It's an epidemic here that so many of us geeks just hates Microsoft - full stop. It's as if the 70,000 odd employees at Microsoft are all thick, incompetent nuts - c'mon people, get real! It's not easy to be hired by Microsoft - the bunch at Redmond and accross the globe are truly awesome at what they do.
It's only partly about software quality. Personally, I've developed an aversion against Word and to some extent Outlook, but that alone would not make me hate the company. Their slimy FUD tactics are worse, and for that I'd consider it good if Microsoft was broken up somehow.
There are "hundred's of thousands" of hardware components out there for Windows. One can't truly expect Microsoft to write drivers (millions of lines of code) for hardware they have no financial benefit from. This task would dwarf the entire development for Windows itself. Why should hardware vendors get free drivers?
The Linux community does it, with a few exceptions (mostly where the hardware vendor does not release the specs). Microsoft could afford to do it as well, at least for the most common products. If some 15 year old Taiwanese NIC is unsupported, tough luck and not many will complain. But for widely used stuff there is not really an excuse if Windows lacks drivers (or the drivers suck). In that context, I think it is Microsoft's fault.
The driver model of XP was a quasi-standard that was pretty stable for several years. But Microsoft themselves broke it because they wanted new functions that were not in the XP model. Some of it made sense (reorganizing the Windows Display Driver Model), other things are mostly annoying to the end user (DRM). The point is that a standard can be limitating too.
The Linux Kernel developers are even more radical about it: they don't want a fixed kernel-driver interface at all because they think it gets in the way of development;-)
True, but Microsoft could do it the way I suggested. If they choose to stay with the status quo, it is not an excuse for lousy stability and performance in Vista. Which seems (admittedly) fixed by now, but Microsoft's whining about "it was the fault of the hardware vendors" does not convince me.
Unless the manufacturer web site contains only incomplete "driver updates" (hello Creative).
Partly because of such asshats, I've taken to the GP's principle of backing up my drivers. Albeit with the difference that I usually archive the latest version known to work, not the original driver CD.
On top of that, some drivers are necessary to access the internet in the first place (NIC) or make it way more convenient to navigate the manufacturer web site (graphics card driver that gives you full functionality, as opposed to 640x480 pixel VGA mode in Windows 2000).
This said, I have had better results with Ubuntu. Everything except the proprietary NVidia driver came with the distribution, and the latter was easily downloaded. Among other things, my old Soundblaster Live for which Creative does not even offer the complete Windows drivers for download was supported right away.
Why would hardware manufacturers bother to write drivers for a Windows Beta release? Especially one that probably won't be released for several years, and the driver requirements and API and such are likely to change several times before then. So many people are happy with XP or Linux, they can wait until the first RC to come out (Microsoft calls it Gold).
It seems that this is more or less what happened with Vista: Hardware vendors started late with driver development (maybe they believed there would be some more delay and changes like you wrote), and immediately after release the user experience sucked. Now Microsoft wants to avoid a repeat...
No, but they do have the power to write drivers themselves (carrot)...
What? MS would have the same problem as Linux does, just to a lesser degree. HW manufactures would have to provide specs to MS, something they haven't done for Linux. The only saving grace would be that MS would be capable of signing an NDA with them.
MS could start writing drivers for those hardware vendors that provide specifications and let others write their own drivers. As an example, right now AMD/ATI would get support for its graphics cards but NVidia would have to provide its own drivers. I guess that would translate into a significant advantage for hardware vendors who publish their specs.
You should be asking, "Should I make architectural decisions before or after I collect all the requirements." But you know the answer to that one.
Sure.
You collect all the requirements as they stand at day X. The you start planning and coding. Once you have invested significant work, say on day X + 20, the requirements change. Repeat every 20 days.
Now, do you tell you manager each time that you have to restart the project? Or do you try to meddle through, reusing as much of your existing code as possible?
Absolutely correct, and to me Xiph's assurance that they did a patent search and found nothing is sufficient. Proving a negative is almost impossible in this case, as you said, and I think it is up to the anti-Theora crowd to show a relevant patent.
I'm sure that our governments would like that, and the US intelligence service probably drop them a few morsels now and then to keep them happy.
But overall, I still think that tolerating US espionage on a large scale is a bad idea. Because it seems to me that the USA view their allies as vassals rather than partners, and that we will always get a bad deal from playing the junior partner to the NSA.
Based on their past sales policy, the 256 core version will probably be the "enterprise server" that costs a few thousand dollars. Unless increasing competition forces the prices down.
Not that it will matter for the average PC user: Today, the typical PC might have a quad core CPU, but more than one CPU socket is the domain of expensive workstations and servers. The cores per CPU might scale to 16 cores some years from now, but that is the maximum I see Joe Sixpack using.
The first "M" in MMO means you need a lot more computing power and bandwidth on the server side than for a FPS server with a maximum of some 10 players. So even if the software company gave away the server software, it might be a bit too expensive for the average fan to run his own server for some 1000 players.
But a MMO vendor could still gain some goodwill by including the server software, thus ensuring there can be at least "small" freeshards once the official servers are closed.
At the company I work for, Word 2000 is still widespread, including "my" PC. It has an annoying tendency to shift formatting in unpredictable ways or simply crashing. Other MS Office products have lesser but still annoying quirks.
Over the years, I have depeloped a sufficient aversion to ban it from my privat PC. And considering that Word 2000 is the fifth major release of Word, I have little faith in newer versions being better.
Open Office, OTOH, has so far worked fine for me and I'm actually getting into apathy territory the other way: why bother checking out Microsoft's latest turd?
And modders? I'm looking at you. There are many of you who would sue when you run that update that SCEA put out and had your system bricked. Lots less legal hassle/bills to nip it in the bud. I doubt anything will change in the way that they are doing things.
Hell yes. If an update bricks my system (as opposed to a PC where I can reformat and install another OS), I would want the maker of that update to pay for the damage. Of course that is hypothetical in my case, as Sony are on my boycott list anyway. No PS3 to brick here.
I've read a lot of agreements where the company in question did their best to get as favorable terms as possible when it comes to things like warranty and possible lawsuits. Read the typical Microsoft EULA for an example of this.
But the "COMMUNITY CODE OF CONDUCT" goes far beyond the typical asshattery of such EULAS. Sony reserve the right to censor your communications, and I suspect some rules, like "You may not use, make, or distribute unauthorized software or hardware in conjunction with PSN, or take or use any data from PSN to design, develop or update unauthorized software or hardware,..." might even be illegal as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade.
Section 11 "MAINTENANCE AND UPGRADES", finally, goes beyond protecting the network and allows Sony to change data on your PS3. They also claim they are not liable for damage in the case of a botched upgrade. It seems Sony executives have not learned anything from the rootkit affair (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit).
People go on and on about how Android is Linux based and Open Source, but it's not. The Linux backend is all but invisible and likely just as locked down as the Linux installs on other embedded devices. You are not going to be able to easily replace it, assuming you can even get close enough to the system to have a hope of doing so. Tivo, all over again.
So the phones sold to the end user are Tivo-ized in this case. But this still leaves room for another hardware vendor to make a non-tivoized Android phone. That would restore the "open".
I tried that for a while too. System still unstable, certain applications (Teamspeak, Day Of Defeat Source) could not be closed normally and required a "dirty" shutdown of the OS with the power switch.
While I'm not sure if the graphics card drivers were at fault, I suspect some driver problem. And the graphics card was the one component for which I had only old or XP drivers.
AFAIK, right now the closed source NVidia drivers are still better than ATI's, either open or closed source. But I expect the Open Source stuff to catch up and the proprietary drivers to break sooner or later.
For my NVidia 8600 GT, for instance, there are no current Windows 2000 drivers available anymore. You can get an old version from the MSI website, but the system was never quite stable under Windows 2000. After switching to XP and current drivers things are fine - but it required changing the OS. Similarly, vendors tend to drop support for old cards from their proprietary drivers. But if the hardware is not extremely rare, Open Source drivers in Linux are supported for a looong time.
I do know, that my next laptop, will be a Dell, and it will have a sweet ass Nvidia card in it. Im keeping faith in them.
Faith is usually misplaced with companies. Most of them have sucked at one point or another. All you can do is do some research about current products and hope there is no hidden problem brewing.
When I last bought a graphics card it was an NVidia 8600GT because of ATI's still-questionable Linux support at the time (the Open Source driver project was announced but nothing delivered yet). Now I can only hope that card does not die on me.
Based on ATI's improvement in drivers and NVidia's current problems I would get an ATI now. But that is not set in stone either and may be reversed a few years from now.
That's interesting because the hydrocarbon output can be easily stored. Which gets around one of the bigger problems with solar energy: how to save the power for usage at night/in cloudy weather.
There could be other approaches along this line: What about an aluminium smelter that runs the electrolysis only in the day while sunlight to power the solar power plant is available? At night the cells could be covered to keep them from cooling down.
It seems that the subsidies in some countries, especially Germany, are keeping prices for photovoltaics panels up. Companies like Nanosolar can sell their panels for way more than manufacturing costs, because the subsidies are designed to make more conventional and expensive panels economically viable. There is a yearly degression built into the legislation, but so far it does not keep up with improvements in manufacturing.
I expect this situation to change drastically once the German market reaches saturation. At that point, real competition will kick in and panel prices will drop to a price where they will be attractive without subsidies. And Nanosolar are not alone in developing cheaper panels.
You can't know in advance, because WINE does not yet support all Windows APIs. Sometimes there are regressions too. If Starcraft II uses an unsupported API, tough luck. The new version of Valve's Day Of Defeat: Source for instance is broken in WINE version 1.1.5.
But if you can wait a few weeks, I'm sure Starcraft II will show up in the AppDB at the WINE homepage. Including some reports from people who alredy tried it.
Any western company that still falls for this deserves to be ripped off. I guess if I was a CEO, I would sell only equipment to China that is somewhat obsolete and does not give away my company's latest technology.
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It's only partly about software quality. Personally, I've developed an aversion against Word and to some extent Outlook, but that alone would not make me hate the company. Their slimy FUD tactics are worse, and for that I'd consider it good if Microsoft was broken up somehow.
The Linux community does it, with a few exceptions (mostly where the hardware vendor does not release the specs). Microsoft could afford to do it as well, at least for the most common products. If some 15 year old Taiwanese NIC is unsupported, tough luck and not many will complain. But for widely used stuff there is not really an excuse if Windows lacks drivers (or the drivers suck). In that context, I think it is Microsoft's fault.
In a way, they had this:
The driver model of XP was a quasi-standard that was pretty stable for several years. But Microsoft themselves broke it because they wanted new functions that were not in the XP model. Some of it made sense (reorganizing the Windows Display Driver Model), other things are mostly annoying to the end user (DRM). The point is that a standard can be limitating too.
The Linux Kernel developers are even more radical about it: they don't want a fixed kernel-driver interface at all because they think it gets in the way of development ;-)
True, but Microsoft could do it the way I suggested. If they choose to stay with the status quo, it is not an excuse for lousy stability and performance in Vista. Which seems (admittedly) fixed by now, but Microsoft's whining about "it was the fault of the hardware vendors" does not convince me.
Unless the manufacturer web site contains only incomplete "driver updates" (hello Creative).
Partly because of such asshats, I've taken to the GP's principle of backing up my drivers. Albeit with the difference that I usually archive the latest version known to work, not the original driver CD.
On top of that, some drivers are necessary to access the internet in the first place (NIC) or make it way more convenient to navigate the manufacturer web site (graphics card driver that gives you full functionality, as opposed to 640x480 pixel VGA mode in Windows 2000).
This said, I have had better results with Ubuntu. Everything except the proprietary NVidia driver came with the distribution, and the latter was easily downloaded. Among other things, my old Soundblaster Live for which Creative does not even offer the complete Windows drivers for download was supported right away.
It seems that this is more or less what happened with Vista:
Hardware vendors started late with driver development (maybe they believed there would be some more delay and changes like you wrote), and immediately after release the user experience sucked. Now Microsoft wants to avoid a repeat...
MS could start writing drivers for those hardware vendors that provide specifications and let others write their own drivers. As an example, right now AMD/ATI would get support for its graphics cards but NVidia would have to provide its own drivers.
I guess that would translate into a significant advantage for hardware vendors who publish their specs.
Sure.
You collect all the requirements as they stand at day X. The you start planning and coding. Once you have invested significant work, say on day X + 20, the requirements change. Repeat every 20 days.
Now, do you tell you manager each time that you have to restart the project?
Or do you try to meddle through, reusing as much of your existing code as possible?
Absolutely correct, and to me Xiph's assurance that they did a patent search and found nothing is sufficient. Proving a negative is almost impossible in this case, as you said, and I think it is up to the anti-Theora crowd to show a relevant patent.
I'm sure that our governments would like that, and the US intelligence service probably drop them a few morsels now and then to keep them happy.
But overall, I still think that tolerating US espionage on a large scale is a bad idea. Because it seems to me that the USA view their allies as vassals rather than partners, and that we will always get a bad deal from playing the junior partner to the NSA.
Thanks for the list.
As an European, I'm somewhat disappointed that our governments don't close most US installation over this.
Based on their past sales policy, the 256 core version will probably be the "enterprise server" that costs a few thousand dollars. Unless increasing competition forces the prices down.
Not that it will matter for the average PC user:
Today, the typical PC might have a quad core CPU, but more than one CPU socket is the domain of expensive workstations and servers. The cores per CPU might scale to 16 cores some years from now, but that is the maximum I see Joe Sixpack using.
The first "M" in MMO means you need a lot more computing power and bandwidth on the server side than for a FPS server with a maximum of some 10 players. So even if the software company gave away the server software, it might be a bit too expensive for the average fan to run his own server for some 1000 players.
But a MMO vendor could still gain some goodwill by including the server software, thus ensuring there can be at least "small" freeshards once the official servers are closed.
At least for me ;-)
At the company I work for, Word 2000 is still widespread, including "my" PC. It has an annoying tendency to shift formatting in unpredictable ways or simply crashing. Other MS Office products have lesser but still annoying quirks.
Over the years, I have depeloped a sufficient aversion to ban it from my privat PC. And considering that Word 2000 is the fifth major release of Word, I have little faith in newer versions being better.
Open Office, OTOH, has so far worked fine for me and I'm actually getting into apathy territory the other way:
why bother checking out Microsoft's latest turd?
Hell yes. If an update bricks my system (as opposed to a PC where I can reformat and install another OS), I would want the maker of that update to pay for the damage.
Of course that is hypothetical in my case, as Sony are on my boycott list anyway. No PS3 to brick here.
I've read a lot of agreements where the company in question did their best to get as favorable terms as possible when it comes to things like warranty and possible lawsuits. Read the typical Microsoft EULA for an example of this.
But the "COMMUNITY CODE OF CONDUCT" goes far beyond the typical asshattery of such EULAS. Sony reserve the right to censor your communications, and I suspect some rules, like ..."
"You may not use, make, or distribute unauthorized software or hardware in conjunction with PSN, or take or use any data from PSN to design, develop or update unauthorized software or hardware,
might even be illegal as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade.
Section 11 "MAINTENANCE AND UPGRADES", finally, goes beyond protecting the network and allows Sony to change data on your PS3. They also claim they are not liable for damage in the case of a botched upgrade.
It seems Sony executives have not learned anything from the rootkit affair (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit).
So the phones sold to the end user are Tivo-ized in this case.
But this still leaves room for another hardware vendor to make a non-tivoized Android phone. That would restore the "open".
I tried that for a while too. System still unstable, certain applications (Teamspeak, Day Of Defeat Source) could not be closed normally and required a "dirty" shutdown of the OS with the power switch.
While I'm not sure if the graphics card drivers were at fault, I suspect some driver problem. And the graphics card was the one component for which I had only old or XP drivers.
AFAIK, right now the closed source NVidia drivers are still better than ATI's, either open or closed source. But I expect the Open Source stuff to catch up and the proprietary drivers to break sooner or later.
For my NVidia 8600 GT, for instance, there are no current Windows 2000 drivers available anymore. You can get an old version from the MSI website, but the system was never quite stable under Windows 2000. After switching to XP and current drivers things are fine - but it required changing the OS.
Similarly, vendors tend to drop support for old cards from their proprietary drivers. But if the hardware is not extremely rare, Open Source drivers in Linux are supported for a looong time.
Faith is usually misplaced with companies. Most of them have sucked at one point or another. All you can do is do some research about current products and hope there is no hidden problem brewing.
When I last bought a graphics card it was an NVidia 8600GT because of ATI's still-questionable Linux support at the time (the Open Source driver project was announced but nothing delivered yet). Now I can only hope that card does not die on me.
Based on ATI's improvement in drivers and NVidia's current problems I would get an ATI now. But that is not set in stone either and may be reversed a few years from now.
I don't worry too much, after all I can get an ATI 4670 for around 80 Euros. So it would suck if my MSI GeForce dies but I can afford to replace it.
That's interesting because the hydrocarbon output can be easily stored. Which gets around one of the bigger problems with solar energy:
how to save the power for usage at night/in cloudy weather.
There could be other approaches along this line:
What about an aluminium smelter that runs the electrolysis only in the day while sunlight to power the solar power plant is available? At night the cells could be covered to keep them from cooling down.
It seems that the subsidies in some countries, especially Germany, are keeping prices for photovoltaics panels up. Companies like Nanosolar can sell their panels for way more than manufacturing costs, because the subsidies are designed to make more conventional and expensive panels economically viable. There is a yearly degression built into the legislation, but so far it does not keep up with improvements in manufacturing.
I expect this situation to change drastically once the German market reaches saturation. At that point, real competition will kick in and panel prices will drop to a price where they will be attractive without subsidies. And Nanosolar are not alone in developing cheaper panels.
For instance, there is First Solar: http://www.firstsolar.com/
You can't know in advance, because WINE does not yet support all Windows APIs. Sometimes there are regressions too. If Starcraft II uses an unsupported API, tough luck.
The new version of Valve's Day Of Defeat: Source for instance is broken in WINE version 1.1.5.
But if you can wait a few weeks, I'm sure Starcraft II will show up in the AppDB at the WINE homepage. Including some reports from people who alredy tried it.
An important exception I forgot...
That's nothing new.
In other industry sectors, China had "joint venture requirements" for years, which amounted to the opportunity for a Chinese company to grab the know-how. As an example see http://www.chinacartimes.com/2008/04/18/chinas-automobile-joint-venture-requirement-may-end-in-2010/
Any western company that still falls for this deserves to be ripped off. I guess if I was a CEO, I would sell only equipment to China that is somewhat obsolete and does not give away my company's latest technology.