Only one retailer put the game on sale, what about all those users who do not have that retailer available near them, or who just didn't realize the game was available early there? The vast majority of people who wanted to play this game had no alternative but to download it.
If a game hasn't been officially released then piracy is the only way people can play it. The way companies hype up a product long before it becomes available is pretty cruel "here look at this, look how great it is but your not getting to touch it for x months"...
IE8 may be a significant improvement from 7, but it is still massively behind other browsers... It has no SVG support, it's javascript engine is still massively behind the other browsers (javascript is very important for google) and it's css support while a big improvement is still behind other browsers... Also, doesn't IE8 require you to insert a non standard tag into your site in order to make it attempt to follow standards?
IE is a browser controlled by a company that competes with google's profitable business areas, and is used by that competitor to drive traffic to it's services which compete with google... Firefox is not a competitor, google make no money from chrome, they just want users to be running a browser that defaults to google, which firefox also does. I imagine they also want users to be running standards compliant browsers, as it makes life much easier for them to write apps for them.
And the google updater (alongside the apple updater, adobe updated, and whatever else updater) you have running only exist to get around a flaw in windows - the lack of a consistent package management system such as apt. If you install enough apps with updaters on windows they will eventually bog your system down real badly, and start using your bandwidth when you least expect it.
I used to run a browser in a chroot on linux, partly because i had a 64bit system but needed some 32bit plugins (java, flash) and partly for the security benefit... In terms of user files, you simply leave them in the sandbox, the host system can access the sandbox but the sandbox can't access the host which is how it should be.
Skinning seems to hurt performance, a lot... Take any app where skinning was added later, and compare the old and new versions side by side... windows media player is a good example since it would leave the old unskinnable version installed when you installed the skinnable version 7, on a machine in those days (p3/600) i had a bunch of video files which would play fine in the old player, and skip when using the new one.
So the commercial offerings can and do fail as well... With your own OSS based setup you have a chance of fixing it, with a commercial setup all you can really do is cast blame, but how exactly does casting blame help you get real work done?
What these big vendors don't want, is for smaller companies with capable staff creating their own massively cheaper appliances... This will force the big vendors to bring their prices back down to more realistic levels. A lot of these companies are very top heavy, and would experience significant pain if they had to operate on a less extortionate profit margin or against competition.
While these "integrated solutions" do have some value inherent in the integration and support, many of them are based on commodity hardware and free software and are massively overpriced... The vendors selling these things don't want people to realise their true value, as it will significantly reduce their profit margins.
The messiest FOSS code i have seen, is where a commercial product has been opened up... Quite often it takes several months of OSS development before the mess can even be compiled - proprietary code tends not to have configure scripts or similar, and is nastily kludged to build in a particular unchanging environment.
A lot of these vendors nowadays use not only commodity hardware, but rebranded OSS software on top of it... How many of these appliances are based on Linux or BSD? A lot are also based on quite old versions, and the vendor specific updates tend to trickle down a lot slower than upstream patches do... Quite often you just don't get value for money at all, you receive commodity hardware and free software and pay a premium for it.
A lot of commercial appliances these days are also a bundle of OSS code with a fancy frontend slapped on top and as you pointed out, installed on bargain basement hardware. Some of these companies are up front about it, and you're paying for the support package... Others actually try to hide the true nature of their appliances.
If it locks up due to overheating and your not running it in an environment outside of the machine's published operating environment, then it's defective and should be returned to apple for repair or replacement.
The xbox online play annoys me no end... I want the freedom to play on my own servers, not be forced to use company supplied ones. I want to be able to play lan games, sometimes in places with no internet connection (getting a bunch of friends together in a hall somewhere is great fun).
Seeing as Linux has zero cost, Windows must therefore have a negative cost, effectively making it a punishment...
That said, more likely it's just all the crapware that comes with the typical windows install, companies pay dell to include their crap. Perhaps the same could be done with linux...
For the price of those apps, you could pay a geek to come to your house, choose apps and install them for you using apt...
That said, you are confusing "easy" with "familiar"... If users were aware of how easy it was to use the gui based package managers in modern linux distros people would prefer them. You can read package descriptions to learn what they do, search for packages, search google for independent recommendations (much better than the blueshirt who is on commission), and perform the install all without spending any money or having to leave your chair... And because it's free, you can try multiple apps without any risk.
However, this does work against linux sometimes... If someone has paid for something, they will be determined to get their money's worth and refuse to believe they wasted their money... As a result, they will be more willing to work around bugs and spend time learning an app. If they got something for free, it's a case of easy come easy go and they are more willing to discard it at the first sign of trouble.
For the price of those apps, you could pay a geek to come to your house, choose apps and install them for you using apt...
That said, you are confusing "easy" with "familiar"... If users were aware of how easy it was to use the gui based package managers in modern linux distros people would prefer them. You can read package descriptions to learn what they do, search for packages, search google for independent recommendations (much better than the blueshirt who is on commission), and perform the install all without spending any money or having to leave your chair... And because it's free, you can try multiple apps without any risk.
Downloading manually is much harder... You have to search... You have to somehow verify that the site you found is a reputable source of the app and not a scam site (try searching for openoffice, there are scam versions out there). All of the sites need to be up, if the main site isn't up you might not be able to see a mirror list. If a site is down, you wont get that app. You have to wait for the downloads to complete because the next step requires manual intervention.
You can also pin versions down, in gentoo you just edit the package.mask file to prevent the installation of newer versions, i imagine other systems have an equivalent... That said, most package repositories won't update versions, just apply bugfix patches to existing versions, so there is very little reason not to take the updates.
Dont the geode processors have some sort of AES capability built in? At least the 500mhz Geode-LX does, i have one and it has a kernel driver for the loop-aes device... Is there any way to have OpenSSL use this hardware on linux? One of the soekris net5501 boxes would make a good little vpn box if i could do that.
You don't want to use multiple ports, most proxies will only permit https connections on port 443 so a lot of users behind corporate proxies would be screwed.
By releasing a console with such a high instance of problems compared to all the closest competitors they have already increased their repair burden, increasing the warranty period to 3 years just made it even worse. Does anyone have figures for the relative failure rates of consoles from Sony/Nintendo and their associated repair costs?
You get screwed by buying a flakey console that has died on you outside of warranty, and you punish the company that screwed you over by... buying another console?
Get a third party RROD fix kit and see if that works, chip the box at the same time so you can make backups of your games in case the machine decides to shred them (as some have)... And complain, no company who sells you sub standard products should be rewarded with another purchase to replace the original failed product.
Noone will exploit SP2 because it hasn't been released yet... If you have an exploit for it, you might be able to get a small handful of beta testers and create a very weak botnet before the details go public and MS roll in a fix before the final release of SP2... Not to mention that the average beta tester is likely to be more technically savvy and notice/investigate/report the attack.
On the other hand, if you hold on to your exploit until SP2 gets a large installed base of largely clueless users you can build yourself a big botnet consisting of mostly clueless users who won't even notice your bot running on their system...
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Only one retailer put the game on sale, what about all those users who do not have that retailer available near them, or who just didn't realize the game was available early there? The vast majority of people who wanted to play this game had no alternative but to download it.
If a game hasn't been officially released then piracy is the only way people can play it.
The way companies hype up a product long before it becomes available is pretty cruel "here look at this, look how great it is but your not getting to touch it for x months"...
IE8 may be a significant improvement from 7, but it is still massively behind other browsers... It has no SVG support, it's javascript engine is still massively behind the other browsers (javascript is very important for google) and it's css support while a big improvement is still behind other browsers...
Also, doesn't IE8 require you to insert a non standard tag into your site in order to make it attempt to follow standards?
IE is a browser controlled by a company that competes with google's profitable business areas, and is used by that competitor to drive traffic to it's services which compete with google...
Firefox is not a competitor, google make no money from chrome, they just want users to be running a browser that defaults to google, which firefox also does. I imagine they also want users to be running standards compliant browsers, as it makes life much easier for them to write apps for them.
And the google updater (alongside the apple updater, adobe updated, and whatever else updater) you have running only exist to get around a flaw in windows - the lack of a consistent package management system such as apt. If you install enough apps with updaters on windows they will eventually bog your system down real badly, and start using your bandwidth when you least expect it.
I used to run a browser in a chroot on linux, partly because i had a 64bit system but needed some 32bit plugins (java, flash) and partly for the security benefit...
In terms of user files, you simply leave them in the sandbox, the host system can access the sandbox but the sandbox can't access the host which is how it should be.
Skinning seems to hurt performance, a lot...
Take any app where skinning was added later, and compare the old and new versions side by side... windows media player is a good example since it would leave the old unskinnable version installed when you installed the skinnable version 7, on a machine in those days (p3/600) i had a bunch of video files which would play fine in the old player, and skip when using the new one.
So the commercial offerings can and do fail as well...
With your own OSS based setup you have a chance of fixing it, with a commercial setup all you can really do is cast blame, but how exactly does casting blame help you get real work done?
What these big vendors don't want, is for smaller companies with capable staff creating their own massively cheaper appliances... This will force the big vendors to bring their prices back down to more realistic levels. A lot of these companies are very top heavy, and would experience significant pain if they had to operate on a less extortionate profit margin or against competition.
While these "integrated solutions" do have some value inherent in the integration and support, many of them are based on commodity hardware and free software and are massively overpriced... The vendors selling these things don't want people to realise their true value, as it will significantly reduce their profit margins.
The messiest FOSS code i have seen, is where a commercial product has been opened up... Quite often it takes several months of OSS development before the mess can even be compiled - proprietary code tends not to have configure scripts or similar, and is nastily kludged to build in a particular unchanging environment.
A lot of these vendors nowadays use not only commodity hardware, but rebranded OSS software on top of it...
How many of these appliances are based on Linux or BSD?
A lot are also based on quite old versions, and the vendor specific updates tend to trickle down a lot slower than upstream patches do...
Quite often you just don't get value for money at all, you receive commodity hardware and free software and pay a premium for it.
A lot of commercial appliances these days are also a bundle of OSS code with a fancy frontend slapped on top and as you pointed out, installed on bargain basement hardware.
Some of these companies are up front about it, and you're paying for the support package... Others actually try to hide the true nature of their appliances.
If it locks up due to overheating and your not running it in an environment outside of the machine's published operating environment, then it's defective and should be returned to apple for repair or replacement.
Plus a windows install that is only used to play games and nothing else, will get less bogged down with crap and thus run your games better...
The xbox online play annoys me no end...
I want the freedom to play on my own servers, not be forced to use company supplied ones.
I want to be able to play lan games, sometimes in places with no internet connection (getting a bunch of friends together in a hall somewhere is great fun).
Seeing as Linux has zero cost, Windows must therefore have a negative cost, effectively making it a punishment...
That said, more likely it's just all the crapware that comes with the typical windows install, companies pay dell to include their crap. Perhaps the same could be done with linux...
For the price of those apps, you could pay a geek to come to your house, choose apps and install them for you using apt...
That said, you are confusing "easy" with "familiar"... If users were aware of how easy it was to use the gui based package managers in modern linux distros people would prefer them.
You can read package descriptions to learn what they do, search for packages, search google for independent recommendations (much better than the blueshirt who is on commission), and perform the install all without spending any money or having to leave your chair... And because it's free, you can try multiple apps without any risk.
However, this does work against linux sometimes... If someone has paid for something, they will be determined to get their money's worth and refuse to believe they wasted their money... As a result, they will be more willing to work around bugs and spend time learning an app. If they got something for free, it's a case of easy come easy go and they are more willing to discard it at the first sign of trouble.
For the price of those apps, you could pay a geek to come to your house, choose apps and install them for you using apt...
That said, you are confusing "easy" with "familiar"... If users were aware of how easy it was to use the gui based package managers in modern linux distros people would prefer them.
You can read package descriptions to learn what they do, search for packages, search google for independent recommendations (much better than the blueshirt who is on commission), and perform the install all without spending any money or having to leave your chair... And because it's free, you can try multiple apps without any risk.
Downloading manually is much harder...
You have to search...
You have to somehow verify that the site you found is a reputable source of the app and not a scam site (try searching for openoffice, there are scam versions out there).
All of the sites need to be up, if the main site isn't up you might not be able to see a mirror list. If a site is down, you wont get that app.
You have to wait for the downloads to complete because the next step requires manual intervention.
You can also pin versions down, in gentoo you just edit the package.mask file to prevent the installation of newer versions, i imagine other systems have an equivalent... That said, most package repositories won't update versions, just apply bugfix patches to existing versions, so there is very little reason not to take the updates.
Dont the geode processors have some sort of AES capability built in? At least the 500mhz Geode-LX does, i have one and it has a kernel driver for the loop-aes device...
Is there any way to have OpenSSL use this hardware on linux? One of the soekris net5501 boxes would make a good little vpn box if i could do that.
You don't want to use multiple ports, most proxies will only permit https connections on port 443 so a lot of users behind corporate proxies would be screwed.
By releasing a console with such a high instance of problems compared to all the closest competitors they have already increased their repair burden, increasing the warranty period to 3 years just made it even worse.
Does anyone have figures for the relative failure rates of consoles from Sony/Nintendo and their associated repair costs?
You get screwed by buying a flakey console that has died on you outside of warranty, and you punish the company that screwed you over by... buying another console?
Get a third party RROD fix kit and see if that works, chip the box at the same time so you can make backups of your games in case the machine decides to shred them (as some have)... And complain, no company who sells you sub standard products should be rewarded with another purchase to replace the original failed product.
Noone will exploit SP2 because it hasn't been released yet... If you have an exploit for it, you might be able to get a small handful of beta testers and create a very weak botnet before the details go public and MS roll in a fix before the final release of SP2... Not to mention that the average beta tester is likely to be more technically savvy and notice/investigate/report the attack.
On the other hand, if you hold on to your exploit until SP2 gets a large installed base of largely clueless users you can build yourself a big botnet consisting of mostly clueless users who won't even notice your bot running on their system...