The changes that insert some also tend to put alleged on it. The edit linked took some data that was written that could be considered putting the invasion of Iraq in a bad light and softening it up with 'somes' and 'alleged', to make it seem like less strong/credible statements.
Note also, the first edit, where the edit takes existing 'alleged' out of the picture.
Basically, the spin on the article pre-edit was things showing the invasion in a bad light were presented more like hard facts, while the elements that were put forth as justifications were relegated to mere allegations. The edit reversed the situation to make the anti-war points allegations and the supporting points factual.
The last bit of substantial edit looks like arguing in the body of the article. Nothing was removed, but what was added looked more appropriate for the Talk section rather than to end up with a paragraph that states something followed by a statement essentially declaring that paragraph to be irrelevant to the article subject.
That putting this up as a program isn't horrible so long as it is totally voluntary and glaringly obvious (though saying 'it's not spyware' in a faq answer is kind of disingenuous') However, saying you make ~$400 off of it is not a good characterization. First off, $400 is the MSRP of Vista Ultimate retail box, without upgrade. If you can participate in this program, first you'd likely be qualified for the upgrade cost. Secondly, OEM pricing is an option if not intending to 'upgrade' your current system (you'd be making a new one, fair chance). Putting all that aside, there are handfuls of ways to get Vista for 'free' or at least for less (i.e. the marketing programs that offer Vista as the free gift).
Simply, there is a good chance the user never would have possibly paid $400, and if someone actually wants Vista, there are plenty of less than blatantly obvious ways to acquire it legally without that money paid. Plus, with all the questionable press reception Vista has received, it's in Microsoft's best interest to give out the software as they can under whatever pretense they can. This way, they preserve the commercial image and pricing, but expand the market share.
Cause for concern:
Will I be able to see what data I'm sharing with you?
Unfortunately, you will not be able to look at your specific data. We designed the Windows Feedback Program software specifically to avoid any interference with your work or how your computer functions. To do that, the data you are sharing is stored in a binary format (zeros and ones) rather than in text format. Storing the data in binary format makes it very small and easy to share with us, but difficult for you to translate and interpret. Damn, stored in zeros and ones, nothing I can do, it's binary. There's no way they could let me know how to understand it. If only it were just zeros, or ones, or maybe some twos...
Only recent MS OS customers. The last copy (i.e. only one I could install somewhere legally) of Windows that existed in this household was Windows 2000 (came on a system inherited from somewhere else). But, that would mean they were trying to market and have *new* customers, that's just crazy talk, companies don't want a larger customer base, no way...
They only want to spy on current users of their software, evidently. So you can get a free copy of Windows, but only if you are already running Windows. Guess they are not out to capture non-Windows users (they probably don't even fathom that concept).
They won't send the product to you. They only send you the 'prize' after they are satisfied, after three months of monitoring on whatever you are doing.
Ok, if you are right, then concerns over Theora should not be too much. Though I might have dismissed those as revenue not as ripe as the wider internet market, at the time of those deployments a patent troll would have had no idea of the phenomenon about to occur that they would have risked missing out on, and would have almost certainly chased after AOL, for example.
On Video, I wouldn't claim H. 261 as capable nearly enough of competing with the MPEG-4 generation at low bitrates. If two video content sites provided the same content over the same bandwith, one encoding with MPEG-1 and the other with MPEG-4, the difference would be glaringly obvious in favor of the one using MPEG-4 codecs.
Now, on audio, you might be correct (Nokia even suggests MP3 as being 'close enough' to patent expiration, though probably also helped by the fact that every imaginable patent holder has come out in the age of MP3 audio players, so they are really comfortable). I haven't noticed MP3 vs. AAC vs Vorbis doing significantly better per bitrate, but I could just have horrible hearing...
Ok, WoW and Guitar Hero II are two targets that might be appealing, however, I think a patent troll might still choose to hold their hand waiting for a popular commercial music player to adopt Vorbis decoding features. Targetting a one-off game or handful of such games would severely limit the amount of reward for revealing their patent, compared to say, if Apple added Vorbis capability to an iPod at some point. Vorbis could have incorporated a patented method accidently as late as 2000 or so, theoretically (basic concept is older, but anyway). There could still enough life left on the patent that a patent troll is willing to wait just a bit longer to potentially maximize the investment.
I agree the fundamental framework certain Linux distributions provide is there for a good user experience, and commercial applications is no fault of the development community. However, on the driver front, I do think Linux developers can take some share of blame for that. If hardware vendors are uncomfortable with open source, they must maintain umpteen different driver versions to be remotely useful (i.e. every minor RedHat kernel update increments the version such that any binary drivers are hosed, Ubuntu is more conservative about the kernel versioning relative to the uname -r output). A complete lack of a stable ABI even among a given family makes things really tough on the developers.
The other option (which many companies have chosen to do) is to open source the driver. Again, though, you are still faced with the sad fact that most kernel API interfaces are so fluid that you have to help adapt the driver to those changes. I do believe one aspect of the lack of a stable ABI is somewhat intentionally antagonistic to kind of force hardware vendors to open source drivers. In the short term, it has been aggravating, but nowadays we are admittedly seeing the fruits of a lot of vendors opening up drivers because they had to.
I would call it a potentially fair assessment. My one complaint is using the word 'Linux'. Linux could mean Gentoo (definitely not new user firendly) to Linux From Scratch (and if you thought Gentoo was complex), to Ubuntu. That out of the way, if you could find someone who has not used Windows to any significant extent since before Win95 released, and sat them down at an Ubuntu 7.10 system and a XP system and asked them to do some tasks I think they'd find Ubuntu easier. At the surface, XP comparison to 7.10 is somewhat unfair, as 7.10 is about 5 years newer, but I've never touched Vista and I think most people wouldn't accuse XP of being significantly harder than Vista to use. Particularly if you consider what Microsoft is actually technically responsible for versus what third parties have done underneath.
First off, there are things that are measured by what you don't have to do. The single platform update system tracks and automatically notifies of updates for all the programs they have (if they use add/remove to find and install the applications), not just the 'operating system' components. Did Freeciv set up an auto-updater? No, but Ubuntu set one up for them. Same for a staggering number of programs. Under Windows, you'll probably have at least a half-dozen auto-updater programs running (i.e. microsoft's, apple's, steam, java updater, etc etc), but even then *not* actively track some software that could leave you in a tight spot. So ask a user to update an Ubuntu system, they get to select a single item, click check for updates, and done. Under Windows, ask to update all the software, it's painful.
Ask a user to browse a flash enabled web site. Firefox will interact with apt and download the right thing automatically, and it starts getting updated. Internet explorer, I don't know what it will do, but whatever happens, it won't add it to an updater automatically unless Adobe sets it up for themselves. Firefox under windows will prompt the user and user does merely need to click a button to install Flash, but again, no auto-update.
Ask a user to install software by role. Under Ubuntu, they'd probably have noticed the Add/Remove menu item (admittedly, it's not obvious that includes intall or even distinguishes it from adding and removing menu items, but to their defense, it seems to be an attempt to mimic Windows terminology). If the role was one of the categories on the left, they'd click it and peruse the list. Failing that, they type it into the search field on that page and up it comes. Under Windows, they may have noticed the Add/Remove programs and then go to that. They will probably poke and prod and realize it's not even remotely meaningfully a way to 'add' programs, only to remove them. Then I'd guess they'd go to the internet and google around until they found an answer, in a medium not intended to present things in a targeted fashion.
Now, ask that user to find that application and run it. Under Windows, the program list gets incredibly large (ease individual program seems to decide it needs a whole submenu item, while 99% of applications in ubuntu only get a single menu entry by default, under an appropriate category. To be fair, this may be more the fault of the third party application providers though, who somehow feel the need to have at least one (maybe more) icons to start their program, at least one icon for a readme file, and at least one icon for uninstalling).
Now, give them a USB stick and have them stick it into the system. Under XP, it might not mount and instead ask for drivers, or it might go ahead and mount. Now they have to figure out which arbitrary drive letter means 'the usb device I just inserted'. XP does segregate things, so the search would be limited to removable devices at least. Under Ubuntu though, a much friendlier name simply appears to describe what is inserted.
The thing that make Microsoft 'easier' is that they were first with something usable in the x86 space. The world in terms of both users and softwar
It's easy to see what they want for video (h264), audio (aac), but I don't know what they want for a container format, except they want DRM (container format is the component that implements DRM, I would guess, but I'm quite possibly wrong). They note that the Theora/Vorbis has not seen commercial distribution, so patent trolls have not had a reason to come out, and it scares them. Theora is patented, but On2 already said it would be no problem, but Nokia is concerned about a non-obvious company waiting for a single big player to adapt those technologies to bring a suit.
The three suggestions they give are interesting. The first is to stay out of it, making interoperability difficult, as they said, but they effectively dismiss it because look how great Flash is without being a standard (that's a good argument to actually dictate something as far as I'm concerned). The second is to use no technology newer than about two decades, ostensibly to avoid patent issues. I think Nokia is angling for this because it ultimately ends up being the same as specifying nothing, as any web content provider will be forced to not stick to the standard, as it would mean delivering poorer quality content or being incredibly costly bandwidth wise. All it takes is one or two sites to deviate, but provide a richer standard to make standards compliance mean absolutely nothing. The final suggestion they are confident would lead to H264 and AAC, and they certainly wouldn't mind that.
First off, you could make that claim about any single transaction. Let's arbitrarily say 20% of web developer money goes into accomodating IE bugs. Why do you think the web developers are *less* likely to hoard than the customers that spent that money? All you *can* say is that 20% of the money spent on web development today is pissed away not towards progress. Note that economics doesn't care much about progress, so while economically its neutral that the money is pissed away on bugs vs. spent on other things, more broadly speaking it means resources are being spent without correlating to meaningful progress. The broken window fallacy is part of every
Secondly, hoarding currency doesn't mean a black hole, one way or another, the currency (or at least the buying power it is meant to represent) will be used again. If truly hoarding for eternity, the value of the rest of the currency increases to compensate. If the currency system collapses without some savings account being exhausted, eventually the buying power that represented will be reflected in another way (maybe unfairly moved to another party, but still...). Wikipedia even contains a response to your argument, that it's either spent directly (the common explanation), or, in the case of sitting in a vault, saved for future economic investment. If 99% of money were put into a vault and nobody was borrowing, you can bet some sort of correction would occur.
I doubt Virtualization on the home desktop will come into play, I'm pretty sure TCPA wouldn't get in the way of running any application as a user, and I can't imagine how the possibility of fine-grained access control would lead to a situation where a game is suddenly denied access to what they need by default.
For virtualization, there is no benefit for a home desktop user (just a lot of overhead for the multiple OS instances). It would be hard to manage (single system image is hard enough for a lot of common users today, and measures to make it look like a single image defeats the whole point) and commercial operating systems would price it prohibitively high. Virtualization makes tons of sense in a server environment where you are trying to provide for totally distinct customers, or where you have IT staff and server applications to run and isolate for security reasons, but the usage patterns do not map to the desktop (Virtualization is used on the desktop by a small share of people, for development on multiple platforms, for using incompatible apps with their preferred OS, evaluation, and for education, but not by many and the resultant complexities of file management across the systems is frustrating).
Now, even assuming a hypothetical virtualization with video card moving capabilities, TCPA, and fine-grained access, I still don't see how administrative privileges in the OS instance of the game come into place. If trying to get the video card while another OS instance was using it, administrative privileges on the not currently entitled OS instance wouldn't help, whatever magic to be done would be done with the current video card owner. TCPA wouldn't care (maybe it would if you wanted to overwrite boot.ini, oh wait....), and fine-grained access control is presumably set to allow this by default, and if not and every application is designed to override that protection, what was the point? Exact same argument applies to the sound card, input (how did you launch the game if you hadn't already switched inputs, btw?), and processor. To the memory question, you don't even have much of a choice short of suspending/shutting down completely the other OS instances of claiming most of the physical memory (a running OS has to be resident somewhere, and if we still care about RAM's speed to run a game, it's guaranteed an OS would run horribly if almost entirely swapped to disk).
If you're argument is the ability to deny everyone else these resources once claimed, how would additional capability make the situation *worse* than the status quo? Today games don't block sound device for exclusivity generally (under Linux some still do the wrong thing), they fullscreen without taking measures to preclude others from doing that, and they take the input as it comes, which the OS should handle gracefully.
As I said, support one or two (say Ubuntu LTS and RHEL/CentOS), with a license permitting repackaging of the binaries, but not leaving the company on the hook for support. If it's truly a commercial endeavor without redistribution, forget officially catering to 100% of the linux base, and focus on select pieces that target a great share of it. The problem when people talk about 'Linux' vs. 'Windows' is that is way too vague. 'Linux' has the bad reputation of being hopelessly diverse as to not even be worth it. It's simply a detail you don't *have* to sweat. Just because 3% of your possible market runs Gentoo, doesn't mean they won't rpm2cpio your rpm and run it anyway, writing their own build script, and they won't necessarily expect support if you set the record straight up front. Even worst case scenario, by targeting two you almost completely meet the needs of 70-80% of the Linux market you'd reach otherwise, which is 70-80% higher than 0% when you refuse to take a stand. My whole point is that you offer up your yum and apt repositories, and anyone not in a supported distribution can fend for themselves. The problem with being somewhat distribution independent by packing it up as a tarball/installanywhere, is that you are being neutral by being a huge pain in the ass to every distribution. It's no harder for a Slackware box to install stuff stored in an rpm than it is for it to run the Java installer you wrap your crap in, so just pick a technology or two and the rest of the world would cope.
As to the library going out of style, OSS is a good example. ALSA at least to me *still* provides the audio interface needing by legacy apps. I can still start Quake2 commercial binary and have sound work. Though ABIs of libraries have moved on, legacy copies of the libraries and interfaces continue to coexist. Device node and syscall interfaces have been pretty stable and standard and consistantly maintained as legacy. For libraries, the distribution better make concessions, or else it's the distribution's fault for not provided adequate 'compat' packaging.
The danger of pure Application Directory strategies (ala OSX) is that there is *still* no mechanism for automated updates in a centralized fashion regardless of application vendor if the vendor hooks into something. Hence my caveat that Windows kinda fell into the trap by being somewhat AppDir oriented (but half-assing enough to have the worst of both worlds).
If it's out there, free and compilable, there almost always exists somewhere a moderately easy repository to add that contains it. If it isn't compilable, the company either publishes a repository (Adobe) or provides the Windows level installation process (InstallAnywhere applications, for example, which sucks so much in Linux simply because of the sane alternative the platform provides. One exception that comes to mind is if you try to go to Sun's web site for Linux installation instructions instead of the repository, I could see that being a painful process to follow.
If Linux were the predominant platform, you could bet it would be no worse than Windows, and probably better for companies that understand repostiories. Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, all of the above provide enough frameworks today to be better than Windows without additonal work on their end.
It's almost *certainly* either in the main repository or another repository not too hard to add. Either way, it's a matter of how things are abused/not used, rather than rather the platforms in question provide sane frameworks that can be used correctly.
The biggest pain in my opinion are the commercial companies that simply don't "get it" and use InstallAnywhere for Linux as well, or some other relatively braindead process that's more like Windows than Linux. Non-free commercial applications so far have not 'gotten it' at all (though there are so few of them), but even then, it's not really much harder than Windows. (Though try following suns instructions on installing linux for java rather than repositories, and that is rough...)
If you take the common distributions, they all have the framework (but Ubuntu may leverage it the best).
Can you tell me honestly that Windows makes installing software easy intrinsically? Let's use the plugin example...
I browse to a flash site without a plugin install. *Firefox* helpfully points me to where to install it (note, Windows did not help me and Firefox had no Microsoft provided framework to assist/hook into). Adobe provides me a binary to run and install (retrieved through firefox) that takes after itself (presumably at least registering itself with the add/remove programs, the *one* interaction with Microsoft framework related to installs. You install it, it's done, and is now fixed at that version without manual effort to keep track of bugfix/security issues, and almost entirely without any help from microsoft, and instead the applications fending for themselves in a non-standardized way. This was the way it happened to work for a Flash plugin, but installing a java run time environment is different, which is different from installing a Valve game, which is different from installing an id game, which is different from installing Pidgin, etc etc.
Now, look at ubuntu. If you don't use the OS method to install it first, you browse, and firefox *asks the apt repository* for something appropriate and has the apt framework install and package manage it. This means any updates to flash plugin are tracked, and by the single update manager that tracks the whole platform. The framework is there to do so much more and help out application providers rather than leaving them to reinvent the wheel in many different styles and frustratingly different ways.
Another point is that people are *way* too quick to judge the general usability of Linux based on too wide a sampling of distributions. Gentoo has an audience, but it's not going to be a random non-technical person (unless it's a build from a friend/relative that's set in stone or actively maintained). By the same token, commercial apps wouldn't have to support umpteen different distros, support Ubuntu LTS releases and CentOS/RHEL and the rest can sort themselves out (hey, it's better than the current situation of people trying to eek by with Wine and running completely outside the parameters planned for/supported by the software vendors).
This is actually one point I *hate* in Windows versus the current generation of Linux systems.
In windows, they have a semi-appfolder oriented design (except most apps either must or choose to dump some crap in system wide directories). As a result, they started out without anything resembling decent package management, and left it to third parties. Now you have a number of InstallAnywhere, MSI (microsoft's eventual 'standard'), Nullsoft installer, dozens of one-off installers for specific applications, and a bunch more I'm forgetting that are semi-standard). Most are moderately to severely anti-unattended and inconsistent. They have the 'add/remove' programs control panel, but largely it's relegated to just remove software, and even then some software ends up mangling the list so that different 'components' appear independently on the list, but uninstalling one breaks the uninstaller for the other, so you should have used the uninstall icon which a lot of programs put right next to running the application. It's horribly mangled and ugly and if the world wasn't so damned used to it, it becomes painfully obvious how piss-poor Windows has dealt with this.
Meanwhile, Linux was 'stuck' with the need to provide an alternative view on which pieces of software owned which binaries that were mixed in with everything else. To get out of a relatively messy situation that was undeniably there, they rolled the most sophisticated package management for a platform ever (mainly deb and rpm). With that, installs *knew* in a standardized way what other programs needed to be installed to work right, and things kind of 'just worked'. It was beautiful.
Then, recognizing the power of the package management, repository management emerged. Apt and Yum are the two prominent things. This above anything else is an *incredible* framework for software installation and, *CRITICALLY* updating. Not only does the *extremely* rich platform 'vendor' provide 99.9% of packages most common people would ever need, the architectures are pluggable so that third-parties can smoothly integrate their updates with your process. Using your flash plugin example and, say, Fedora Core. Adobe provides a yum repository. The low-level mechanics is that a file gets dumped in/etc/yum.repos.d, and from then on out, the global system update monitoring process tracks Adobe's software as well as the vendors. I don't know much about non-free software, but I do know that yum in RHEL requires authentication tokens to easily interact with RedHat servers. The framework is simple http, so I presume at the worst, https with http auth would be a viable thing for automated updates even for commercial, for-pay applications. I don't know about flashy layers over yum (I normally use ubuntu) that make yum administration painless, but I do know that Ubuntu wraps up the low-level framework in a mostly clean way. I added the wine repo by opening a terminal and copying and pasting the two lines from the wine repo install directions to the command line. It's not that hard, but a simple GUI tool could wrap even that.
Now, compare that to the MS side of things. Well, you got Microsoft update, which generally cares only about the low-level windows stuff (though I can't remember if Office would tag along for the ride or not..), which also wants to WGA the hell out of clients, but we'll put that aside from now. I install Java, and what happens, a freaking java update checker/manager starts (it can't hook into the running MS update architecture). I install quicktime, Apple's software updater starts running (same as Java). I install Half Life, suddenly Steam also needs to run to manage updates for games. I install Warcraft and Blizzards software starts checking for updates independently. Repeat for Bioware, Symantec, etc. Oh, my video driver, well, I'll have to go to a website somewhere and manually check for updates. And that *still* omits a ton of applications for which they never implemented an update management solution. I
I doubt it's well characterized as a move so much as an expansion of the CDMA equipment. Currently, they have a CDMA network to the point of having embraced EV-DO as the 3G standard they went with. Looks like UMB (the 4G equivalent of LTE) has absolutely zero takers, and that Verizon plans to deploy LTE equipment to complement their current networks. Just like while I'm in a large city, I generally can get EVDO access, but if I go 100 miles away, I only get 1x RTT connection from the tower. Meanwhile, though I haven't used it in a while, the good ol' AMPS network is still active where I am at and is guaranteed for at least two more months (despite that digital networks have been essentially ubiquitous for nearly a decode now). I would expect their CDMA network to be live for probably a decade after the first LTE technologies become available to consumers, by which point getting an LTE phone would be chump change.
Use public-private key signing rather than hashes (a hash is pretty limited, for *every* file to transfer, there must be a checksum in existence on the client side that got there through a 'secure' means. Signing means they just need to be confident they got your public key once and from then on out, your signatures can be proven/disproven on files without need for further guaranteed secure means.
About the only place I see MD5 sums used much is for large iso files, get the md5 sum from the distribution site, then grab the iso from a mirror and make sure it's ok. For apt and yum, where signatures are checked automatically, it's pretty certain they use public-private key signing.
Slashdot Mirror
The changes that insert some also tend to put alleged on it. The edit linked took some data that was written that could be considered putting the invasion of Iraq in a bad light and softening it up with 'somes' and 'alleged', to make it seem like less strong/credible statements.
Note also, the first edit, where the edit takes existing 'alleged' out of the picture.
Basically, the spin on the article pre-edit was things showing the invasion in a bad light were presented more like hard facts, while the elements that were put forth as justifications were relegated to mere allegations. The edit reversed the situation to make the anti-war points allegations and the supporting points factual.
The last bit of substantial edit looks like arguing in the body of the article. Nothing was removed, but what was added looked more appropriate for the Talk section rather than to end up with a paragraph that states something followed by a statement essentially declaring that paragraph to be irrelevant to the article subject.
That putting this up as a program isn't horrible so long as it is totally voluntary and glaringly obvious (though saying 'it's not spyware' in a faq answer is kind of disingenuous') However, saying you make ~$400 off of it is not a good characterization. First off, $400 is the MSRP of Vista Ultimate retail box, without upgrade. If you can participate in this program, first you'd likely be qualified for the upgrade cost. Secondly, OEM pricing is an option if not intending to 'upgrade' your current system (you'd be making a new one, fair chance). Putting all that aside, there are handfuls of ways to get Vista for 'free' or at least for less (i.e. the marketing programs that offer Vista as the free gift).
Simply, there is a good chance the user never would have possibly paid $400, and if someone actually wants Vista, there are plenty of less than blatantly obvious ways to acquire it legally without that money paid. Plus, with all the questionable press reception Vista has received, it's in Microsoft's best interest to give out the software as they can under whatever pretense they can. This way, they preserve the commercial image and pricing, but expand the market share.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to look at your specific data. We designed the Windows Feedback Program software specifically to avoid any interference with your work or how your computer functions. To do that, the data you are sharing is stored in a binary format (zeros and ones) rather than in text format. Storing the data in binary format makes it very small and easy to share with us, but difficult for you to translate and interpret. Damn, stored in zeros and ones, nothing I can do, it's binary. There's no way they could let me know how to understand it. If only it were just zeros, or ones, or maybe some twos...
Only recent MS OS customers. The last copy (i.e. only one I could install somewhere legally) of Windows that existed in this household was Windows 2000 (came on a system inherited from somewhere else). But, that would mean they were trying to market and have *new* customers, that's just crazy talk, companies don't want a larger customer base, no way...
They only want to spy on current users of their software, evidently. So you can get a free copy of Windows, but only if you are already running Windows. Guess they are not out to capture non-Windows users (they probably don't even fathom that concept).
They won't send the product to you. They only send you the 'prize' after they are satisfied, after three months of monitoring on whatever you are doing.
They want to monitor whatever you are currently using today, XP or Vista, and won't give the goods until after three months of watching your stuff.
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000035.shtml was my source, but it could be a bad source. I can't conveniently look at the actual ISO pdf, so I can't verify, but I'd take someone's look at implementing code over some web page.
If they are different and MPEG-1 is better than H. 261, then Nokia's suggestion is even worse than saying MPEG-1.
H 261 and MPEG-1 video codec are one in the same, FYI.
Ok, if you are right, then concerns over Theora should not be too much. Though I might have dismissed those as revenue not as ripe as the wider internet market, at the time of those deployments a patent troll would have had no idea of the phenomenon about to occur that they would have risked missing out on, and would have almost certainly chased after AOL, for example.
On Video, I wouldn't claim H. 261 as capable nearly enough of competing with the MPEG-4 generation at low bitrates. If two video content sites provided the same content over the same bandwith, one encoding with MPEG-1 and the other with MPEG-4, the difference would be glaringly obvious in favor of the one using MPEG-4 codecs.
Now, on audio, you might be correct (Nokia even suggests MP3 as being 'close enough' to patent expiration, though probably also helped by the fact that every imaginable patent holder has come out in the age of MP3 audio players, so they are really comfortable). I haven't noticed MP3 vs. AAC vs Vorbis doing significantly better per bitrate, but I could just have horrible hearing...
Ok, WoW and Guitar Hero II are two targets that might be appealing, however, I think a patent troll might still choose to hold their hand waiting for a popular commercial music player to adopt Vorbis decoding features. Targetting a one-off game or handful of such games would severely limit the amount of reward for revealing their patent, compared to say, if Apple added Vorbis capability to an iPod at some point. Vorbis could have incorporated a patented method accidently as late as 2000 or so, theoretically (basic concept is older, but anyway). There could still enough life left on the patent that a patent troll is willing to wait just a bit longer to potentially maximize the investment.
I agree the fundamental framework certain Linux distributions provide is there for a good user experience, and commercial applications is no fault of the development community. However, on the driver front, I do think Linux developers can take some share of blame for that. If hardware vendors are uncomfortable with open source, they must maintain umpteen different driver versions to be remotely useful (i.e. every minor RedHat kernel update increments the version such that any binary drivers are hosed, Ubuntu is more conservative about the kernel versioning relative to the uname -r output). A complete lack of a stable ABI even among a given family makes things really tough on the developers.
The other option (which many companies have chosen to do) is to open source the driver. Again, though, you are still faced with the sad fact that most kernel API interfaces are so fluid that you have to help adapt the driver to those changes. I do believe one aspect of the lack of a stable ABI is somewhat intentionally antagonistic to kind of force hardware vendors to open source drivers. In the short term, it has been aggravating, but nowadays we are admittedly seeing the fruits of a lot of vendors opening up drivers because they had to.
I would call it a potentially fair assessment. My one complaint is using the word 'Linux'. Linux could mean Gentoo (definitely not new user firendly) to Linux From Scratch (and if you thought Gentoo was complex), to Ubuntu. That out of the way, if you could find someone who has not used Windows to any significant extent since before Win95 released, and sat them down at an Ubuntu 7.10 system and a XP system and asked them to do some tasks I think they'd find Ubuntu easier. At the surface, XP comparison to 7.10 is somewhat unfair, as 7.10 is about 5 years newer, but I've never touched Vista and I think most people wouldn't accuse XP of being significantly harder than Vista to use. Particularly if you consider what Microsoft is actually technically responsible for versus what third parties have done underneath.
First off, there are things that are measured by what you don't have to do. The single platform update system tracks and automatically notifies of updates for all the programs they have (if they use add/remove to find and install the applications), not just the 'operating system' components. Did Freeciv set up an auto-updater? No, but Ubuntu set one up for them. Same for a staggering number of programs. Under Windows, you'll probably have at least a half-dozen auto-updater programs running (i.e. microsoft's, apple's, steam, java updater, etc etc), but even then *not* actively track some software that could leave you in a tight spot. So ask a user to update an Ubuntu system, they get to select a single item, click check for updates, and done. Under Windows, ask to update all the software, it's painful.
Ask a user to browse a flash enabled web site. Firefox will interact with apt and download the right thing automatically, and it starts getting updated. Internet explorer, I don't know what it will do, but whatever happens, it won't add it to an updater automatically unless Adobe sets it up for themselves. Firefox under windows will prompt the user and user does merely need to click a button to install Flash, but again, no auto-update.
Ask a user to install software by role. Under Ubuntu, they'd probably have noticed the Add/Remove menu item (admittedly, it's not obvious that includes intall or even distinguishes it from adding and removing menu items, but to their defense, it seems to be an attempt to mimic Windows terminology). If the role was one of the categories on the left, they'd click it and peruse the list. Failing that, they type it into the search field on that page and up it comes. Under Windows, they may have noticed the Add/Remove programs and then go to that. They will probably poke and prod and realize it's not even remotely meaningfully a way to 'add' programs, only to remove them. Then I'd guess they'd go to the internet and google around until they found an answer, in a medium not intended to present things in a targeted fashion.
Now, ask that user to find that application and run it. Under Windows, the program list gets incredibly large (ease individual program seems to decide it needs a whole submenu item, while 99% of applications in ubuntu only get a single menu entry by default, under an appropriate category. To be fair, this may be more the fault of the third party application providers though, who somehow feel the need to have at least one (maybe more) icons to start their program, at least one icon for a readme file, and at least one icon for uninstalling).
Now, give them a USB stick and have them stick it into the system. Under XP, it might not mount and instead ask for drivers, or it might go ahead and mount. Now they have to figure out which arbitrary drive letter means 'the usb device I just inserted'. XP does segregate things, so the search would be limited to removable devices at least. Under Ubuntu though, a much friendlier name simply appears to describe what is inserted.
The thing that make Microsoft 'easier' is that they were first with something usable in the x86 space. The world in terms of both users and softwar
It's easy to see what they want for video (h264), audio (aac), but I don't know what they want for a container format, except they want DRM (container format is the component that implements DRM, I would guess, but I'm quite possibly wrong). They note that the Theora/Vorbis has not seen commercial distribution, so patent trolls have not had a reason to come out, and it scares them. Theora is patented, but On2 already said it would be no problem, but Nokia is concerned about a non-obvious company waiting for a single big player to adapt those technologies to bring a suit.
The three suggestions they give are interesting. The first is to stay out of it, making interoperability difficult, as they said, but they effectively dismiss it because look how great Flash is without being a standard (that's a good argument to actually dictate something as far as I'm concerned). The second is to use no technology newer than about two decades, ostensibly to avoid patent issues. I think Nokia is angling for this because it ultimately ends up being the same as specifying nothing, as any web content provider will be forced to not stick to the standard, as it would mean delivering poorer quality content or being incredibly costly bandwidth wise. All it takes is one or two sites to deviate, but provide a richer standard to make standards compliance mean absolutely nothing. The final suggestion they are confident would lead to H264 and AAC, and they certainly wouldn't mind that.
First off, you could make that claim about any single transaction. Let's arbitrarily say 20% of web developer money goes into accomodating IE bugs. Why do you think the web developers are *less* likely to hoard than the customers that spent that money? All you *can* say is that 20% of the money spent on web development today is pissed away not towards progress. Note that economics doesn't care much about progress, so while economically its neutral that the money is pissed away on bugs vs. spent on other things, more broadly speaking it means resources are being spent without correlating to meaningful progress. The broken window fallacy is part of every
Secondly, hoarding currency doesn't mean a black hole, one way or another, the currency (or at least the buying power it is meant to represent) will be used again. If truly hoarding for eternity, the value of the rest of the currency increases to compensate. If the currency system collapses without some savings account being exhausted, eventually the buying power that represented will be reflected in another way (maybe unfairly moved to another party, but still...). Wikipedia even contains a response to your argument, that it's either spent directly (the common explanation), or, in the case of sitting in a vault, saved for future economic investment. If 99% of money were put into a vault and nobody was borrowing, you can bet some sort of correction would occur.
I doubt Virtualization on the home desktop will come into play, I'm pretty sure TCPA wouldn't get in the way of running any application as a user, and I can't imagine how the possibility of fine-grained access control would lead to a situation where a game is suddenly denied access to what they need by default.
For virtualization, there is no benefit for a home desktop user (just a lot of overhead for the multiple OS instances). It would be hard to manage (single system image is hard enough for a lot of common users today, and measures to make it look like a single image defeats the whole point) and commercial operating systems would price it prohibitively high. Virtualization makes tons of sense in a server environment where you are trying to provide for totally distinct customers, or where you have IT staff and server applications to run and isolate for security reasons, but the usage patterns do not map to the desktop (Virtualization is used on the desktop by a small share of people, for development on multiple platforms, for using incompatible apps with their preferred OS, evaluation, and for education, but not by many and the resultant complexities of file management across the systems is frustrating).
Now, even assuming a hypothetical virtualization with video card moving capabilities, TCPA, and fine-grained access, I still don't see how administrative privileges in the OS instance of the game come into place. If trying to get the video card while another OS instance was using it, administrative privileges on the not currently entitled OS instance wouldn't help, whatever magic to be done would be done with the current video card owner. TCPA wouldn't care (maybe it would if you wanted to overwrite boot.ini, oh wait....), and fine-grained access control is presumably set to allow this by default, and if not and every application is designed to override that protection, what was the point? Exact same argument applies to the sound card, input (how did you launch the game if you hadn't already switched inputs, btw?), and processor. To the memory question, you don't even have much of a choice short of suspending/shutting down completely the other OS instances of claiming most of the physical memory (a running OS has to be resident somewhere, and if we still care about RAM's speed to run a game, it's guaranteed an OS would run horribly if almost entirely swapped to disk).
If you're argument is the ability to deny everyone else these resources once claimed, how would additional capability make the situation *worse* than the status quo? Today games don't block sound device for exclusivity generally (under Linux some still do the wrong thing), they fullscreen without taking measures to preclude others from doing that, and they take the input as it comes, which the OS should handle gracefully.
As I said, support one or two (say Ubuntu LTS and RHEL/CentOS), with a license permitting repackaging of the binaries, but not leaving the company on the hook for support. If it's truly a commercial endeavor without redistribution, forget officially catering to 100% of the linux base, and focus on select pieces that target a great share of it. The problem when people talk about 'Linux' vs. 'Windows' is that is way too vague. 'Linux' has the bad reputation of being hopelessly diverse as to not even be worth it. It's simply a detail you don't *have* to sweat. Just because 3% of your possible market runs Gentoo, doesn't mean they won't rpm2cpio your rpm and run it anyway, writing their own build script, and they won't necessarily expect support if you set the record straight up front. Even worst case scenario, by targeting two you almost completely meet the needs of 70-80% of the Linux market you'd reach otherwise, which is 70-80% higher than 0% when you refuse to take a stand. My whole point is that you offer up your yum and apt repositories, and anyone not in a supported distribution can fend for themselves. The problem with being somewhat distribution independent by packing it up as a tarball/installanywhere, is that you are being neutral by being a huge pain in the ass to every distribution. It's no harder for a Slackware box to install stuff stored in an rpm than it is for it to run the Java installer you wrap your crap in, so just pick a technology or two and the rest of the world would cope.
As to the library going out of style, OSS is a good example. ALSA at least to me *still* provides the audio interface needing by legacy apps. I can still start Quake2 commercial binary and have sound work. Though ABIs of libraries have moved on, legacy copies of the libraries and interfaces continue to coexist. Device node and syscall interfaces have been pretty stable and standard and consistantly maintained as legacy. For libraries, the distribution better make concessions, or else it's the distribution's fault for not provided adequate 'compat' packaging.
The danger of pure Application Directory strategies (ala OSX) is that there is *still* no mechanism for automated updates in a centralized fashion regardless of application vendor if the vendor hooks into something. Hence my caveat that Windows kinda fell into the trap by being somewhat AppDir oriented (but half-assing enough to have the worst of both worlds).
If it's out there, free and compilable, there almost always exists somewhere a moderately easy repository to add that contains it. If it isn't compilable, the company either publishes a repository (Adobe) or provides the Windows level installation process (InstallAnywhere applications, for example, which sucks so much in Linux simply because of the sane alternative the platform provides. One exception that comes to mind is if you try to go to Sun's web site for Linux installation instructions instead of the repository, I could see that being a painful process to follow.
If Linux were the predominant platform, you could bet it would be no worse than Windows, and probably better for companies that understand repostiories. Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, all of the above provide enough frameworks today to be better than Windows without additonal work on their end.
It's almost *certainly* either in the main repository or another repository not too hard to add. Either way, it's a matter of how things are abused/not used, rather than rather the platforms in question provide sane frameworks that can be used correctly.
The biggest pain in my opinion are the commercial companies that simply don't "get it" and use InstallAnywhere for Linux as well, or some other relatively braindead process that's more like Windows than Linux. Non-free commercial applications so far have not 'gotten it' at all (though there are so few of them), but even then, it's not really much harder than Windows. (Though try following suns instructions on installing linux for java rather than repositories, and that is rough...)
If you take the common distributions, they all have the framework (but Ubuntu may leverage it the best).
Can you tell me honestly that Windows makes installing software easy intrinsically? Let's use the plugin example...
I browse to a flash site without a plugin install. *Firefox* helpfully points me to where to install it (note, Windows did not help me and Firefox had no Microsoft provided framework to assist/hook into). Adobe provides me a binary to run and install (retrieved through firefox) that takes after itself (presumably at least registering itself with the add/remove programs, the *one* interaction with Microsoft framework related to installs. You install it, it's done, and is now fixed at that version without manual effort to keep track of bugfix/security issues, and almost entirely without any help from microsoft, and instead the applications fending for themselves in a non-standardized way. This was the way it happened to work for a Flash plugin, but installing a java run time environment is different, which is different from installing a Valve game, which is different from installing an id game, which is different from installing Pidgin, etc etc.
Now, look at ubuntu. If you don't use the OS method to install it first, you browse, and firefox *asks the apt repository* for something appropriate and has the apt framework install and package manage it. This means any updates to flash plugin are tracked, and by the single update manager that tracks the whole platform. The framework is there to do so much more and help out application providers rather than leaving them to reinvent the wheel in many different styles and frustratingly different ways.
Another point is that people are *way* too quick to judge the general usability of Linux based on too wide a sampling of distributions. Gentoo has an audience, but it's not going to be a random non-technical person (unless it's a build from a friend/relative that's set in stone or actively maintained). By the same token, commercial apps wouldn't have to support umpteen different distros, support Ubuntu LTS releases and CentOS/RHEL and the rest can sort themselves out (hey, it's better than the current situation of people trying to eek by with Wine and running completely outside the parameters planned for/supported by the software vendors).
This is actually one point I *hate* in Windows versus the current generation of Linux systems.
/etc/yum.repos.d, and from then on out, the global system update monitoring process tracks Adobe's software as well as the vendors. I don't know much about non-free software, but I do know that yum in RHEL requires authentication tokens to easily interact with RedHat servers. The framework is simple http, so I presume at the worst, https with http auth would be a viable thing for automated updates even for commercial, for-pay applications. I don't know about flashy layers over yum (I normally use ubuntu) that make yum administration painless, but I do know that Ubuntu wraps up the low-level framework in a mostly clean way. I added the wine repo by opening a terminal and copying and pasting the two lines from the wine repo install directions to the command line. It's not that hard, but a simple GUI tool could wrap even that.
In windows, they have a semi-appfolder oriented design (except most apps either must or choose to dump some crap in system wide directories). As a result, they started out without anything resembling decent package management, and left it to third parties. Now you have a number of InstallAnywhere, MSI (microsoft's eventual 'standard'), Nullsoft installer, dozens of one-off installers for specific applications, and a bunch more I'm forgetting that are semi-standard). Most are moderately to severely anti-unattended and inconsistent. They have the 'add/remove' programs control panel, but largely it's relegated to just remove software, and even then some software ends up mangling the list so that different 'components' appear independently on the list, but uninstalling one breaks the uninstaller for the other, so you should have used the uninstall icon which a lot of programs put right next to running the application. It's horribly mangled and ugly and if the world wasn't so damned used to it, it becomes painfully obvious how piss-poor Windows has dealt with this.
Meanwhile, Linux was 'stuck' with the need to provide an alternative view on which pieces of software owned which binaries that were mixed in with everything else. To get out of a relatively messy situation that was undeniably there, they rolled the most sophisticated package management for a platform ever (mainly deb and rpm). With that, installs *knew* in a standardized way what other programs needed to be installed to work right, and things kind of 'just worked'. It was beautiful.
Then, recognizing the power of the package management, repository management emerged. Apt and Yum are the two prominent things. This above anything else is an *incredible* framework for software installation and, *CRITICALLY* updating. Not only does the *extremely* rich platform 'vendor' provide 99.9% of packages most common people would ever need, the architectures are pluggable so that third-parties can smoothly integrate their updates with your process. Using your flash plugin example and, say, Fedora Core. Adobe provides a yum repository. The low-level mechanics is that a file gets dumped in
Now, compare that to the MS side of things. Well, you got Microsoft update, which generally cares only about the low-level windows stuff (though I can't remember if Office would tag along for the ride or not..), which also wants to WGA the hell out of clients, but we'll put that aside from now. I install Java, and what happens, a freaking java update checker/manager starts (it can't hook into the running MS update architecture). I install quicktime, Apple's software updater starts running (same as Java). I install Half Life, suddenly Steam also needs to run to manage updates for games. I install Warcraft and Blizzards software starts checking for updates independently. Repeat for Bioware, Symantec, etc. Oh, my video driver, well, I'll have to go to a website somewhere and manually check for updates. And that *still* omits a ton of applications for which they never implemented an update management solution. I
I doubt it's well characterized as a move so much as an expansion of the CDMA equipment. Currently, they have a CDMA network to the point of having embraced EV-DO as the 3G standard they went with. Looks like UMB (the 4G equivalent of LTE) has absolutely zero takers, and that Verizon plans to deploy LTE equipment to complement their current networks. Just like while I'm in a large city, I generally can get EVDO access, but if I go 100 miles away, I only get 1x RTT connection from the tower. Meanwhile, though I haven't used it in a while, the good ol' AMPS network is still active where I am at and is guaranteed for at least two more months (despite that digital networks have been essentially ubiquitous for nearly a decode now). I would expect their CDMA network to be live for probably a decade after the first LTE technologies become available to consumers, by which point getting an LTE phone would be chump change.
http://www.rcrnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071201/SUB/71201021/1002 The story linked from the summary mentions Verizon endorsing LTE (GSM's next-gen stuff). No one's embracing UMB (the CDMA equivalent).
Use public-private key signing rather than hashes (a hash is pretty limited, for *every* file to transfer, there must be a checksum in existence on the client side that got there through a 'secure' means. Signing means they just need to be confident they got your public key once and from then on out, your signatures can be proven/disproven on files without need for further guaranteed secure means.
About the only place I see MD5 sums used much is for large iso files, get the md5 sum from the distribution site, then grab the iso from a mirror and make sure it's ok. For apt and yum, where signatures are checked automatically, it's pretty certain they use public-private key signing.