Most of these online role-playing games are subscription based... You pay for the service, that is for someone to host a server for you and thousands of other users on a fast enough connection to handle it. Plenty of scope for companies to make money here, entirely within the bounds of the GPL... It's just like the many thousands of companies that make money selling webhosting on Linux.
They would still need to develop their own compatible client... And doing so without violating the GPL would require rewriting the entire of the client and making sure it can interoperate with the server, so they wouldn't gain all that much.
Mainly so you can (re)install a system remotely... Very useful in a lights-out datacenter, especially one which is miles from where you are. I have a number of sun systems which were physically installed into a rack by the fairly clueless on-site techs, they did little more than plug cables in, everything else i did remotely, that is power the systems up, install the OS, configure the OS, etc..
Your thinking of win32s... Ofcourse, the win32 API came first in NT3, win32s was the port of it to dos-based windows... Windows 95 was basically 3.11 with win32s bundled in, a new interface and a few other things bundled in by default. And it came bundled with dos instead of having to install it seperately. They both still had dos underneath, tho 95 started windows by default whereas 3.1 didn't.
Those same critical GUI resources are still limited systemwide, only now they're limited to 16Mb. They don't fix the problems, they just push them further out of the way. Out of interest tho, how difficult would it be to write a program specifically to allocate as many of these resources as possible (to cause a dos), and is it possible with something like a word macro?
If someone else is hosting the service, sure. Are you content to use bandwidth that's ultimately controlled by someone else (your ISP)? How about email, do you run your own email server? Someone providing a service is completely different from someone providing a product. If i purchase a product (some software) and use it together with another product i already own (a computer), i don't want to relinquish control over any of my existing products. They are my physical property, and should be under my total control.
On the other hand, if google are providing a server hosted on the internet and allowing me to use it (either for free or by paying for it) i don't expect to have total control of it, because that's not the service being offered. If i want total control, i can buy server colocation easily enough.
And why should customers who know how to use windows have to pay HP for support they're not going to use? Support should be bought seperately, for those who need it.
Monopolists like Phoenix or Award? Amusing... you cite 2 choices and complain about a monopoly... Intel make their own firmware too, EFI as used on modern macs... and theres a few others, there is choice as to which bios you can have, although it would be much better to move away from the clunky idea of a bios and use something more modern.
The Amiga was good in this sense... You saw an animation of a floppy disk being inserted into a drive, atleast with kickstart 2.0 or above based Amigas.
Well then, they need to change the BIOS to give a more useful message. People never had trouble with the Amiga... It was rare to buy an Amiga with a hard drive, you had to load software from floppy... If you turned the machine on without a floppy inserted, you either saw a picture of a hand holding a floppy disk, or an animation of a floppy disk going into a drive. I never heard of anyone who didn't get the hint. They also reiterated the instructions in the printed literature that came with the machine, you got a quick start guide and a couple of proper printed manuals. Also the bundled software, came in a paper packet with the license agreement printed on the outside of it, and instructions on where to send it (unopened) for a refund if you didn't want to accept the agreement.
So what exactly is the problem with providing a bios that says "Insert an operating system DVD to continue", a foldout quick start guide with bright color diagrams explaining what to do, and a choice of OS DVDs which do an image-based install onto the disk without prompting the user other than asking if they're sure they want to use this OS.
You could sell the media separately from the machine, giving the user choice, including the choice to not buy any media with the machine. And more importantly, print the license agreement on the packaging and provide the OS media in a sealed packet, the opening of which implies agreement with the supplied license.
HP offer computers using multiple types of motherboards, multiple types and quantities of CPUs, multiple types and quantities of RAM. They don't offer the same choice regarding the operating system, despite the fact that multiple choices are available.
Also, by choosing the motherboard, you have also decided what type of CPU and RAM you are having, so your choice in these areas is now limited to a specific range by YOUR previous choice. Thus, even if you bought a motherboard without ram or cpu, you'd still have to buy that particular type of ram and cpu in order to make the motherboard useful.
By contrast, whatever choices you make regarding hardware have very little effect on what OS you can run, unless your buying more exotic hardware like sparc or mips based systems. Thus, by being forced to buy an OS your not going to use, your being ripped off.
The trouble with trying to filter, is that the word format is a binary blob without any documentation... It's quite easy to filter out things like the jpeg exploit, just try opening it with a jpeg library on the filter server, the exploit jpegs won't load properly and error, or you can convert them on the fly to another image format. Ofcourse this brings up a risk to your server, but the risk is much smaller, the server is likely to be hardened, could be running many different os's on several different hardware platforms, won't be running the code as a privileged user, and could easily be running it inside of a chroot. If you were to use something like grsecurity on linux, you could make sure the risky parsing code ran inside of a chroot, did not have the ability to write anywhere (except its input/output pipes) and did not have the ability to open sockets or execute any additional programs. When you know the format, you can cut out a large percentage of exploits by validating the contents of the format against what the specs say it should contain, you can then sanitise parts of the file if necessary, or convert it into another (compatible) format. Ofcourse it's not foolproof, but it raises the bar much higher. This is a very good reason not to allow unknown binary data to be transferred in/out of your network.
Strange... My car had a huge array of choices when i was buying it... I could choose wether or not i wanted aircon, electric seats, leather, etc etc... I could also choose which style of rims i wanted and what brand and type of tyres i wanted on them.
There's also the difference that, tyres, like oil and sparkplugs, are expendable... Your going to have to buy new tyres for your car sooner or later, since the old ones will wear out. So it's more like including ink with a printer.
Assuming that sony produce accelerated 3d drivers for X11 on the PS3, then you could program graphics through OpenGL or SDL etc... Given that, a game written for the PS3 could easily work with just a simple recompile on any system running linux, and potentially OSX/BSD aswell, assuming it doesn't require the advanced features of the Cell processor (tho it could still potentially run on one of those cell based IBM servers).
You could have the machines hibernate (so your application states are saved) and have them configured to start up 10 minutes before your due to be in the office... When you leave you just hibernate and walk out, the time it takes to write the image is not your concern, and it will power itself off when done... And when you come back, it's there waiting for you.
I bought an xbox specifically because i could copy games to the HD... Losing or damaging the media is irritating, plus if i want to take it anywhere (friends place, hotel etc) i have much less bits to worry about.
No, unix was widely used as both clients and servers... For a good while, the internet was populated entirely by unix machines, are you saying they were all servers? Universities of the day had labs full of unix clients. What point is a server with no clients to access them? A dumb terminal is just an IO device, it's not a computer in it's own right. I can't speak for mac, but windows was quite a way behind amigaos in many areas, including IP networking.
A missing feature is also a bug report... The bug tracking system has facilities to propose new features in much the same way as bugs. Also, since one of the goals is compatibility with msoffice, a feature missing from openoffice which is supported by msoffice _IS_ a bug.
Because that's what excel supports... If openoffice supported more, and people started using the extra rows and then tried exporting their spreadsheets to be loaded into excel, it would be openoffice that was seen as broken.
As per the original post you replied to... Microsoft won't fully comply with the standard, and other vendors will be forced to reverse engineer their nonstandard implementation in order to be compatible with it. And because their software is so widely used, people will (incorrectly) assume that every other implementation is the broken one. Just look at the web, and how horrendously broken IE is.
A large battery backed up cache and lots of ram works well. On my machines, writes to the disk finish almost instantly (and the raid controller carries out the actual writing in the background), the entire os gets loaded into memory and stays there for the duration (i keep the machine running, never reboot it) as do my apps... The only files i regularly use that are really too large to cache are things like video, which are only needed at a certain rate (for playback) anyway.
We still have a 100Mb disk from around 1989, located in a MicroVAX... This machine has been running 24/7 since then, and the original drive still works.
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People will create their own small communities of players, much like what happens currently with quake servers and the like.
Most of these online role-playing games are subscription based... You pay for the service, that is for someone to host a server for you and thousands of other users on a fast enough connection to handle it.
Plenty of scope for companies to make money here, entirely within the bounds of the GPL... It's just like the many thousands of companies that make money selling webhosting on Linux.
They would still need to develop their own compatible client...
And doing so without violating the GPL would require rewriting the entire of the client and making sure it can interoperate with the server, so they wouldn't gain all that much.
Mainly so you can (re)install a system remotely... Very useful in a lights-out datacenter, especially one which is miles from where you are.
I have a number of sun systems which were physically installed into a rack by the fairly clueless on-site techs, they did little more than plug cables in, everything else i did remotely, that is power the systems up, install the OS, configure the OS, etc..
Your thinking of win32s...
Ofcourse, the win32 API came first in NT3, win32s was the port of it to dos-based windows... Windows 95 was basically 3.11 with win32s bundled in, a new interface and a few other things bundled in by default. And it came bundled with dos instead of having to install it seperately.
They both still had dos underneath, tho 95 started windows by default whereas 3.1 didn't.
Those same critical GUI resources are still limited systemwide, only now they're limited to 16Mb.
They don't fix the problems, they just push them further out of the way.
Out of interest tho, how difficult would it be to write a program specifically to allocate as many of these resources as possible (to cause a dos), and is it possible with something like a word macro?
If someone else is hosting the service, sure.
Are you content to use bandwidth that's ultimately controlled by someone else (your ISP)? How about email, do you run your own email server?
Someone providing a service is completely different from someone providing a product. If i purchase a product (some software) and use it together with another product i already own (a computer), i don't want to relinquish control over any of my existing products. They are my physical property, and should be under my total control.
On the other hand, if google are providing a server hosted on the internet and allowing me to use it (either for free or by paying for it) i don't expect to have total control of it, because that's not the service being offered. If i want total control, i can buy server colocation easily enough.
And drivers aren't software either?
And why should customers who know how to use windows have to pay HP for support they're not going to use?
Support should be bought seperately, for those who need it.
Monopolists like Phoenix or Award?
Amusing... you cite 2 choices and complain about a monopoly...
Intel make their own firmware too, EFI as used on modern macs... and theres a few others, there is choice as to which bios you can have, although it would be much better to move away from the clunky idea of a bios and use something more modern.
The Amiga was good in this sense...
You saw an animation of a floppy disk being inserted into a drive, atleast with kickstart 2.0 or above based Amigas.
Well then, they need to change the BIOS to give a more useful message.
People never had trouble with the Amiga... It was rare to buy an Amiga with a hard drive, you had to load software from floppy... If you turned the machine on without a floppy inserted, you either saw a picture of a hand holding a floppy disk, or an animation of a floppy disk going into a drive. I never heard of anyone who didn't get the hint.
They also reiterated the instructions in the printed literature that came with the machine, you got a quick start guide and a couple of proper printed manuals.
Also the bundled software, came in a paper packet with the license agreement printed on the outside of it, and instructions on where to send it (unopened) for a refund if you didn't want to accept the agreement.
So what exactly is the problem with providing a bios that says "Insert an operating system DVD to continue", a foldout quick start guide with bright color diagrams explaining what to do, and a choice of OS DVDs which do an image-based install onto the disk without prompting the user other than asking if they're sure they want to use this OS.
You could sell the media separately from the machine, giving the user choice, including the choice to not buy any media with the machine. And more importantly, print the license agreement on the packaging and provide the OS media in a sealed packet, the opening of which implies agreement with the supplied license.
HP offer computers using multiple types of motherboards, multiple types and quantities of CPUs, multiple types and quantities of RAM.
They don't offer the same choice regarding the operating system, despite the fact that multiple choices are available.
Also, by choosing the motherboard, you have also decided what type of CPU and RAM you are having, so your choice in these areas is now limited to a specific range by YOUR previous choice. Thus, even if you bought a motherboard without ram or cpu, you'd still have to buy that particular type of ram and cpu in order to make the motherboard useful.
By contrast, whatever choices you make regarding hardware have very little effect on what OS you can run, unless your buying more exotic hardware like sparc or mips based systems. Thus, by being forced to buy an OS your not going to use, your being ripped off.
The trouble with trying to filter, is that the word format is a binary blob without any documentation...
It's quite easy to filter out things like the jpeg exploit, just try opening it with a jpeg library on the filter server, the exploit jpegs won't load properly and error, or you can convert them on the fly to another image format.
Ofcourse this brings up a risk to your server, but the risk is much smaller, the server is likely to be hardened, could be running many different os's on several different hardware platforms, won't be running the code as a privileged user, and could easily be running it inside of a chroot. If you were to use something like grsecurity on linux, you could make sure the risky parsing code ran inside of a chroot, did not have the ability to write anywhere (except its input/output pipes) and did not have the ability to open sockets or execute any additional programs.
When you know the format, you can cut out a large percentage of exploits by validating the contents of the format against what the specs say it should contain, you can then sanitise parts of the file if necessary, or convert it into another (compatible) format.
Ofcourse it's not foolproof, but it raises the bar much higher.
This is a very good reason not to allow unknown binary data to be transferred in/out of your network.
Strange...
My car had a huge array of choices when i was buying it... I could choose wether or not i wanted aircon, electric seats, leather, etc etc... I could also choose which style of rims i wanted and what brand and type of tyres i wanted on them.
There's also the difference that, tyres, like oil and sparkplugs, are expendable... Your going to have to buy new tyres for your car sooner or later, since the old ones will wear out. So it's more like including ink with a printer.
Assuming that sony produce accelerated 3d drivers for X11 on the PS3, then you could program graphics through OpenGL or SDL etc...
Given that, a game written for the PS3 could easily work with just a simple recompile on any system running linux, and potentially OSX/BSD aswell, assuming it doesn't require the advanced features of the Cell processor (tho it could still potentially run on one of those cell based IBM servers).
Well, why would you be intending to setup a mythtv box using multiple cpus?
Most people using such machines, want something small and quiet....
You could have the machines hibernate (so your application states are saved) and have them configured to start up 10 minutes before your due to be in the office...
When you leave you just hibernate and walk out, the time it takes to write the image is not your concern, and it will power itself off when done... And when you come back, it's there waiting for you.
I bought an xbox specifically because i could copy games to the HD...
Losing or damaging the media is irritating, plus if i want to take it anywhere (friends place, hotel etc) i have much less bits to worry about.
No, unix was widely used as both clients and servers...
For a good while, the internet was populated entirely by unix machines, are you saying they were all servers? Universities of the day had labs full of unix clients.
What point is a server with no clients to access them?
A dumb terminal is just an IO device, it's not a computer in it's own right.
I can't speak for mac, but windows was quite a way behind amigaos in many areas, including IP networking.
A missing feature is also a bug report...
The bug tracking system has facilities to propose new features in much the same way as bugs.
Also, since one of the goals is compatibility with msoffice, a feature missing from openoffice which is supported by msoffice _IS_ a bug.
Because that's what excel supports...
If openoffice supported more, and people started using the extra rows and then tried exporting their spreadsheets to be loaded into excel, it would be openoffice that was seen as broken.
As per the original post you replied to...
Microsoft won't fully comply with the standard, and other vendors will be forced to reverse engineer their nonstandard implementation in order to be compatible with it.
And because their software is so widely used, people will (incorrectly) assume that every other implementation is the broken one. Just look at the web, and how horrendously broken IE is.
A large battery backed up cache and lots of ram works well.
On my machines, writes to the disk finish almost instantly (and the raid controller carries out the actual writing in the background), the entire os gets loaded into memory and stays there for the duration (i keep the machine running, never reboot it) as do my apps...
The only files i regularly use that are really too large to cache are things like video, which are only needed at a certain rate (for playback) anyway.
We still have a 100Mb disk from around 1989, located in a MicroVAX... This machine has been running 24/7 since then, and the original drive still works.