Of course, like with Blaster for example, you can release a patch and 30 days later the exploit nails all the people who didn't bother to fucking patch.
I can see some people's heads exploding with this one.
No, he's not. Why don't you address his point instead of feigning outrage? You said there are 18 bazillion "packages" in the Debian repos, and implied that has some sort of significance. There must be tens of thousands of Windows applications out there but I don't use that to prop up some unrelated point about Windows.
Stop using those useless arguments or be prepared to defend them. Fair enough, isn't it?
not every "application" ever written survives the M$ upgrade cycle
It's damn time "M$" stopped compromising security in the name of backwards compatibility, if that's what you're implying. And yes, it sucks that users will get all those UAC prompts. But it's either that or continue along as usual. Upgrade to a version of your app that doesn't think it owns the machine, switch to something else or stop whining.
Now, if you'd like to point out a number of applications that didn't "survive" the "M$" upgrade cycle before, and then contrast that with a set of Linux-specific software like drivers that don't break from one kernel point release to another, I'll be hapy to concede your point.
A "product" that is made up of nothing more than intellectual creative property is not a "product" and so your definition simply does not apply. It does not apply to music or movies or books or software. It applies to pliers and ceramic mugs.
The people who wanted to protect their "ephemeral" creations decided they could treat them the same exact way they treat a pen or a sack of sand, and then simply stacked up artificial restrictions on top of that. These restrictions proved useless because they simply didn't see the digital age coming along (not that anybody else did of course). So while I agree with you that the system is broken in many ways, making bogus emotional arguments like these doesn't help much, either.
We've entered the spin zone!
will be fixed quickly
Just like any problem with "Windoze", if you bother to patch.
it's filled with FUD about free software
Of course, all this is "FUD"
so Windoze away
Yes, do the "oooh, look over there M$ Windoze sux!" routine. Better get it polished up though - you better get used to this being more and more prevalent and you'll have to do a lot better than these. It shouldn't detract from the quality of Linux at all, it's just reality. But people like you just have to spin it to hell because you feel like you're losing your security blanket.
BTW mods, "Erris" here is a sockpuppet of twitter, and he's been astroturfing his own posts all day to rack up some karma.
What part of "the flaw was in the open portion of the driver" did you manage to miss?
Interesting also that a flaw in a driver can cause the whole machine to be compromised. IIRC you've said yourself in the past that this is a "Windoze"-only "feature", it was explained to you how drivers work in Linux and you of course chose to ignore logic and common sense in favor of mindless advocacy.
This is why it's important to distinguish between "Linux" and "Free Software". ... nonsense like the popularity argument and other FUD presented in PC World.
I don't see how this is relevant or even how it makes any sense at all.
BTW, how come you're posting with both accounts today?
Look at it another way - this may be an *incentive* to migrate to another platform.
Really, how many times are you planning to run this "story"? Maybe the plan is to stop once the FUD meme is spread to your satisfaction like all the others before?
There are enough things to criticize Microsoft over. These FUD campaigns are going to backfire one of these days. You can only claim you're being FUD'ed for so long before everyone realizes you're no better.
That's exactly what I thought about the whole Dixie Chicks thing. You can say whatever the hell you want, just be aware that because you function in the court of public opinion, if you insult a large enough segment of them you'll probably have to deal with the consecuences. Of course that wasn't a popular POV at the time, since the were "so clearly" being "victimized" by the vast right-wing conspiracy or something like that.
Extrapolating the group of people who read that blog to "the most hated company in america" just blows my mind. You wouldn't work for "The Consumerist" by any chance, right?
Well, in any event if Microsoft had outbid Google everyone would be up in froth screaming that they can't innovate, compete, etc. and they have to buy everyting. So it's just as well.
Are you done trying to pretend you an keep all your sockpuppets straight?
And defending a flocktard like twitter (yes, "Erris" is one of twitter's sockpuppet accounts) is a sure sign of stupidity.
Yeah well, so it's not "so good" after all, right?
Freedom of expression is not a relative concept. You either have it or you don't.
Actually payroll is one of the most outsourced corporate functions, by far.
Having said that, a web application will never have the level of control that a forms-based one has, no matter how fancy your JavaScript is. Truth is, the browser is a crappy platform no matter how you look at it. The web illuminati proclaimed the desktop dead ten years ago and now again on the tails of GMail and the half million good and bad "rich" applications developed apparently for the specific purpose of showcasing how utterly screwed up the browser as a platform is.
But if you work for a living you probably have to go with the flow, so "Ajax" it is until the next fad comes around. Personally I think Java/.NET/Mono and the like with a good forms front end and a really powerful matching backend infrastructure is going to be the next big thing along with XCOPY deployment and zero impact installs. CPUs and memory are catching up to managed frameworks and writing a web service (or a client) is laughably simple now (I remember hand-coding my WSDL and walking in the snow uphill both ways, etc).
In any case, the fun part is being int he middle of it all =)