MS is just attempting to confuse and dilute the term Open Source.
Microsoft calls it "Shared Source" with a completely different license, not the GPL, and somehow they're trying to confuse and dilute another term called "Open Source?" What's so confusing about it? Couldn't be any more confusing than GPL, LGPL, CPL, XPL, BSD, etc.
Seems rather silly. Especially since Microsoft has been sharing their Windows source with universities for years. In fact, it was a Linux machine at a company called Mainsoft that got hacked which resulted in that Windows source leak. But you didn't see that reported here.
I find it interesting that Windows is so widely deployed, yet so few people are truly "in love" with the operating system. You'll find people willing to die for Mac OSX, for OpenBSD, for BeOS, for Amiga, for Gentoo, or for any number of other systems -- but to date, I've never met a single person that was truly satisfied with Windows, much less happy or fanatical about it.
That's because DORKS use OS X, OpenBSD, BeOS, Amiga, Gentoo, and actually LOVE their operating systems.
The majority of the world is not made of computer geeks who treat their operating systems like religions and lovers, and the majority of the world also uses Windows. Therefore, the majority of Windows users don't jerk off to which operating system they're using.
Sorry, pal, we're a geek niche. Slashdot doesn't represent majority opinion. It's just us.
You've got to be kidding me--you're directing me to Al Franken as an unbiased source of FoxNews criticism? The guy still thinks Bill O'Reilly didn't grow up in Levittown, to the point that O'Reilly went so far as displaying the actual scanned legal deed on his show. Franken's only response is that his book is "satire." Kind of the Michael Moore way of shaking the facts, pretending they're truth, then calling them satire when called on it.
Al Franken is a host on the liberal radio network Air America. You know, that network that's doing so poorly that Al Franken is currently working for no salary...
I'm always given some biased link and then told to "start there." I guess the burden of proof is being shoved off onto me. Which means I won the debate.
P.S. Before I get accused of being "right-wing," I hate the very idea of two major political parties and voted for Nader in 2000 (like Michael Moore did, *shudder*). But I've never seen so much personal vitriol and outright truth distortion as I have from the left-wingers in this election year. It's like they take it personally and are desperate to win the election, and the ends justify the means. If you put liberal policy to a popular vote, it would lose--that's why they have to go through judges, lawyers, and lawsuits to force people into begrudgingly following their views. That's crap. Look how many times an hour Comedy Central runs Michael Moore's film ads as compared to any other channel.
Where's the outcry over CBSNews.com having a stake in Clinton's book sales via Amazon? Real unbiased news channel, there. If FoxNews did that for a pro-Bush book, liberal media would be all over it for bias.
I'm sure I'll get unbiased commentary from "o-reilly-sucks.com." How dare I trust UCLA/Stanford.
I've been to this website before. The thing that immediately struck me was that when I went to the guestbook, the admin was posting endless Democratic party articles. I remember one of them because it's headline was (I kid you not) "Democrats Want To Help Mankind," and it was about how great Democrat polices are and how the evil Republicans are all about keeping them down.
Basically your only evidence is to link to a decidedly biased Democratic party website. Wow. I'm convinced. I love that a lot of those links go to the same liberal websites repeatedly like fair.org and some known left-leaning newspapers. Ha, even towards the end, it just starts linking to oreilly-sucks.com again! Classic. I love how CNN is magically supposed to have "20% more viewers." I guess Nielsen ratings are wrong. I even saw one link that went to some guy's personal Angelfire page! Wow. This is really convincing me.
Again, I have yet to hear you cite a single example of what EXACTLY makes FoxNews biased. No falsely reported story, no viewpoint held above another. Hell, according to this, FoxNews.com is biased toward liberals! I guess you just don't like that they--gasp--run an American flag graphic in their logo. Seeing as how they're an American news channel and all.
I definitely need more than this, but I won't hold my breath--it's clear where your partyline lies. Political parties are like organized religions, each with their messengers, proof, holy books, and evil enemies. Apparently, because FoxNews dares to air conservative viewpoints along with its liberal viewpoints, it's on the Democratic hitlist. Too bad--this isn't CNN where the only time someone's political views are named is if they're "conservative."
Unchecking all those options in Firefox is the first thing I do when I download a new version. I don't want status bars to disappear, or have their text changed, or windows resized, or anything else. My windowing system controls my windows, thank you, not some website.
Someone doesn't have an "MTV attention span" just because they didn't like some cartoon that a bunch of American fanboys spew their load all over whenever it's mentioned.
You're using the same argument used to defend the absolutely shitty Matrix sequels--"It's supposed to be overly philosophical and have these boring things happen because they intended it that way!" Just because it was intended doesn't make it not suck in the end.
If you're really so knowledgable about "serious anime," you'd know that Ghost In The Shell isn't really like most anime at all, and is only as popular as it is in the States, as opposed to in Japan where it's relatively obscure.
To sum up--pull your head out of your ass. Yes, there are people who find Ghost In The Shell fucking boring. That doesn't make them MTV sheep or less appreciative of intelligent movies. It just means they don't like these cartoons you like so much.
...or is Ghost In The Shell the most boring animation ever? I do not get the fanboy worship for this. I am not a hardcore anime guy and had way more fun watching the two Vampire Hunter Ds. Ghost In The Shell bored me to tears.
For the record, I have seen the subtitled camrip of Ghost In The Shell 2...it's more of the same with better animation (lots of your typical CG ships).
Great strides have been made in the area of level editing for Doom 1/2. Thanks to Doom Builder, you can now edit your levels in Windows and see them in real-time 3D before you even fire up Doom. And with the scripting capabilities of Doom Legacy, ZDoom, and more, you can pretty much do a lot of crazy shit with Doom.
So go make a kick-ass old school Doom wad to pass the time before Doom 3 comes out.
...the real difference is how well the video cards support shaders in their hardware. It's pretty much assured that Direct3D shaders are the best supported by the new cards--not OpenGL.
I think id Software is the last major game company I know of still using OpenGL. Everyone else has moved on (and surpassed them engine-wise...you won't be seeing infinite drawing distance outdoor worlds in Doom 3 any time soon like you already do in Far Cry. Hell, Far Cry's indoor areas pretty much look exactly like Doom 3).
And those, my friend, are called fighting the symptoms without curing the disease.
You're right. User-run executable attachments are part of some great disease of system design. It's all Microsoft's fault when people don't patch their systems, and two months later an exploit makes the rounds.
Let's continue using this 1998-era "funny" bash of Microsoft. It means you're clever and intelligent!
"Damn M$. I hate Micro$loth products." Witness the mental fury of these high school/college dorm room Linux zealots. Meanwhile, outside the little niche of the Slashdot forum, the rest of the world doesn't know or care about something called "M$," "RIAA," or even "Linux."
Wow, your opinion is bolstered by the fact you used the term "M$." No company is ever out to make money other than Microsoft! Sorry, "Micro$loth."
The time/money involved in training the staff to adopt to linux is better than sinking huge amounts into fighting viruses and frequent shutdowns.
It's called firewall or antivirus software. What "frequent shutdowns?"
Microsoft may not like some servers switching to Linux, but they're not exactly worried about it. Windows XP is doing extremely well, and their marketshare is intact (despite such "formidable" competitors like XFree86). With.NET, they've shown the kind of forward-thinking that OSS lacks--who is still busy reimplenting more UNIX stuff from the last two decades melded with a Windows 98 interface-a-like. Apple got it right when it comes to UNIX GUIs.
All it takes is someone to exploit any of the kinds of exploits and flaws listed at Linux Security. What's that? You actually believed Linux was magically secure from everything just because it has things like permissions? Give me a fucking break. That website lists all the weekly security flaws Slashdot never, ever reports on which would be taken up by every random script and e-mail attachment out there.
There is a myriad of ways of getting into a Linux system like that, and you better believe people would find them out if Linux ever got more than 1% usage based on Google Zeitgeist (in comparison, OS X has 5%). Consider a wide user base to be one big beta test. In that sense, it's not surprising Windows holes have been found and subsequently patched. You might even make the argument that because Windows has been so much more aggressively tested, it might be less of a risk than if Linux suddenly had that market share overnight.
If Linux is this golden child of security, how is it GNU, GNOME, Debian, Gentoo, Savannah, and more were all hacked last year in the span of six months? Oh, I forgot, we've swept all that under the rug around here.
Hell, you think that kernel exploit that got patched a week ago wouldn't already be making the rounds right now? Normal users wouldn't be upgrading their "kernel" like Linux geeks do. Look at how many people already don't run Automatic Updates under XP.
You have illustrated a point I often make (and get modded down for). For all the "forward thinking" that Linux users are supposed to be doing, and all the progress they're supposed to be making, the truth is that the OSS community avoids change and is very stubborn.
When KDE and GNOME came out, it was nice at first to have a couple of cute desktop emulators hacked on top of X, but I always thought by now someone would have replaced XFree86 with something modern and hardware-accelerated, and we would have moved on. But we're still using KDE and GNOME.
Endless hierarchies of folder structures are prevalent everywhere. We're just supposed to accept things like "/usr/local/lib/blah/blah.something" for some random file. If it was on Windows, someone would be complaining about how Windows "hides" things in convoluted folder nests. On Linux, it's just accepted because some random geeks got together and deemed it a "Linux Filesystem Standard" for files to be scattered every which way across a filesystem made up of thousands of directories.
Linux and its desktop attempts are hindered by the huge cross-section of anti-social geeks who have latched onto UNIX as their mentality for being "elite." It's holding back progress. You're absolutely right, OS X had the right idea, but don't expect anything to change in this community. Many of us have been saying this since the late 90s. Developers don't listen ("code it yourself!"), and Slashdotters bitch at you ("don't criticize a volunteer effort!").
Windows is still based on an almost 15 year old code base.
No, it's not. That's like saying Linux is based on an almost 15 year old code base (1991 is just 13 years ago...).
Its time to rewrite it from the ground up. Screw the backwards compatibility. Move on.
They already did. It's called Windows NT and was a complete rewrite based on parts of VMS (the same guy who worked on VMS even became NT's lead).
With Windows XP, they finally completely replaced the DOS-based kernel and merged off of NT. Everything is using that unified codebase now.
You know, it's really shocking how little Slashdotters seem to know about these things. Back in the day, it seems like Slashdot was so much better at actually reporting tech knowledge, but now it's about posting the most scathing and trollish articles in order to get reactionary page hits in order to run their ads. Few people consider that this website is corporate-owned now. This place is the Ain't-It-Cool-News of the tech sector.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is just attempting to confuse and dilute the term Open Source.
Microsoft calls it "Shared Source" with a completely different license, not the GPL, and somehow they're trying to confuse and dilute another term called "Open Source?" What's so confusing about it? Couldn't be any more confusing than GPL, LGPL, CPL, XPL, BSD, etc.
Seems rather silly. Especially since Microsoft has been sharing their Windows source with universities for years. In fact, it was a Linux machine at a company called Mainsoft that got hacked which resulted in that Windows source leak. But you didn't see that reported here.
...both were already reported on Slashdot in the past. Doesn't seem so incredible now when an editor dupes a post, does it?
I find it interesting that Windows is so widely deployed, yet so few people are truly "in love" with the operating system. You'll find people willing to die for Mac OSX, for OpenBSD, for BeOS, for Amiga, for Gentoo, or for any number of other systems -- but to date, I've never met a single person that was truly satisfied with Windows, much less happy or fanatical about it.
That's because DORKS use OS X, OpenBSD, BeOS, Amiga, Gentoo, and actually LOVE their operating systems.
The majority of the world is not made of computer geeks who treat their operating systems like religions and lovers, and the majority of the world also uses Windows. Therefore, the majority of Windows users don't jerk off to which operating system they're using.
Sorry, pal, we're a geek niche. Slashdot doesn't represent majority opinion. It's just us.
Part of the reason for the open source GPL was to get more developers, too.
But for Microsoft, you're right, it's devious.
Name an instance of IIS being automatically exploited. I'll cite you two Apache holes in return.
Nothing is 100% secure. Let's be mature and rational, people.
Sounds like you're confusing their hard news with their evening news commentary shows (i.e., O'Reilly). Those are like op-ed pieces in the newspaper.
You've got to be kidding me--you're directing me to Al Franken as an unbiased source of FoxNews criticism? The guy still thinks Bill O'Reilly didn't grow up in Levittown, to the point that O'Reilly went so far as displaying the actual scanned legal deed on his show. Franken's only response is that his book is "satire." Kind of the Michael Moore way of shaking the facts, pretending they're truth, then calling them satire when called on it.
Al Franken is a host on the liberal radio network Air America. You know, that network that's doing so poorly that Al Franken is currently working for no salary...
I'm always given some biased link and then told to "start there." I guess the burden of proof is being shoved off onto me. Which means I won the debate.
P.S. Before I get accused of being "right-wing," I hate the very idea of two major political parties and voted for Nader in 2000 (like Michael Moore did, *shudder*). But I've never seen so much personal vitriol and outright truth distortion as I have from the left-wingers in this election year. It's like they take it personally and are desperate to win the election, and the ends justify the means. If you put liberal policy to a popular vote, it would lose--that's why they have to go through judges, lawyers, and lawsuits to force people into begrudgingly following their views. That's crap. Look how many times an hour Comedy Central runs Michael Moore's film ads as compared to any other channel.
Where's the outcry over CBSNews.com having a stake in Clinton's book sales via Amazon? Real unbiased news channel, there. If FoxNews did that for a pro-Bush book, liberal media would be all over it for bias.
I'm sure I'll get unbiased commentary from "o-reilly-sucks.com." How dare I trust UCLA/Stanford.
I've been to this website before. The thing that immediately struck me was that when I went to the guestbook, the admin was posting endless Democratic party articles. I remember one of them because it's headline was (I kid you not) "Democrats Want To Help Mankind," and it was about how great Democrat polices are and how the evil Republicans are all about keeping them down.
Basically your only evidence is to link to a decidedly biased Democratic party website. Wow. I'm convinced. I love that a lot of those links go to the same liberal websites repeatedly like fair.org and some known left-leaning newspapers. Ha, even towards the end, it just starts linking to oreilly-sucks.com again! Classic. I love how CNN is magically supposed to have "20% more viewers." I guess Nielsen ratings are wrong. I even saw one link that went to some guy's personal Angelfire page! Wow. This is really convincing me.
Again, I have yet to hear you cite a single example of what EXACTLY makes FoxNews biased. No falsely reported story, no viewpoint held above another. Hell, according to this, FoxNews.com is biased toward liberals! I guess you just don't like that they--gasp--run an American flag graphic in their logo. Seeing as how they're an American news channel and all.
I definitely need more than this, but I won't hold my breath--it's clear where your partyline lies. Political parties are like organized religions, each with their messengers, proof, holy books, and evil enemies. Apparently, because FoxNews dares to air conservative viewpoints along with its liberal viewpoints, it's on the Democratic hitlist. Too bad--this isn't CNN where the only time someone's political views are named is if they're "conservative."
I always find it amusing that liberals accuse FoxNews of being biased, yet never, ever cite an example in those claims.
Then, a study comes out showing it's centrist, and suddenly that's biased too. I doubt there will be examples cited in those claims, either.
Apparently, anything that disagrees with your stubborn opinion is just plain biased. Right?
This is completely off-topic. It's just a sig.
Unchecking all those options in Firefox is the first thing I do when I download a new version. I don't want status bars to disappear, or have their text changed, or windows resized, or anything else. My windowing system controls my windows, thank you, not some website.
Someone doesn't have an "MTV attention span" just because they didn't like some cartoon that a bunch of American fanboys spew their load all over whenever it's mentioned.
You're using the same argument used to defend the absolutely shitty Matrix sequels--"It's supposed to be overly philosophical and have these boring things happen because they intended it that way!" Just because it was intended doesn't make it not suck in the end.
If you're really so knowledgable about "serious anime," you'd know that Ghost In The Shell isn't really like most anime at all, and is only as popular as it is in the States, as opposed to in Japan where it's relatively obscure.
To sum up--pull your head out of your ass. Yes, there are people who find Ghost In The Shell fucking boring. That doesn't make them MTV sheep or less appreciative of intelligent movies. It just means they don't like these cartoons you like so much.
...or is Ghost In The Shell the most boring animation ever? I do not get the fanboy worship for this. I am not a hardcore anime guy and had way more fun watching the two Vampire Hunter Ds. Ghost In The Shell bored me to tears.
For the record, I have seen the subtitled camrip of Ghost In The Shell 2...it's more of the same with better animation (lots of your typical CG ships).
Great strides have been made in the area of level editing for Doom 1/2. Thanks to Doom Builder, you can now edit your levels in Windows and see them in real-time 3D before you even fire up Doom. And with the scripting capabilities of Doom Legacy, ZDoom, and more, you can pretty much do a lot of crazy shit with Doom.
So go make a kick-ass old school Doom wad to pass the time before Doom 3 comes out.
...the real difference is how well the video cards support shaders in their hardware. It's pretty much assured that Direct3D shaders are the best supported by the new cards--not OpenGL.
I think id Software is the last major game company I know of still using OpenGL. Everyone else has moved on (and surpassed them engine-wise...you won't be seeing infinite drawing distance outdoor worlds in Doom 3 any time soon like you already do in Far Cry. Hell, Far Cry's indoor areas pretty much look exactly like Doom 3).
Romero worked on Quake.
And those, my friend, are called fighting the symptoms without curing the disease.
You're right. User-run executable attachments are part of some great disease of system design. It's all Microsoft's fault when people don't patch their systems, and two months later an exploit makes the rounds.
It's all their fault (repeat over and over).
Let's continue using this 1998-era "funny" bash of Microsoft. It means you're clever and intelligent!
"Damn M$. I hate Micro$loth products." Witness the mental fury of these high school/college dorm room Linux zealots. Meanwhile, outside the little niche of the Slashdot forum, the rest of the world doesn't know or care about something called "M$," "RIAA," or even "Linux."
Wow, your opinion is bolstered by the fact you used the term "M$." No company is ever out to make money other than Microsoft! Sorry, "Micro$loth."
.NET, they've shown the kind of forward-thinking that OSS lacks--who is still busy reimplenting more UNIX stuff from the last two decades melded with a Windows 98 interface-a-like. Apple got it right when it comes to UNIX GUIs.
The time/money involved in training the staff to adopt to linux is better than sinking huge amounts into fighting viruses and frequent shutdowns.
It's called firewall or antivirus software. What "frequent shutdowns?"
Microsoft may not like some servers switching to Linux, but they're not exactly worried about it. Windows XP is doing extremely well, and their marketshare is intact (despite such "formidable" competitors like XFree86). With
All it takes is someone to exploit any of the kinds of exploits and flaws listed at Linux Security. What's that? You actually believed Linux was magically secure from everything just because it has things like permissions? Give me a fucking break. That website lists all the weekly security flaws Slashdot never, ever reports on which would be taken up by every random script and e-mail attachment out there.
There is a myriad of ways of getting into a Linux system like that, and you better believe people would find them out if Linux ever got more than 1% usage based on Google Zeitgeist (in comparison, OS X has 5%). Consider a wide user base to be one big beta test. In that sense, it's not surprising Windows holes have been found and subsequently patched. You might even make the argument that because Windows has been so much more aggressively tested, it might be less of a risk than if Linux suddenly had that market share overnight.
If Linux is this golden child of security, how is it GNU, GNOME, Debian, Gentoo, Savannah, and more were all hacked last year in the span of six months? Oh, I forgot, we've swept all that under the rug around here.
Hell, you think that kernel exploit that got patched a week ago wouldn't already be making the rounds right now? Normal users wouldn't be upgrading their "kernel" like Linux geeks do. Look at how many people already don't run Automatic Updates under XP.
Sorry, but you're full of shit.
Not until it adopts a BSD license. Then it would truly be free. The GPL isn't free, no matter how much Slashdot has drilled it into your head.
Aside from that, you can't ignore support costs, training, and maintenance and claim something is completely free. That's spinning it.
Explain exactly how Microsoft's monopoly "collapsed" in 2001, or how Windows has become obsolete?
In that first article you linked, ESR predicts "in six months" that Microsoft will collapse. Yeah, that really happened in 2001.
Before calling a prediction "accurate," it kind of, you know, has to come true first...
You have illustrated a point I often make (and get modded down for). For all the "forward thinking" that Linux users are supposed to be doing, and all the progress they're supposed to be making, the truth is that the OSS community avoids change and is very stubborn.
When KDE and GNOME came out, it was nice at first to have a couple of cute desktop emulators hacked on top of X, but I always thought by now someone would have replaced XFree86 with something modern and hardware-accelerated, and we would have moved on. But we're still using KDE and GNOME.
Endless hierarchies of folder structures are prevalent everywhere. We're just supposed to accept things like "/usr/local/lib/blah/blah.something" for some random file. If it was on Windows, someone would be complaining about how Windows "hides" things in convoluted folder nests. On Linux, it's just accepted because some random geeks got together and deemed it a "Linux Filesystem Standard" for files to be scattered every which way across a filesystem made up of thousands of directories.
Linux and its desktop attempts are hindered by the huge cross-section of anti-social geeks who have latched onto UNIX as their mentality for being "elite." It's holding back progress. You're absolutely right, OS X had the right idea, but don't expect anything to change in this community. Many of us have been saying this since the late 90s. Developers don't listen ("code it yourself!"), and Slashdotters bitch at you ("don't criticize a volunteer effort!").
Windows is still based on an almost 15 year old code base.
No, it's not. That's like saying Linux is based on an almost 15 year old code base (1991 is just 13 years ago...).
Its time to rewrite it from the ground up. Screw the backwards compatibility. Move on.
They already did. It's called Windows NT and was a complete rewrite based on parts of VMS (the same guy who worked on VMS even became NT's lead).
With Windows XP, they finally completely replaced the DOS-based kernel and merged off of NT. Everything is using that unified codebase now.
You know, it's really shocking how little Slashdotters seem to know about these things. Back in the day, it seems like Slashdot was so much better at actually reporting tech knowledge, but now it's about posting the most scathing and trollish articles in order to get reactionary page hits in order to run their ads. Few people consider that this website is corporate-owned now. This place is the Ain't-It-Cool-News of the tech sector.
This is a troll.
Mozilla runs just fine, and it doesn't matter if it didn't because Mozilla would just update its code (being open source and all).
You can't install SP2 (RC2) through Windows Update. SP2 is only released through Microsoft's beta program.