"Does that mean Wine won't even be listed in the package manager?" Not by default (have not tried Ubuntu 7.04 yet). You have to visit http://www.winehq.com/, browse to the download section and follow the directions to add the WineHQ APT Repository to your system's list of download sources. This is not exactly what a newbie might expect, but since WINE is still "early beta" quality, I would not recommend it anyway for people who dislike tinkering with the system. As WINE gets more mature, I expect that it will be officially included into the Ubuntu distribution at some point.
I can see in a few years we'll have subscription sets to whole development houses/publishers - "My Ubi-key gets me the latest titles as soon as they're out!". 90% of them are terrible games that get rushed out of the door, and you end up paying for more than you use, but that's the ideal scenario right? For them, yes.
There is already something similar: The "Station Pass" of Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) that gives you access to several MMORPGs with one subscription. And yes, they have a reputation for making terrible games.
The big problem came from legacy. Microsoft didn't want to go off in a new direction without orphaning a whole generation of software, and they were smart to know this. Afterall, if a company spends $15,000 on an application for a vertical market they're not going to invalidate that investment by upgrading to a new incompatible OS. So Microsoft did the smart thing in Windows NT and added in DOS and Windows 3.x emulation, allowing the programs to run interpretted in a sandbox, effectively a virtual machine.
However, then someone at MS figured out how to extend DOS with 32-bit support and preemptive multithreading and Windows 95 was born. This environment was close enough to the Win32 support in NT to make determination of emulation difficult, and it also demanded performance that the virtual machine could not provide. Windows 95 ran DOS programs directly alongside Win32 programs with no barriers in order to allow them to perform as expected. This allowed the non-existant security model to continue to exist.
Good description of Win9x, and I'd like to add that it needed less system ressources than Windows NT. This made it a huge success in the consumer market, but at the expense of promoting the non-existant security model to the 32 bit world.
If Microsoft was always aware of the problem as you say, they must have decided to disregard it when they introduced Windows 95. Because that threw away the best chance of moving the Microsoft world to a security-aware programming paradigm. I think the switch from 16 to 32 bit would have been a good opportunity, marketing-wise, to convince people to accept the NT concept as new standard.
The culture is different on these other operating systems. On UNIX, you'd be considered nuts if you ran as root all the time. And if you wrote a program that demanded to be run as root for no good reason, your application would be shunned, and rightly so.
and:
If you are a developer who has turned off UAC in frustration, remember that UAC is only this way because of all those software developers who insist on running as admin. It's not Windows you should be looking to blame.
I think that this is, in turn, a consequence of earlier Microsoft operating systems (Windows 3.x to ME) that did not have security features worth mentioning. Unix had a clear differentiation between user and admin (root) rights since decades. Windows did not, and essentially everyone was administrator.
As a result, lots of applications got written that implicitly required admin rights, accidentially or because it was the path of least resistance for the developer. As a result of that, people got used to work as administrators all the time on the newer systems (Win NT and later) too. As a result of that, there was less pressure to clean up the applications.
Now Microsoft is trying to break that vicious circle with UAC, but it seems they are not very successful... as it is once more the path of least resistance to turn it off;-)
I have a somewhat older Plextor (CD-Rom Plexwriter from 2003) and it is a very good drive. Later, however, they started to relabel drives they bought elsewhere and sell them for twice the price. Today, I like to buy Samsung: Cheap enough and so far quite reliable for me and my friends. But take it with a grain of salt because we don't have the numbers of computers to give you meaningful statistics.
Or maybe the early batches are sometimes overspeced - because they don't know which corners they can cut yet. Then once they figure it out, the later models die not too long after warranty;).
Meanwhile, Lite-on seems to have figured it out. A friend of mine had a few Lite-on CD drives die in the last years. Now, he avoids anything from that company;-)
DX10 - I haven't seen one person mention DirectX 10. Have any of you seen the screenshots for the new DX10 games? They're AMAZING. You're all on here whining and asking what you get in Vista that you don't get in Win XP? The answer is DirectX 10.
Now that you mention it... but graphics in games have reached a quality I find quite satisfactory years ago. So that is not an icentive for me to get Vista.
Newer MSFT OS's have ALWAYS required more resources than their predecessors; which means they'll always have worse performance on the same machine. It's a no brainer -...
True, but does it need to be this way? I think MSFT is wasting our hardware ressources with excessive bloat. Not that the Linux world is completely innocent there: While the kernel seems to be quite efficient, KDE and GNOME are more or less on XP's level in ressource hunger.
...as in "highest bidder gets the spectrum", big telecom will get it anyway. Like when the UMTS channels were auctioned off in Germany, with the large telecom companies placing bids in the billion Euro range.
At least the treasury got a very nice boost out of it, in fact I think the companies overpaid in their fear of being cut off from an important future market;-)
The difference is that Windows 2000 (or XP) had some real improvements over Win 98. Most importantly, support for more RAM and better stability. It had some problems with driver availability at first, but that is the only drawback I can recall.
With Vista, you get the same driver problems, less stability than before (as the predecessor is stable enough and much harder competition than Win 98 was) plus some compatibility problems. The only advantage might be the new GUI design. I say might be, because that is a matter of taste.
So I guess Vista will have a much harder time replacing XP than XP replacing 98.
If divulging confidential information is free speech now, lets start to leak -secret government documents -our employers' trade secrets and I'm sure there are a lot more possibilities...
I almost hope they get through with this, just for the funny side effects;-)
Pitbull = RIAA Lawyer You = Defendant in court mistakenly accused by the RIAA
So the better analogy would be that the pitbull of your neighbor goes after you because he confuses you with someone who has attacked his owner (attack the owner = copyright violation). The neighbor knows better but still does not bother to apologize or offer to pay your hospital bill. Now the question was, do you sue the neighbor for the damages you suffered?
Just like people do with other abandonware, people bypass those mechanisms. They are already bypassed. And if Microsoft isn't supporting the applications, they have some very patchy legal ground to take action against anyone with a legitimate license for their product, regardless of the method used to fulfill the license.
Sure, XP is known to be cracked. Vista will probably be cracked as well (according to some Slashdot news there are already partial cracks in circulation). But downloading such cracks from a random internet site will always carry a risk of getting a trojan as well. Not really what I'm looking for;-)
I'd also like to point out, as you mention yourself, if Vista becomes obselete, then... why would you use it?
Nobody uses Win98 or 3.11 anymore (apart from a few crazy nutjobs).
I might not agree with Microsoft about Vista being obsolete (assuming for the sake of the argument I'd use it in the first place). A similar situation is now approaching for Windows 2000. Which I'm still using and consider mostly OK. But Microsoft has already reduced support to a minimum and announced its complete end in 2010: http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evalua tion/news/bulletins/extendedsupport.mspx
This is an anti-piracy process. If you respect copyrights and have legitimately paid for your software, this shouldn't be a problem.
It is not yet a problem. But what happens when Microsoft decides at some point that XP and Vista are obsolete and will no longer be supported, including activation?
I guess that legitimate customers could sue Microsoft at this point and win in court. But some of us prefer not to give them the option of refusing activation in the first place. Like GP, I don't run XP on my private PC for that reason (let alone Vista, which appears to be worse in almost every regard). As long as Windows 2000 does the job, fine. After that, it will be Linux, even if I need to dump most games as a consequence.
In the past, sticking to Windows seems to have worked for Dell. There are obvious reasons (need to support only one OS) plus maybe a very favourable volume deal by Microsoft. But as Linux gains more market share, it is time for Dell to re-evaluate this position. Michael Dell using Ubuntu may be part of such research. If so, he is acting with more foresight than some managers I know;-)
To me, "balance" implies that the interests of the patent holders have a similar value as the public good, and the public has to accomodate them. This is completely wrong. Being granted a monopoly (which a patent does for a time) is a privilege, not a right. The "natural" thing to happen would be that once the invention is out, others can study and copy it.
Patent law was designed to give the inventor temporary protection from this form of competition, in the hope that it would make pursuing invention more worthwile and thus promote technical progress. But I think that is not something the inventor has a right to. It is something society grants in the expectation of getting a return.
And explain me this - how are commercial interests in and of themselves against the public good? If a business invents or develops something good and sells it the customers are happy, the employees have jobs and the owners make a profit. Who loses in that scenario?
In combination with patents:
1) Everyone who makes the same invention independently loses. Because they cannot make a profit from their investment, which they deserve as much as the other guy who just ran to the patent office a bit faster.
2) When 1) happens, the customers lose because lack of competition means higher prices.
Now both of these problems would be tolerable with a patent office that only grants patents for significant technical improvements. Which seems not to work anymore these days thanks to sloppy reviews and ridiculously low standards for patent applications. As a result, patents are becoming a tool for sabotaging the competition rather than protecting innovation.
And if you had bothered to read all of my post, you would have noticed that I propose trying to fix the patent system first before removing it altogether. Seems your own tinfoil hat is either blocking your eyes or restricting the blood flow to your brain....
The USTPO is *you*. They are supposed to represent the commons: To ensure that the patent system delivers the balance between commercial interests and The Public Good (tm).
What balance? The patent system is supposed to promote The Public Good (tm) by encouraging innovation. It is not supposed to be a favour for "commercial interests". If it fails that purpose (and cannot be fixed as you suggest), patents should be abolished.
Holding them accountable is... errrm... how exactly can you hold them accountable?
On an organizational level, making the USPTO pay for bad patents means the management cannot show good financial results if lots of patents get overturned in court. This does not immediately save taxpayer money, but if it causes a change towards better patent quality a lot of the current trouble would go away. On an individual level, the examiner who issued a crap patent could have it counted against his quota in some way. I think these measures are worth a try, if they fail see above;-)
The solar energy subsidies are not at the expense of the taxpayer but at the expense of the electricity suppliers (and ultimately their customers). The electricity suppliers are obliged by law to buy the solar-generated electricity at above-market prices.
The $6/w total you calculated include the wages of the people building the cells, raw materials, investment in manufacturing facilities...
So the financial payback time can be quite different from the energy payback time, depending on which form of energy source is more labor-intensive to make. Also, the market price for solar cells seems currently inflated vs. the manufacturing price.
In Germany, a political discussion has started about cutting solar energy subsidies faster than originally planned, because the manufacturers have made a lot of progress in reducing manufacturing cost and are earning large profits - mostly at the expense of the taxpayer.
There is only 1 vendor for Windows: Microsoft. There are a ton of vendors for Linux.
That is an argument in favour of Linux, because you can find a replacement if your previously-preferred distributor goes out of business or starts screwing up horribly;-) With Windows, you have to take whatever Microsoft is offering.
With Windows, it truly is Plug-And-Play. Every piece of hardware that I've bought from Bluetooth devices to HDTV video cards to a bunch of different USB devices (GPS, storage, etc.) just works. I plug it in, install the Windows drivers that came on the CD, and I'm done. At the bare minimum for Linux, I'd have to hope there was a Linux driver, find it, install it, etc. That takes precious time which a lot of people don't have.
That was true for XP, but at the moment it seems Vista is less than perfect in this regard. There are enough reports on the web from people who failed to get their hardware running under Vista. Some even claim they have tried both Linux and Vista and got better hardware support from Linux.
The only force that can bring down Microsoft from desktop domination is a combination of Microsoft screwing up horribly AND a truly viable alternate solution being available to take advantage. The only one I can think of is Apple - another big, established publicly traded corporation.
Vista in combination with refusing further XP sales may be that collossal screwup. I have not tested Vista myself so I'm not claiming that it is, but there are enough negative reviews to suspect it. On the other hand, Linux has improved AND gained a bunch of mature applications that cover the most common tasks, Firefox and Open Office probably being the most important ones. By now, it is viable enough that several large organizations (mostly public authorities outside the US) have started to replace Windows by Linux. Finally, Apple is not automatically better than Microsoft but I'd still like to see them take a bigger share of the market. Because that would force Microsoft to compete instead of dictating terms to their customers.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
Eventually, as it always happens, there will be bug releases and new drivers for Windows Vista. Upgrading to them is as easily as doing "Windows Update." Linux (and BSD) distros will never be this easily patched due to the very nature of being open source. I only have to go to 1 web site to update my PC's - Windows Update - and it's incredibly simple - just click on Update and voila, it's done and everything works.
The same goes for Ubuntu Linux. I'm playing with it on and off (not being a serious user yet), and I found updating as easy as using Windows Update. Start the Synaptic package manager, reload the packet information and have it apply the available updates. Maybe two or three clicks more than Windows Update, but easily figured out.
And it has the advantage of covering various applications too, even third-party ones that are not part of the distribution.
Consider this other news: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/183 251 With the same reasoning, people could sue Verizon over first selling "unlimited" access and then putting a 5 GByte limit into the fine print. Now IANAL and I don't know how likely success in court would be, but Verizon may be cruising for a bruising here;-)
Not all MMO's have been PC-only (and of those, there has been piracy, PSO anyone?). Further, I'd argue that connecting to a central server with a CD key is not proof against piracy. Finally, the primary financial outlay surrounding an MMO is purchased time, not software.
I agree about the primary financial outlay, and I think games like EVE Online are doing the smart thing by allowing free download of the client, free trial period and eliminating box sales altogether.
This way, you can check if you like the game without much hassle, but if you want to stay you need a paid up account. Easy to get into, but not so easy to get around the payment.
US campaigns have seen MUCH lower and dirtier rethorics than this little film. With a bit of luck, the author will get enough publicity from it to find another job elsewhere.
After all, the customer pays for the access. If a provider sells "internet access" without making clear that they might block content on a whim, by all means whack them for fraud.
Now try to sell internet access while writing in your advertisments that it is only limited access. Good luck;-)
Of course, I'd venture that Microsoft already thought as much. If they're opening up their specs it may mean that (a) they're desperate to sell to the EU no matter what the possible consequences; (b) they're going to take whatever measures to stop the specs finding their way to free software. NDA's, liability and exorbitant licensing costs are pretty good methods, albeit not infallible. Another trick would be to offer the specs hopelessly obfuscated, but that won't work if they charge an arm and a leg for it -- those who pay want to know what they payed for.
a) seems likely, considering how many other big companies are willing to enter joint ventures to sell in China, while it is well known that those joint ventures are a way of siphoning off technical know-how. I think the parallels are rather obvious;-)
b) possible but I think the EU Commission would hit them with another fine for such tactics. Once the licensing terms are published we will be able to make a more educated guess. In the meantime, I guess that Microsoft are drawing the process out as long as possible, but will avoid open contempt for the EU Commission's decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does that mean Wine won't even be listed in the package manager?"
Not by default (have not tried Ubuntu 7.04 yet). You have to visit http://www.winehq.com/, browse to the download section and follow the directions to add the WineHQ APT Repository to your system's list of download sources.
This is not exactly what a newbie might expect, but since WINE is still "early beta" quality, I would not recommend it anyway for people who dislike tinkering with the system. As WINE gets more mature, I expect that it will be officially included into the Ubuntu distribution at some point.
There is already something similar:
The "Station Pass" of Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) that gives you access to several MMORPGs with one subscription. And yes, they have a reputation for making terrible games.
Good description of Win9x, and I'd like to add that it needed less system ressources than Windows NT. This made it a huge success in the consumer market, but at the expense of promoting the non-existant security model to the 32 bit world.
If Microsoft was always aware of the problem as you say, they must have decided to disregard it when they introduced Windows 95. Because that threw away the best chance of moving the Microsoft world to a security-aware programming paradigm. I think the switch from 16 to 32 bit would have been a good opportunity, marketing-wise, to convince people to accept the NT concept as new standard.
I think that this is, in turn, a consequence of earlier Microsoft operating systems (Windows 3.x to ME) that did not have security features worth mentioning. Unix had a clear differentiation between user and admin (root) rights since decades. Windows did not, and essentially everyone was administrator.
As a result, lots of applications got written that implicitly required admin rights, accidentially or because it was the path of least resistance for the developer. As a result of that, people got used to work as administrators all the time on the newer systems (Win NT and later) too. As a result of that, there was less pressure to clean up the applications.
Now Microsoft is trying to break that vicious circle with UAC, but it seems they are not very successful... as it is once more the path of least resistance to turn it off
I have a somewhat older Plextor (CD-Rom Plexwriter from 2003) and it is a very good drive. Later, however, they started to relabel drives they bought elsewhere and sell them for twice the price.
Today, I like to buy Samsung:
Cheap enough and so far quite reliable for me and my friends. But take it with a grain of salt because we don't have the numbers of computers to give you meaningful statistics.
Meanwhile, Lite-on seems to have figured it out. A friend of mine had a few Lite-on CD drives die in the last years. Now, he avoids anything from that company
Now that you mention it... but graphics in games have reached a quality I find quite satisfactory years ago. So that is not an icentive for me to get Vista.
True, but does it need to be this way? I think MSFT is wasting our hardware ressources with excessive bloat. Not that the Linux world is completely innocent there:
While the kernel seems to be quite efficient, KDE and GNOME are more or less on XP's level in ressource hunger.
...as in "highest bidder gets the spectrum", big telecom will get it anyway. Like when the UMTS channels were auctioned off in Germany, with the large telecom companies placing bids in the billion Euro range.
;-)
At least the treasury got a very nice boost out of it, in fact I think the companies overpaid in their fear of being cut off from an important future market
The difference is that Windows 2000 (or XP) had some real improvements over Win 98. Most importantly, support for more RAM and better stability. It had some problems with driver availability at first, but that is the only drawback I can recall.
With Vista, you get the same driver problems, less stability than before (as the predecessor is stable enough and much harder competition than Win 98 was) plus some compatibility problems. The only advantage might be the new GUI design. I say might be, because that is a matter of taste.
So I guess Vista will have a much harder time replacing XP than XP replacing 98.
If divulging confidential information is free speech now, lets start to leak
;-)
-secret government documents
-our employers' trade secrets
and I'm sure there are a lot more possibilities...
I almost hope they get through with this, just for the funny side effects
Pitbull = RIAA Lawyer
You = Defendant in court mistakenly accused by the RIAA
So the better analogy would be that the pitbull of your neighbor goes after you because he confuses you with someone who has attacked his owner (attack the owner = copyright violation).
The neighbor knows better but still does not bother to apologize or offer to pay your hospital bill. Now the question was, do you sue the neighbor for the damages you suffered?
Sure, XP is known to be cracked. Vista will probably be cracked as well (according to some Slashdot news there are already partial cracks in circulation). But downloading such cracks from a random internet site will always carry a risk of getting a trojan as well. Not really what I'm looking for
I might not agree with Microsoft about Vista being obsolete (assuming for the sake of the argument I'd use it in the first place). A similar situation is now approaching for Windows 2000. Which I'm still using and consider mostly OK. But Microsoft has already reduced support to a minimum and announced its complete end in 2010:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/server/evalu
It is not yet a problem. But what happens when Microsoft decides at some point that XP and Vista are obsolete and will no longer be supported, including activation?
I guess that legitimate customers could sue Microsoft at this point and win in court. But some of us prefer not to give them the option of refusing activation in the first place. Like GP, I don't run XP on my private PC for that reason (let alone Vista, which appears to be worse in almost every regard). As long as Windows 2000 does the job, fine. After that, it will be Linux, even if I need to dump most games as a consequence.
In the past, sticking to Windows seems to have worked for Dell. There are obvious reasons (need to support only one OS) plus maybe a very favourable volume deal by Microsoft. ;-)
But as Linux gains more market share, it is time for Dell to re-evaluate this position. Michael Dell using Ubuntu may be part of such research. If so, he is acting with more foresight than some managers I know
Patent law was designed to give the inventor temporary protection from this form of competition, in the hope that it would make pursuing invention more worthwile and thus promote technical progress. But I think that is not something the inventor has a right to. It is something society grants in the expectation of getting a return.
In combination with patents:
1) Everyone who makes the same invention independently loses. Because they cannot make a profit from their investment, which they deserve as much as the other guy who just ran to the patent office a bit faster.
2) When 1) happens, the customers lose because lack of competition means higher prices.
Now both of these problems would be tolerable with a patent office that only grants patents for significant technical improvements. Which seems not to work anymore these days thanks to sloppy reviews and ridiculously low standards for patent applications. As a result, patents are becoming a tool for sabotaging the competition rather than protecting innovation.
And if you had bothered to read all of my post, you would have noticed that I propose trying to fix the patent system first before removing it altogether.
Seems your own tinfoil hat is either blocking your eyes or restricting the blood flow to your brain....
What balance?
The patent system is supposed to promote The Public Good (tm) by encouraging innovation. It is not supposed to be a favour for "commercial interests". If it fails that purpose (and cannot be fixed as you suggest), patents should be abolished.
On an organizational level, making the USPTO pay for bad patents means the management cannot show good financial results if lots of patents get overturned in court. This does not immediately save taxpayer money, but if it causes a change towards better patent quality a lot of the current trouble would go away.
On an individual level, the examiner who issued a crap patent could have it counted against his quota in some way.
I think these measures are worth a try, if they fail see above
The solar energy subsidies are not at the expense of the taxpayer but at the expense of the electricity suppliers (and ultimately their customers).
The electricity suppliers are obliged by law to buy the solar-generated electricity at above-market prices.
The $6/w total you calculated include the wages of the people building the cells, raw materials, investment in manufacturing facilities...
So the financial payback time can be quite different from the energy payback time, depending on which form of energy source is more labor-intensive to make. Also, the market price for solar cells seems currently inflated vs. the manufacturing price.
In Germany, a political discussion has started about cutting solar energy subsidies faster than originally planned, because the manufacturers have made a lot of progress in reducing manufacturing cost and are earning large profits - mostly at the expense of the taxpayer.
With Windows, you have to take whatever Microsoft is offering.That was true for XP, but at the moment it seems Vista is less than perfect in this regard. There are enough reports on the web from people who failed to get their hardware running under Vista. Some even claim they have tried both Linux and Vista and got better hardware support from Linux.Vista in combination with refusing further XP sales may be that collossal screwup. I have not tested Vista myself so I'm not claiming that it is, but there are enough negative reviews to suspect it. On the other hand, Linux has improved AND gained a bunch of mature applications that cover the most common tasks, Firefox and Open Office probably being the most important ones. By now, it is viable enough that several large organizations (mostly public authorities outside the US) have started to replace Windows by Linux.
Finally, Apple is not automatically better than Microsoft but I'd still like to see them take a bigger share of the market. Because that would force Microsoft to compete instead of dictating terms to their customers.
The same goes for Ubuntu Linux.
I'm playing with it on and off (not being a serious user yet), and I found updating as easy as using Windows Update.
Start the Synaptic package manager, reload the packet information and have it apply the available updates. Maybe two or three clicks more than Windows Update, but easily figured out.
And it has the advantage of covering various applications too, even third-party ones that are not part of the distribution.
Consider this other news: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/183 251 ;-)
With the same reasoning, people could sue Verizon over first selling "unlimited" access and then putting a 5 GByte limit into the fine print. Now IANAL and I don't know how likely success in court would be, but Verizon may be cruising for a bruising here
I agree about the primary financial outlay, and I think games like EVE Online are doing the smart thing by allowing free download of the client, free trial period and eliminating box sales altogether.
This way, you can check if you like the game without much hassle, but if you want to stay you need a paid up account. Easy to get into, but not so easy to get around the payment.
US campaigns have seen MUCH lower and dirtier rethorics than this little film.
With a bit of luck, the author will get enough publicity from it to find another job elsewhere.
After all, the customer pays for the access. If a provider sells "internet access" without making clear that they might block content on a whim, by all means whack them for fraud.
;-)
Now try to sell internet access while writing in your advertisments that it is only limited access. Good luck
a) seems likely, considering how many other big companies are willing to enter joint ventures to sell in China, while it is well known that those joint ventures are a way of siphoning off technical know-how.
I think the parallels are rather obvious
b) possible but I think the EU Commission would hit them with another fine for such tactics. Once the licensing terms are published we will be able to make a more educated guess. In the meantime, I guess that Microsoft are drawing the process out as long as possible, but will avoid open contempt for the EU Commission's decisions.