The problem is that there are simply too many sites asking for passwords these days..
The sensible thing is obviously to use a different password everywhere, but you will never remember them and end up keeping them written down somewhere. Either somewhere inconvenient, so that you don't have access to the password when you need it, or somewhere convenient where it could more easily fall into someone else's hands.
So people reuse passwords across sites, the problem with this is that you don't know how a given site will store your password... It might be in plain text, or using a weak algorithm... A compromise of one site (see linkedin) thus compromises your accounts on other sites.
Well, you could always contract an engine from a company that agrees to open source it after a time... ID for example.
Open sourcing can even extend the profitability of a game... The original quake for dos would be pretty much abandonware by now, running only in dosbox... But because it got open sourced, there are modern versions which run on modern hardware but you still need the original data files to play it. Obviously you could pirate them, but many people wouldn't because not only is it cheap at least ID aren't treating their paying customers with contempt.
And patent trolls can easily look for infringement in binaries... Going after open source code isn't worth the effort most of the time because the payout would be small.
Compared to laptops, tablets are smaller and lighter because the keyboard is optional (you don't always need a keyboard)... They also generally have better battery life, wake quicker and go to sleep more quickly so its more convenient to take it out, do something quickly and then put it back.
When i travel on the train, i can take out my tablet, hold it in my hand and read something on it, all one handed (need the other hand to hold on to the handrail, very rarely do you get a seat here) or using one hand to hold and another to operate.. Doing that with a laptop, even a small one is far more inconvenient. You typically need somewhere to rest a laptop, so that you can use both hands to operate it.
That's great and all, but windows is not supplied that way, and modifying it yourself to be a more optimal gaming config is not a simple task.
The only version of windows that is supplied in a decent config for gaming, is the version that comes on the xbox which is quite heavily modified.
As for "running in 32mb", wasn't so long ago that games consoles or even full blown computers actually shipped with less than that in total!
The Amiga was a much better gaming platform in its day... You could use the OS as a loader or menu system, and it was there if you wanted it, but it was also possible for games to purge the OS from memory and take over the hardware in its entirety to squeeze every last drop of performance from it. Obviously this only works if you know what the hardware is going to be, but makes sense for fixed config consoles.
Ram is the biggest issue, and you had 4 times as much of it as the xbox did, That's hardly a fair comparison. The overhead caused by windows is primarily the RAM it consumes, which means that RAM then cannot be used by the game. Many of the games would probably not tax the CPU all that much.
How much of that 256MB was used just to boot, and how much was in use when you were playing a typical game? If the total when playing a game exceeded 64Mb then you would be swapping on an xbox equivalent config, and even with a massively faster cpu and gpu swapping would make the performance suck.
Also the xbox memory is shared with video ram, i'm sure your Geforce 2 had some dedicated VRAM.
I have a 40 ton truck, it can do everything a car can do.. Plus more. Why don't you drive to work in a 40 ton truck, or go grocery shopping in one?
The answer is that a 40 ton truck, just like a PC is massive overkill for the vast majority of typical end user use cases. Sure there are some cases which require the larger more complex device, but for everyday use the smaller device is a better fit.
video editing, bookkeeping, multitrack mixing, working with complex spreadsheets, etc
And how many people actually do any of these things on a regular basis?
Most people's video editing needs are very basic, maybe just cutting before uploading the video to facebook etc... Very few people do multi track mixing, that's very much a niche... Similarly bookkeeping, few people do this for personal purposes unless they run a business. Complex spreadsheets too, are rarely used at home.
Most people are just tweeting twits or spend all their time on facebook... Such an interface will actually suit them just fine.
MS is very bad for students anyway, to someone young and inexperienced the constant warnings thrown up by windows (eg dont look at this dir, it contains system files which have been hidden for your own safety!) combined with the ease of breaking the system and the immense difficulty of fixing it scare people away and make them fearful of computers...
Older people, who grew up before computers were available are generally uninterested in them... At the other end of the scale, younger people who grew up with windows tend to be fearful of computers and unwilling to stray from the path laid out for them, and are very fearful of anything different... And then, those who grew up with the C64, Sinclair, Amiga and DOS based systems tend to be unafraid of technology, willing to try new things and experiment.
Content creators are not generally a good market... The business market do not want to buy new hardware, they want to stick with what works. Business computers are seen as boring, something you have to put up with at work but can get away from once you get home. Business users will also be looking to reduce their costs, so getting away from replacing kit regularly. Eventually businesses will wise up and ditch MS entirely as the market matures, since a lack of lock-in, lack of forced upgrades and lower costs only make sense from a business perspective. Businesses don't care about "new shiny", they want "cheap, functional, maintainable"
Apple seem to have done pretty well for themselves without needing to target business users...
Funny you should mention it, but if i buy a particular model of Mac i know exactly what components it has... I tried to buy a laptop from HP or Lenovo recently, and they told me they couldn't tell me what wireless chipset it would have (from a choice of 3) in advance, and that i would just have to buy it and see. Now those 3 chipsets (atheros, broadcom, intel) are NOT equal, atheros and intel publish specs and open drivers, broadcom does not... The atheros will do monitor and master mode, not sure the others will.
That said, i'm not happy with Apple since they dropped the 17" macbook, so...
Show me a laptop where i can be guaranteed to get an atheros, or at the very least intel wireless card (none of this broadcom crap) and a high resolution screen competitive with the apple retina displays.
What i want, and which companies have sofar only made half assed attempts at... Is a phone that when combined with a dock consisting of a monitor, keyboard and some usb ports etc can be turned into a full blown computer. That way i can carry the system around and have all my data available, but use a keyboard/mouse interface when i'm in a location that doing so is suitable or needing to use applications that require such access. I know there have been a few attempts at this, but i really want a full blown linux system when in desktop mode, android is designed for a touchscreen and is an absolute pain to use with keyboard and mouse.
The first xbox was basically a fixed spec x86 machine which played games...
The problem for MS is that windows is actually a very bad platform for gaming. It's far too big and bloated, with too much stuff running in the background (usually including necessary third party stuff like av and update services etc)... Not to mention hassle with driver conflicts, drm conflicts, incompatible third party software and the gradual slowdown that windows systems suffer from over time.
Try building a PC with similar spec to the original xbox (700mhz celeron, 64mb ram, geforce 3 or so), and then running games that are available for both systems... The overhead of windows will often render the games unplayable, while the xbox runs them fine.
And what's to stop users doing the same thing by modifying windows binaries? Or compiling the source that has been leaked a few times? Or just modify the anti-cheating code to lie to the server? Or just taking control from a lower level (eg hypervisor)? The fact is the client cannot be trusted, and if you place trust in the client no matter how much effort you go through at the end of the day the client is still under the control of the end users and any trust placed in the client can be subverted.
I can indeed work from home using linux. Not linux's fault your employer uses a proprietary remote working setup.
I can also create diagrams the same as people would in ms visio, and libreoffice can even convert the proprietary visio format.
There are several things i do on linux, which i couldn't do on windows either at all or in a cost effective manner.
Companies waste millions a year as a result of getting locked into proprietary systems... I have direct experience of several very recently, where at the time they thought buying into proprietary software was great and would bring them savings or efficiency improvements etc, and now it's costing them a fortune and would cost them even more to get out of it.
Absolutely, its about profit, piracy is just the scapegoat... The publishers realise that most pirates either cannot buy, or would rather do without than buy. On the other hand, non pirates have already proven their willingness to hand over money so they seek to get as much out of them as possible.
And of course, people only have finite budgets, so rather than having to make 4 separate games, they would much rather force some poor sucker to buy 4 copies of the same game... Same expenditure for the user, but much less value for them and much more profit for the publisher.
Hopefully treating their customers with such utter contempt will come back to bite them in the ass in the form of lost sales, but i won't hold my breath... And if sales do go down, they will never admit that it's because they screwed their customers, they will just try to blame piracy again.
Advertised features of the game (multiplayer) require those servers to function, and in many cases the servers are not an ongoing subscription therefore the service is part of the original software...
What should happen is...
1, games are given away free but the online service is subscription based (eg think eve online)... a single player mode, if one exists, is effectively a demo.
2, the game is sold but also comes with the server software, so people can run their own servers.
I utterly detest the idea of buying a game and then having to keep paying to actually play it... don't be so fucking greedy, choose one or the other... You're either selling software, or renting access service.
I also hate games which lock you in to their servers, there are so many things wrong with this... Often LAN play is impossible, LAN parties are fun and some of us don't always have access to the internet. Once the service is turned off, the game will become useless. The servers may not be local to you, and therefore have poor latency making gameplay unpleasant and/or unfair. If the servers go down, you can't play.
The only thing the publishers should be running, is a matchmaking service like gamespy which lets users find public servers to play on.
I still play Quake, not least of all because i can actually run my own server. If Quake had been released without server code, and had not been open sourced, do you think it would still be playable today?
The chinese government is acting to benefit its own interests, the fact that those benefitting are members of the communist party rather than owners of large businesses is fairly inconsequential.
If anything, the chinese government is actually serving its purpose better because at least their actions are aimed at benefitting chinese people, as opposed to many other governments which bend over backwards to benefit foreign corporations.
The same reason that what little binary-only software exists for linux is generally not compiled for arm/ppc/alpha/mips/whatever, and why so little windows software was ever compiled for ia64 or alpha... Testing and support, any commercial developer will want to at least create the impression that they operate some form of quality control, and that they have tested all versions of their software prior to foisting it on the unsuspecting public...
They are not going to build their software for ARM unless there are potential customers, and those customers are not going to buy ARM devices unless there is software available...
You can see where MS is going with their processor neutral framework, but that in itself is a resource sucking kludge to try and alleviate the fundamental problem of closed source software.
Personally i've been running Linux on non x86 architectures for a long time, and i run all sorts of software on hardware which the original author never even considered and in many cases did not even exist when the software was written, all thanks to having the source code.
Get some USB wireless cards such as those from alfa networks along with a decent antenna... A long USB cable means you can site the wifi card and antenna away from the system itself (which is a source of interference).
Well he never said he was running it on a big power hungry box...
You can get low power Linux boxes such as the Sheevaplug or OpenRD, which must be pretty comparable to common routers in terms of power usage, while being considerably more capable.
Imagine trying to explain that over the phone, when you can't see the user's screen, where the user may have little or no computer knowledge, and where his machine may be configured differently, or he has removed/hidden the icons, or all manner of other differences... Not to mention the fact that text is simple to explain over the phone - you just read it.... However explaining anything graphical over the phone is open to interpretation, and the way some users describe icons that we would consider to be obvious or intuitive is hilarious.
Find the "my network places" icon, it should be on your desktop or it might be on the start menu... The desktop is your screen, behind any windows you might have open. Good, now click on it. Did it bring up a window? Ok, what icons are inside that window? You see "local ethernet connection"? double click on that Did it bring up another window? Ok, at the top of that window do you see three different words with boxes around them? These are known as "tabs", click on the one labelled "support" Now find the line which mentioned "IP address", does it have a set of numbers next to it?
vs
hold down the windows key (its near the bottom left of your keyboard) and press r did a new window appear? type c, m, d and press enter in the new black window, type i p c o n f i g and press enter again read out the new text that just came up on screen
and you can easily repeat for more commands, like ping, etc
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that there are simply too many sites asking for passwords these days..
The sensible thing is obviously to use a different password everywhere, but you will never remember them and end up keeping them written down somewhere. Either somewhere inconvenient, so that you don't have access to the password when you need it, or somewhere convenient where it could more easily fall into someone else's hands.
So people reuse passwords across sites, the problem with this is that you don't know how a given site will store your password... It might be in plain text, or using a weak algorithm... A compromise of one site (see linkedin) thus compromises your accounts on other sites.
Well, you could always contract an engine from a company that agrees to open source it after a time... ID for example.
Open sourcing can even extend the profitability of a game... The original quake for dos would be pretty much abandonware by now, running only in dosbox... But because it got open sourced, there are modern versions which run on modern hardware but you still need the original data files to play it. Obviously you could pirate them, but many people wouldn't because not only is it cheap at least ID aren't treating their paying customers with contempt.
And patent trolls can easily look for infringement in binaries... Going after open source code isn't worth the effort most of the time because the payout would be small.
The unlock screen was probably designed that way to try and avoid the slide to unlock patent...
Slide to unlock is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used a bolt...
This is what one looks like for anyone unfamiliar with the term:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Bolt_lock.jpg
Compared to laptops, tablets are smaller and lighter because the keyboard is optional (you don't always need a keyboard)...
They also generally have better battery life, wake quicker and go to sleep more quickly so its more convenient to take it out, do something quickly and then put it back.
When i travel on the train, i can take out my tablet, hold it in my hand and read something on it, all one handed (need the other hand to hold on to the handrail, very rarely do you get a seat here) or using one hand to hold and another to operate.. Doing that with a laptop, even a small one is far more inconvenient. You typically need somewhere to rest a laptop, so that you can use both hands to operate it.
That's great and all, but windows is not supplied that way, and modifying it yourself to be a more optimal gaming config is not a simple task.
The only version of windows that is supplied in a decent config for gaming, is the version that comes on the xbox which is quite heavily modified.
As for "running in 32mb", wasn't so long ago that games consoles or even full blown computers actually shipped with less than that in total!
The Amiga was a much better gaming platform in its day... You could use the OS as a loader or menu system, and it was there if you wanted it, but it was also possible for games to purge the OS from memory and take over the hardware in its entirety to squeeze every last drop of performance from it. Obviously this only works if you know what the hardware is going to be, but makes sense for fixed config consoles.
Ram is the biggest issue, and you had 4 times as much of it as the xbox did, That's hardly a fair comparison. The overhead caused by windows is primarily the RAM it consumes, which means that RAM then cannot be used by the game. Many of the games would probably not tax the CPU all that much.
How much of that 256MB was used just to boot, and how much was in use when you were playing a typical game? If the total when playing a game exceeded 64Mb then you would be swapping on an xbox equivalent config, and even with a massively faster cpu and gpu swapping would make the performance suck.
Also the xbox memory is shared with video ram, i'm sure your Geforce 2 had some dedicated VRAM.
I have a 40 ton truck, it can do everything a car can do.. Plus more.
Why don't you drive to work in a 40 ton truck, or go grocery shopping in one?
The answer is that a 40 ton truck, just like a PC is massive overkill for the vast majority of typical end user use cases. Sure there are some cases which require the larger more complex device, but for everyday use the smaller device is a better fit.
video editing, bookkeeping, multitrack mixing, working with complex spreadsheets, etc
And how many people actually do any of these things on a regular basis?
Most people's video editing needs are very basic, maybe just cutting before uploading the video to facebook etc...
Very few people do multi track mixing, that's very much a niche...
Similarly bookkeeping, few people do this for personal purposes unless they run a business.
Complex spreadsheets too, are rarely used at home.
Most people are just tweeting twits or spend all their time on facebook... Such an interface will actually suit them just fine.
MS is very bad for students anyway, to someone young and inexperienced the constant warnings thrown up by windows (eg dont look at this dir, it contains system files which have been hidden for your own safety!) combined with the ease of breaking the system and the immense difficulty of fixing it scare people away and make them fearful of computers...
Older people, who grew up before computers were available are generally uninterested in them...
At the other end of the scale, younger people who grew up with windows tend to be fearful of computers and unwilling to stray from the path laid out for them, and are very fearful of anything different...
And then, those who grew up with the C64, Sinclair, Amiga and DOS based systems tend to be unafraid of technology, willing to try new things and experiment.
Content creators are not generally a good market... The business market do not want to buy new hardware, they want to stick with what works. Business computers are seen as boring, something you have to put up with at work but can get away from once you get home. Business users will also be looking to reduce their costs, so getting away from replacing kit regularly. Eventually businesses will wise up and ditch MS entirely as the market matures, since a lack of lock-in, lack of forced upgrades and lower costs only make sense from a business perspective. Businesses don't care about "new shiny", they want "cheap, functional, maintainable"
Apple seem to have done pretty well for themselves without needing to target business users...
Funny you should mention it, but if i buy a particular model of Mac i know exactly what components it has...
I tried to buy a laptop from HP or Lenovo recently, and they told me they couldn't tell me what wireless chipset it would have (from a choice of 3) in advance, and that i would just have to buy it and see.
Now those 3 chipsets (atheros, broadcom, intel) are NOT equal, atheros and intel publish specs and open drivers, broadcom does not... The atheros will do monitor and master mode, not sure the others will.
That said, i'm not happy with Apple since they dropped the 17" macbook, so...
Show me a laptop where i can be guaranteed to get an atheros, or at the very least intel wireless card (none of this broadcom crap) and a high resolution screen competitive with the apple retina displays.
What i want, and which companies have sofar only made half assed attempts at...
Is a phone that when combined with a dock consisting of a monitor, keyboard and some usb ports etc can be turned into a full blown computer. That way i can carry the system around and have all my data available, but use a keyboard/mouse interface when i'm in a location that doing so is suitable or needing to use applications that require such access.
I know there have been a few attempts at this, but i really want a full blown linux system when in desktop mode, android is designed for a touchscreen and is an absolute pain to use with keyboard and mouse.
The first xbox was basically a fixed spec x86 machine which played games...
The problem for MS is that windows is actually a very bad platform for gaming. It's far too big and bloated, with too much stuff running in the background (usually including necessary third party stuff like av and update services etc)... Not to mention hassle with driver conflicts, drm conflicts, incompatible third party software and the gradual slowdown that windows systems suffer from over time.
Try building a PC with similar spec to the original xbox (700mhz celeron, 64mb ram, geforce 3 or so), and then running games that are available for both systems... The overhead of windows will often render the games unplayable, while the xbox runs them fine.
And what's to stop users doing the same thing by modifying windows binaries? Or compiling the source that has been leaked a few times? Or just modify the anti-cheating code to lie to the server? Or just taking control from a lower level (eg hypervisor)?
The fact is the client cannot be trusted, and if you place trust in the client no matter how much effort you go through at the end of the day the client is still under the control of the end users and any trust placed in the client can be subverted.
I can indeed work from home using linux. Not linux's fault your employer uses a proprietary remote working setup.
I can also create diagrams the same as people would in ms visio, and libreoffice can even convert the proprietary visio format.
There are several things i do on linux, which i couldn't do on windows either at all or in a cost effective manner.
Companies waste millions a year as a result of getting locked into proprietary systems... I have direct experience of several very recently, where at the time they thought buying into proprietary software was great and would bring them savings or efficiency improvements etc, and now it's costing them a fortune and would cost them even more to get out of it.
WoW actually did have a linux client when it was in beta, the last version to ship with the linux client was aparrently 0.9.1:
http://www.learninglinux.com/postp734.html#734
So they had a Linux client all along, they just needed to keep it updated which would be considerably easier than porting it from scratch.
You own the copy of the software just like you own the copy of the book..
You could claim you were only licensed to read the book too.
And there is no reason why you couldn't transfer a license to someone else, building permits are often transferred for instance.
Why buy a used copy if you have to crack it?
Might as well just get a pre cracked pirate copy...
Absolutely, its about profit, piracy is just the scapegoat...
The publishers realise that most pirates either cannot buy, or would rather do without than buy.
On the other hand, non pirates have already proven their willingness to hand over money so they seek to get as much out of them as possible.
And of course, people only have finite budgets, so rather than having to make 4 separate games, they would much rather force some poor sucker to buy 4 copies of the same game... Same expenditure for the user, but much less value for them and much more profit for the publisher.
Hopefully treating their customers with such utter contempt will come back to bite them in the ass in the form of lost sales, but i won't hold my breath... And if sales do go down, they will never admit that it's because they screwed their customers, they will just try to blame piracy again.
Advertised features of the game (multiplayer) require those servers to function, and in many cases the servers are not an ongoing subscription therefore the service is part of the original software...
What should happen is...
1, games are given away free but the online service is subscription based (eg think eve online)... a single player mode, if one exists, is effectively a demo.
2, the game is sold but also comes with the server software, so people can run their own servers.
I utterly detest the idea of buying a game and then having to keep paying to actually play it... don't be so fucking greedy, choose one or the other... You're either selling software, or renting access service.
I also hate games which lock you in to their servers, there are so many things wrong with this...
Often LAN play is impossible, LAN parties are fun and some of us don't always have access to the internet.
Once the service is turned off, the game will become useless.
The servers may not be local to you, and therefore have poor latency making gameplay unpleasant and/or unfair.
If the servers go down, you can't play.
The only thing the publishers should be running, is a matchmaking service like gamespy which lets users find public servers to play on.
I still play Quake, not least of all because i can actually run my own server. If Quake had been released without server code, and had not been open sourced, do you think it would still be playable today?
The chinese government is acting to benefit its own interests, the fact that those benefitting are members of the communist party rather than owners of large businesses is fairly inconsequential.
If anything, the chinese government is actually serving its purpose better because at least their actions are aimed at benefitting chinese people, as opposed to many other governments which bend over backwards to benefit foreign corporations.
The same reason that what little binary-only software exists for linux is generally not compiled for arm/ppc/alpha/mips/whatever, and why so little windows software was ever compiled for ia64 or alpha...
Testing and support, any commercial developer will want to at least create the impression that they operate some form of quality control, and that they have tested all versions of their software prior to foisting it on the unsuspecting public...
They are not going to build their software for ARM unless there are potential customers, and those customers are not going to buy ARM devices unless there is software available...
You can see where MS is going with their processor neutral framework, but that in itself is a resource sucking kludge to try and alleviate the fundamental problem of closed source software.
Personally i've been running Linux on non x86 architectures for a long time, and i run all sorts of software on hardware which the original author never even considered and in many cases did not even exist when the software was written, all thanks to having the source code.
Get some USB wireless cards such as those from alfa networks along with a decent antenna...
A long USB cable means you can site the wifi card and antenna away from the system itself (which is a source of interference).
Well he never said he was running it on a big power hungry box...
You can get low power Linux boxes such as the Sheevaplug or OpenRD, which must be pretty comparable to common routers in terms of power usage, while being considerably more capable.
Imagine trying to explain that over the phone, when you can't see the user's screen, where the user may have little or no computer knowledge, and where his machine may be configured differently, or he has removed/hidden the icons, or all manner of other differences...
Not to mention the fact that text is simple to explain over the phone - you just read it.... However explaining anything graphical over the phone is open to interpretation, and the way some users describe icons that we would consider to be obvious or intuitive is hilarious.
Find the "my network places" icon, it should be on your desktop or it might be on the start menu...
The desktop is your screen, behind any windows you might have open.
Good, now click on it.
Did it bring up a window?
Ok, what icons are inside that window?
You see "local ethernet connection"? double click on that
Did it bring up another window?
Ok, at the top of that window do you see three different words with boxes around them?
These are known as "tabs", click on the one labelled "support"
Now find the line which mentioned "IP address", does it have a set of numbers next to it?
vs
hold down the windows key (its near the bottom left of your keyboard) and press r
did a new window appear? type c, m, d and press enter
in the new black window, type i p c o n f i g and press enter again
read out the new text that just came up on screen
and you can easily repeat for more commands, like ping, etc