They also state in the demonstration program that the software renderer would not be fast enough to run the demo and thus is disabled. I dispute that. A software renderer should be fast enough to do what that demo does considering the world detail. Also, one of the features of the software renderer is that it has a z-buffer. I wouldn't say that this is a feature, it's more of a necessity.
I tried the demonstation program. It runs at 75fps until the female runner and jumper are displayed, then it drops down to around 35. Curiously, the character meshes seem to be antialiased and run at 10fps, when the world is not antialiased and runs at about 30-40 FPS when the characters are displayed.
There are stencil buffer bugs when the shadows of the character meshes are hidden behind a partical effect such as the flames.
I would not call this engine "fast" from the demo. Sure, the flyby ran at 75fps but the world geometry was extremely simple, and I would have expected at least 70-100fps from that without vsync enabled. I can imagine that when character meshes and moving brushes are added this thing will crawl. I imagine this is because they strive for cross-platform portability on the processor side of things and thus (I'm guessing) there's no optimizations (MMX/SSE/SSE2 assembler etc) in the matrix transforms. Someone may want to correct me on that one since I havent looked at the source.
Eventually Zalman will release the HeatCase/FlowerCase: A gigantic flowercooler heatsync that also functions as a regular computer case. Just insert your motherboard and cards and pump in a gallon of heat transmissive grease. We really need some better way of cooling CPUs, and if anyone mentions peltier you will get what's coming to you.
What about cache sync? Educate me here but I would have thought that a double-sized shared cache would be faster than two seperate caches that have to be synced all the time. Am I an idiot?
makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen
Material to be "stolen", eh? Nobody's stealing stuff from me if I offer it up online for them to take. Makes as much sense as "Officer, my house was burgled after I swung open the door and yelled 'please burgle my house'". It's only indirect theft from the record companies as well. If I broke into someone's flat and pinched all their CDs, I wouldn't be stealing from the record company, I'd be stealing from whoever I just robbed. I wouldn't be making any money from the action either, so it's not like the record company is watching money that should go to them go somewhere else, all they're watching is money not go anywhere at all, and they don't like that.
Music has to come from somewhere. Currently it's coming out of record companies, who are consistently saying "how the hell do we create an audio track that people can listen to without being able to copy it". This is a pipedream. If you can listen to it and it's on a shiney disc, it MUST go through a DAC at some stage, and that's where your entry point as a copier is. Even with a decent analog system you can make a perfectly fine copy just off the line out.
If you download a copy of something, rest assured that at least someone somewhere must have bought it. Perhaps now the best thing for the record companies to do is auction off one single original copy of an album with bidding starting at six million dollars, wait for a community of fans to get the funds together and buy it, then watch it spread across the net, safe in the knowledge that they got a guaranteed six million dollars from an album before anyone had even heard it.
Many hardware manufacturers will simply not provide open source drivers for their products, mainly for marketing reasons. Imagine you're a video card manufacturer. You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards. So you try to disable overclocking in the driver (presumably by making the driver reclock the card to the correct frequencies, thus undoing the work of any overclocking software). If you release open source drivers, it'd be pretty easy for hacked drivers to be released that allow people to overclock, even though you dont want them to.
I think the precise reason that OEMs are releasing closed source drivers for Linux is so that they can get in before someone tries to reverse engineer their hardware and pass off some shoddy drivers that cast their hardware or their development team in a bad light. They want to be sure that people use the original drivers for Linux that they support, not some crazy third party ones. They certainly do not want support requests about drivers that they didn't even develop. Releasing open source drivers creates a lot of questions. How do you distribute the drivers? If someone out there fixes bugs in your driver, what's the procedure for implementing these fixes into the main distribution? What legal rights does anyone who adds fixes to the driver have if their fixes are implemented into the main distribution? Do you pay them or do you just thank them? Will you lay off your own developers once you notice that the community is developing the drivers and not you? Will you become lethargic in your testing of new drivers when you realise that you can release shoddy open source code quickly, and the community will fix it for you?
From an OEM's perspective, open sourcing drivers is a pain in the ass. It sounds like it'd make the development team feel less secure in their jobs (if there's a bunch of people out there that will do their job for free, why are they still employed?) and less determined to write good code when they can pass the buck to an external community.
You hit a serious problem when you're a professional company earning money from selling hardware, and then outsource one sector of your company to the community. People like Intel have done this, but have dissociated the Intel brand from the open source project as much as possible and turned it into a kind of "novelty" project like "this is what our guys work on when they go home in the evening!". I think that to a lot of companies, open source is merely a device used to improve the company image, to make them seem more forward thinking and relaxed, and get them some damn good press and the lifelong devotion of a great deal of short-sighted nerds ("These guys make things open source, so I'll buy their products because I support open source, even though they're moneygrabbing assholes in everything else that they do").
The only drivers regular profit-making companies can support are closed source drivers developed in-house. As soon as you implement the code of other people or allow some random guy you don't know access to your CVS to do a few check-ins, you cannot claim to offer any support for the product whatsoever, because people who have worked on it are not your employees and you are not responsible for anything they do, and are consequently no longer responsible for work done on your own driver, which you would like to be able to legally own, support, endorse and distribute with your product as your own (unless you claim responsibility for all work done on the driver by third parties, which would be incredibly foolish). There are also various laws concerning how companies can may make use of contributions from third parties, and what rights anyone who contributes to a company has. Laws concerning competition may also apply here - once the community develops your driver and effectively does work for free that you'd normally pay people to do, isn't that a seriously unfair advantage? Can you give an example of any company that ha
So now Microsoft is taking the fall for America's lacklustre level of cultural awareness. Companies do this all the time, and I'm only surprised that Microsoft havent done this a lot more, when you think of the amount of products and services it provides across the globe.
I like the way the article neglets to inform us which part of Windows 95 was to blame, or which game(s) were causing offence. Perhaps things would suddenly become understandable and cause the article to lose some of it's bashing impact had these details been presented.
The only map I can think of in '95 was the for setting the timezone, and as I remember all of that map was the same shade of green. It does sound a bit bitchy to make kashmir a special exception, so I'd like to know what part of Win95 this map was actually in, and whether other parts of the world had special shades of green too.
OK, so here we have yet another manual on how to use a desktop. How do I surf web?! Double click Mozilla icon! If you're having difficulties remembering that Mozilla is a web browser, rename the icon "WEB BROWSER".
Linux is "ready for the desktop", it's been ready for years. What it isn't ready for is typical desktop users. The various linux desktops out there are very nice and accommodate most of the stuff that typical desktop users would want to do. However, where Linux fails the typical desktop user is on three key points:
Now, before I get the misconceptions brigade sticking their placards up my bottom, I should point out that there are some great tools to help you install and de-install applications on Linux. A lot of them are unfortunately based around RPM, which is a pretty dreadful package format at best. Users need to adopt a new mindset when installing things on Linux.
Firstly, there's problems in the community, especially with with Linux app websites and naming things. "Binary". What is a binary? It sure isn't an executable file. A JPEG is a binary. This will confuse users who have no idea what a binary is. Binary packages should be renamed "Installation packages", and directed at users (i.e. they should be offered first, the source distribution should be offered in a developer section of a site).
Second, it's with dependencies. What is a dependency? Why does this application I just downloaded complain that I don't have some seemingly unrelated application installed? "Well that's because the seemingly unrelated application provides shared object files that your application needs. You could try and download the statically linke---" AARGH. Distribute the shared objects required along with your installation packages. If they're already in the system, your installer should detect this and not update system files (like Windows does). Dependencies are the number one reason that installing stuff on Linux can be a real pain.
Another thing wrong is what happens when stuff goes wrong. Who do you call? Usually your mate who knows a bit about this Linux thing and can fix it up for you. Failing that, you go to an internet café and trawl through endless forums and howto's, which you probably won't be able to find, let alone make sense of, being a typical desktop user.
You want to install drivers for something? Forget it. This sometimes even involves recompiling your OS kernel in extreme situations. Rarely will an installer be happy to help you with the installation process for drivers. You're expected to know how, and you're expected to read and understand the terminology used in the INSTALL file which is normally something along the lines of "we used automake, so it's the standard process for that, configure, make, make install". To which the end user says "what?!".
Most Linux advocates instantly seem to shrug off the idea that a user would want to do something as technical as installing the drivers for the new scanner they just bought at Walmart.
The above problems are not the fault of Linux, but of the state of the community. For Linux to become more user friendly, the community needs to become more user friendly. Mozilla's website is a good example of something heading in the right direction, with friendly icons and simple instructions. However, most other software sites are lagging behind.
Linux needs to standardize installation and setup procedures between distros to make the process of installing and setting up each application familiar.
The problem is that Linux started out as a hackers OS, whereas Win32 started out as MS-DOS: an idiot's OS. DOS was simple. Underpowered, yes, badly written, yes, but simple. Windows has always tried to build on simplicity (and it has pretty much failed but what the hell). Linux has to somehow dumb down most of it's doctrines for end users. Simplifying downwards is a lot
I've downloaded a movie. It was an MPEG of a chimp scratching it's ass and falling off a branch. I sure hope the MPAA don't come round my house to bust my bollocks, because that would be intolerable. I also downloaded one boatload of pornographic movie files this past few years. I hope the MPAA doesn't make me pay for those, because they were free.
Our country listens to mobile phone calls (you can tell when a light echo of your voice kicks in)
That's bullshit. The echo is simply a reflection from the receiver's end of the call, and happens if they have a shitty phone or phone line. They get crosstalk from the earpiece into the mic. Normally it's not noticeable on landline-to-landline calls because the transport of audio is pretty much instantaneous, but on the cell network buffering, compression overhead and switching all play a part in delaying the audio a bit. This is why you hear an echo. Why would wiretapping cause an echo? Do you not think that any wiretapping worth its salt would be indetectable to the users, especially on a digital network such as the cell network?
So bloody what. This is not news, it's been known by every audiophile on the planet since the inception of transistors. Transistors clip more harshly than tubes. Tubes clip softly, transistors clip sharply. If you want to go loud without clipping, buy a better amplifier.
Right, so now there are MP3 players out there boasting SRS and WOW and a lot of other Bass/audio management effects. All these things had EQs on them before anyway, and I absolutely hate all this "TruBass" and "MegaBass" nonsense. If you want decent bass you should:
1. Buy a decent MP3 player with a good amp and decompressors in it (read: not an iPod. They look the part but the sound quality is not brilliant)
2. Buy some decent headphones
If you need to add artificial bass and effects to make things sound good, something's wrong somewhere in your set-up. I much prefer my music unadulterated by gimmics.
If you have made promises like that to your former company, it's a pretty dumb idea to name the software that publically breaks those promises with your own name.
"Hay guys, I won't develop any social networking services for rival companies or use the code I wrote for you!"
"Cool Orkut, thanks, that'd be legally binding then."
*several months later*
"Hmm, I think I'll call the service 'Orkut'. They'll never know it was me."
Nice tricks, I quite like the concept, but I'd never trust my car to park itself, I sure couldn't just walk off like Captain Naked did.
Plus, I'm a firm believer in the fact that IF YOU CANNOT PARK YOUR CAR, YOU SHOULD NOT BE BLOODY DRIVING. This system would, however, be excellent for teaching learner drivers - especially the guided-steering incarnation of it (where it shows you how to steer and lets you do the steering, rather than doing the steering itself).
Macrovision's stance on copy protection is to DISCOURAGE people easilly copying stuff. They are not so naive as to imagine that they will STOP people copying things, but they put things like this in your way to make copying tracks more of an inconvenience.
After all, you can always rip the track by playing it on a CD player with SP-DIF output, or even record it over an analogue connection. The protection is there to make ripping more difficult. They freely admit that if you can listen to it, then you can copy it. Any audio on a CD must go through a simple DAC at some point so you can hear it, and that point is the point where you can rip it in full fidelity (if at realtime speeds).
Who the hell are these guys? I'm glad the game publishing industry is so clued up on these things that nobody uses. If they were really serious they'd go after Alcohol Software or Elaborate Bytes, both of whom offer CD/DVD copying software with options to "break" copy protection. Of course they don't "break" the copy protection at all, they simply copy the copy protection.
As Macrovision (creators of SafeDisc) have said in the past, their products are not so much copy protection as copy dissuasion: making it more of a pain in the ass to copy stuff. And it sure is. Copying a SafeDisced game takes hours in raw mode, as exactly duplicating the ECC/EDC data on the disc is a painfully slow process (probably because ECC/EDC checking has to be done in software for every block when it's disabled on the drive).
Anyway, all the above is besides the point. 321Studios have made a critical error which I see as remarkably foolish: Marketing their product as "HAY GUYS, SOFTWAREZ TO KOPY UR GAMEZ!" Who in their right mind would do this and not expect their ass to be kicked severely by some legal body? You don't get any more obvious than calling it "GameXCopy" which is a name that doesn't even make sense anyway. What the hell is the X about? Other software remains legal because it sells itself on the fact you can create exact clones of any CD for back up purposes: not just games.
It's not this kind of software they should be going after anyway. People don't copy games onto another CD anymore. People create images of a game and distribute it over the internet. It's considerably easier to create an image file, and from what I can tell GameXCopy doesn't let you do this. Furthermore, software such as Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120% and Virtual CloneDVD will let you mount ripped protected images in Windows as if they were a CD-ROM drive. Just download and mount. No burning. Surely this should be what they're worried about?
We're redefining what the PDA is. Mobile phones are swiftly becoming the new PDA. They store contacts, run software, play MP3s, games, etc as well as having the handy ability to make phone calls. I think the PDA is not dead, it's just merging with mobile phones, which is a lot more useful device than the plain old PDA.
.NET removes this object and this is probably why it hasn't received a patch yet. But, now this "Explosive hole" has been blown in IE, there will probably be a patch soon (MS only patches when things go medium or critical, and this flaw was not exploited in the wild and has not gone "critical" up until now, despite what security sites say). I can't comment on what Microsoft chooses to patch and when because I don't work for them, and I know there are many holes unpatched in IE.
Sadly the biggest security flaw is the user, no matter what browser or OS they use. And you can't patch them. In every case it's more of a PEBKAC issue than anything else, and I realise IE's auto component-install service has not exactly helped here, since it's still the best way to exploit machines (make the user click "OK" on the big and confusing box that appears).
"Riiiight... Like how Apache has a larger market share than IIS, and it has way less security vulnerabilities."
Apache is not a tool for end users and neither is IIS. Therefore there it does not apply to my point. IIS is insecure because IT HAS LESS MARKET SHARE THAN APACHE. Do you see now? Probably not. You say that Apache has very few holes, well, that's because
a) Apache is more mature than IIS and more widespread and all those holes have been found and fixed in the same manner that the holes in the widespread IE browser are being found and fixed
b) YOU never get told about the holes or the holes are never found because open source projects don't get the press that end-user tools such as IE get.
The press report Microsoft security holes. Certain massive holes such as the OpenSSL hole that appeared a year or two ago don't get any generalized press because the public wouldn't understand them or the press don't understand them.
"I'm sure there's plenty more holes in IE left to be found, and many more will be created when other crap is stacked on top of it and leveraged by the operating system."
Probably not as many holes as are waiting to be found in non-dominant browsers such as Opera or Mozilla because they have not had the exposure to people looking for such holes as Internet Explorer has had. Plus, you have no logic or evidence to support your point, thus your point is void.
"A good thing is healthy competition, and good open source alternatives should make Microsoft improve the quality of their products to compete; we have just started to see that."
To compete with what? Microsoft are not worried by Linux on the desktop. On the desktop they're worried by Macs, and always have been. The whole Start menu was ripped right out of a Mac, in fact the majority of the Windows interface was. The KDE/Gnome interface? Well that was ripped out of Windows AND Macs. Sadly it's not the best of both worlds. Microsoft are worried about Linux/UNIX in business, which is where Microsoft gets its main source of revenue. This is why you only ever see ads for business products from Microsoft (especially on Open Source/Linux oriented sites -- hello Linux Today). In the desktop arena the only people Microsoft is currently competing with in real terms, real life, in the real fucking world where you buy your software off the shelf in WalMart is the crackers. It's not Linux or UNIX that is making Microsoft compete more in DESKTOP arenas, it's Macs, and it always has been.
How true this is, and it's what a lot of people forget before jumping on the bandwaggon to badmouth Microsoft and Internet Explorer. The only bad thing that Internet Explorer has done is to create a whole bunch of websites that only work properly in Internet Explorer, but that's a web developers/designers fault, not IEs.
Given widespread distribution to the tune of over 80% usage (according to various webstats I've looked at) IE probably is one of the more secure browsers. I've made this point before about the security of the Windows OS. The fact is, if your browser dominates the market then any security holes are found quickly by miscreants and (hopefully) patched. You'll notice the complexity of this hole is quite advanced, looks like we're running out of holes to find in IE.
Slashdot Mirror
They also state in the demonstration program that the software renderer would not be fast enough to run the demo and thus is disabled. I dispute that. A software renderer should be fast enough to do what that demo does considering the world detail. Also, one of the features of the software renderer is that it has a z-buffer. I wouldn't say that this is a feature, it's more of a necessity.
I tried the demonstation program. It runs at 75fps until the female runner and jumper are displayed, then it drops down to around 35. Curiously, the character meshes seem to be antialiased and run at 10fps, when the world is not antialiased and runs at about 30-40 FPS when the characters are displayed.
There are stencil buffer bugs when the shadows of the character meshes are hidden behind a partical effect such as the flames.
I would not call this engine "fast" from the demo. Sure, the flyby ran at 75fps but the world geometry was extremely simple, and I would have expected at least 70-100fps from that without vsync enabled. I can imagine that when character meshes and moving brushes are added this thing will crawl. I imagine this is because they strive for cross-platform portability on the processor side of things and thus (I'm guessing) there's no optimizations (MMX/SSE/SSE2 assembler etc) in the matrix transforms. Someone may want to correct me on that one since I havent looked at the source.
A good try, but Just Another 3D Engine for now.
Eventually Zalman will release the HeatCase/FlowerCase: A gigantic flowercooler heatsync that also functions as a regular computer case. Just insert your motherboard and cards and pump in a gallon of heat transmissive grease. We really need some better way of cooling CPUs, and if anyone mentions peltier you will get what's coming to you.
Yeah I was right. The only reason I might be an idiot is because I didn't read comments posted above mine.
What about cache sync? Educate me here but I would have thought that a double-sized shared cache would be faster than two seperate caches that have to be synced all the time. Am I an idiot?
Because you touch yourself in bed.
makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen
Material to be "stolen", eh? Nobody's stealing stuff from me if I offer it up online for them to take. Makes as much sense as "Officer, my house was burgled after I swung open the door and yelled 'please burgle my house'". It's only indirect theft from the record companies as well. If I broke into someone's flat and pinched all their CDs, I wouldn't be stealing from the record company, I'd be stealing from whoever I just robbed. I wouldn't be making any money from the action either, so it's not like the record company is watching money that should go to them go somewhere else, all they're watching is money not go anywhere at all, and they don't like that.
Music has to come from somewhere. Currently it's coming out of record companies, who are consistently saying "how the hell do we create an audio track that people can listen to without being able to copy it". This is a pipedream. If you can listen to it and it's on a shiney disc, it MUST go through a DAC at some stage, and that's where your entry point as a copier is. Even with a decent analog system you can make a perfectly fine copy just off the line out.
If you download a copy of something, rest assured that at least someone somewhere must have bought it. Perhaps now the best thing for the record companies to do is auction off one single original copy of an album with bidding starting at six million dollars, wait for a community of fans to get the funds together and buy it, then watch it spread across the net, safe in the knowledge that they got a guaranteed six million dollars from an album before anyone had even heard it.
Many hardware manufacturers will simply not provide open source drivers for their products, mainly for marketing reasons. Imagine you're a video card manufacturer. You realise people are overclocking your previous line of cards instead of buying the new faster range of cards. So you try to disable overclocking in the driver (presumably by making the driver reclock the card to the correct frequencies, thus undoing the work of any overclocking software). If you release open source drivers, it'd be pretty easy for hacked drivers to be released that allow people to overclock, even though you dont want them to.
I think the precise reason that OEMs are releasing closed source drivers for Linux is so that they can get in before someone tries to reverse engineer their hardware and pass off some shoddy drivers that cast their hardware or their development team in a bad light. They want to be sure that people use the original drivers for Linux that they support, not some crazy third party ones. They certainly do not want support requests about drivers that they didn't even develop. Releasing open source drivers creates a lot of questions. How do you distribute the drivers? If someone out there fixes bugs in your driver, what's the procedure for implementing these fixes into the main distribution? What legal rights does anyone who adds fixes to the driver have if their fixes are implemented into the main distribution? Do you pay them or do you just thank them? Will you lay off your own developers once you notice that the community is developing the drivers and not you? Will you become lethargic in your testing of new drivers when you realise that you can release shoddy open source code quickly, and the community will fix it for you?
From an OEM's perspective, open sourcing drivers is a pain in the ass. It sounds like it'd make the development team feel less secure in their jobs (if there's a bunch of people out there that will do their job for free, why are they still employed?) and less determined to write good code when they can pass the buck to an external community.
You hit a serious problem when you're a professional company earning money from selling hardware, and then outsource one sector of your company to the community. People like Intel have done this, but have dissociated the Intel brand from the open source project as much as possible and turned it into a kind of "novelty" project like "this is what our guys work on when they go home in the evening!". I think that to a lot of companies, open source is merely a device used to improve the company image, to make them seem more forward thinking and relaxed, and get them some damn good press and the lifelong devotion of a great deal of short-sighted nerds ("These guys make things open source, so I'll buy their products because I support open source, even though they're moneygrabbing assholes in everything else that they do").
The only drivers regular profit-making companies can support are closed source drivers developed in-house. As soon as you implement the code of other people or allow some random guy you don't know access to your CVS to do a few check-ins, you cannot claim to offer any support for the product whatsoever, because people who have worked on it are not your employees and you are not responsible for anything they do, and are consequently no longer responsible for work done on your own driver, which you would like to be able to legally own, support, endorse and distribute with your product as your own (unless you claim responsibility for all work done on the driver by third parties, which would be incredibly foolish). There are also various laws concerning how companies can may make use of contributions from third parties, and what rights anyone who contributes to a company has. Laws concerning competition may also apply here - once the community develops your driver and effectively does work for free that you'd normally pay people to do, isn't that a seriously unfair advantage? Can you give an example of any company that ha
Your apps were faulty, not your OS.
So now Microsoft is taking the fall for America's lacklustre level of cultural awareness. Companies do this all the time, and I'm only surprised that Microsoft havent done this a lot more, when you think of the amount of products and services it provides across the globe.
I like the way the article neglets to inform us which part of Windows 95 was to blame, or which game(s) were causing offence. Perhaps things would suddenly become understandable and cause the article to lose some of it's bashing impact had these details been presented.
The only map I can think of in '95 was the for setting the timezone, and as I remember all of that map was the same shade of green. It does sound a bit bitchy to make kashmir a special exception, so I'd like to know what part of Win95 this map was actually in, and whether other parts of the world had special shades of green too.
OK, so here we have yet another manual on how to use a desktop. How do I surf web?! Double click Mozilla icon! If you're having difficulties remembering that Mozilla is a web browser, rename the icon "WEB BROWSER".
Linux is "ready for the desktop", it's been ready for years. What it isn't ready for is typical desktop users. The various linux desktops out there are very nice and accommodate most of the stuff that typical desktop users would want to do. However, where Linux fails the typical desktop user is on three key points:
Software/Driver installation
Software/Driver deinstallation and/or upgrade
Troubleshooting
Now, before I get the misconceptions brigade sticking their placards up my bottom, I should point out that there are some great tools to help you install and de-install applications on Linux. A lot of them are unfortunately based around RPM, which is a pretty dreadful package format at best. Users need to adopt a new mindset when installing things on Linux.
Firstly, there's problems in the community, especially with with Linux app websites and naming things. "Binary". What is a binary? It sure isn't an executable file. A JPEG is a binary. This will confuse users who have no idea what a binary is. Binary packages should be renamed "Installation packages", and directed at users (i.e. they should be offered first, the source distribution should be offered in a developer section of a site).
Second, it's with dependencies. What is a dependency? Why does this application I just downloaded complain that I don't have some seemingly unrelated application installed? "Well that's because the seemingly unrelated application provides shared object files that your application needs. You could try and download the statically linke---" AARGH. Distribute the shared objects required along with your installation packages. If they're already in the system, your installer should detect this and not update system files (like Windows does). Dependencies are the number one reason that installing stuff on Linux can be a real pain.
Another thing wrong is what happens when stuff goes wrong. Who do you call? Usually your mate who knows a bit about this Linux thing and can fix it up for you. Failing that, you go to an internet café and trawl through endless forums and howto's, which you probably won't be able to find, let alone make sense of, being a typical desktop user.
You want to install drivers for something? Forget it. This sometimes even involves recompiling your OS kernel in extreme situations. Rarely will an installer be happy to help you with the installation process for drivers. You're expected to know how, and you're expected to read and understand the terminology used in the INSTALL file which is normally something along the lines of "we used automake, so it's the standard process for that, configure, make, make install". To which the end user says "what?!".
Most Linux advocates instantly seem to shrug off the idea that a user would want to do something as technical as installing the drivers for the new scanner they just bought at Walmart.
The above problems are not the fault of Linux, but of the state of the community. For Linux to become more user friendly, the community needs to become more user friendly. Mozilla's website is a good example of something heading in the right direction, with friendly icons and simple instructions. However, most other software sites are lagging behind.
Linux needs to standardize installation and setup procedures between distros to make the process of installing and setting up each application familiar.
The problem is that Linux started out as a hackers OS, whereas Win32 started out as MS-DOS: an idiot's OS. DOS was simple. Underpowered, yes, badly written, yes, but simple. Windows has always tried to build on simplicity (and it has pretty much failed but what the hell). Linux has to somehow dumb down most of it's doctrines for end users. Simplifying downwards is a lot
I've downloaded a movie. It was an MPEG of a chimp scratching it's ass and falling off a branch. I sure hope the MPAA don't come round my house to bust my bollocks, because that would be intolerable. I also downloaded one boatload of pornographic movie files this past few years. I hope the MPAA doesn't make me pay for those, because they were free.
Gee, I must be one of the four!
Our country listens to mobile phone calls (you can tell when a light echo of your voice kicks in)
That's bullshit. The echo is simply a reflection from the receiver's end of the call, and happens if they have a shitty phone or phone line. They get crosstalk from the earpiece into the mic. Normally it's not noticeable on landline-to-landline calls because the transport of audio is pretty much instantaneous, but on the cell network buffering, compression overhead and switching all play a part in delaying the audio a bit. This is why you hear an echo. Why would wiretapping cause an echo? Do you not think that any wiretapping worth its salt would be indetectable to the users, especially on a digital network such as the cell network?
So bloody what. This is not news, it's been known by every audiophile on the planet since the inception of transistors. Transistors clip more harshly than tubes. Tubes clip softly, transistors clip sharply. If you want to go loud without clipping, buy a better amplifier.
Man that's how I always imagined a triffid. Interesting that it's called the amorphophalus. Clearly whoever discovered it had a sense of humour.
Right, so now there are MP3 players out there boasting SRS and WOW and a lot of other Bass/audio management effects. All these things had EQs on them before anyway, and I absolutely hate all this "TruBass" and "MegaBass" nonsense. If you want decent bass you should:
1. Buy a decent MP3 player with a good amp and decompressors in it (read: not an iPod. They look the part but the sound quality is not brilliant)
2. Buy some decent headphones
If you need to add artificial bass and effects to make things sound good, something's wrong somewhere in your set-up. I much prefer my music unadulterated by gimmics.
If you have made promises like that to your former company, it's a pretty dumb idea to name the software that publically breaks those promises with your own name.
"Hay guys, I won't develop any social networking services for rival companies or use the code I wrote for you!"
"Cool Orkut, thanks, that'd be legally binding then."
*several months later*
"Hmm, I think I'll call the service 'Orkut'. They'll never know it was me."
Nice tricks, I quite like the concept, but I'd never trust my car to park itself, I sure couldn't just walk off like Captain Naked did.
Plus, I'm a firm believer in the fact that IF YOU CANNOT PARK YOUR CAR, YOU SHOULD NOT BE BLOODY DRIVING. This system would, however, be excellent for teaching learner drivers - especially the guided-steering incarnation of it (where it shows you how to steer and lets you do the steering, rather than doing the steering itself).
Macrovision's stance on copy protection is to DISCOURAGE people easilly copying stuff. They are not so naive as to imagine that they will STOP people copying things, but they put things like this in your way to make copying tracks more of an inconvenience. After all, you can always rip the track by playing it on a CD player with SP-DIF output, or even record it over an analogue connection. The protection is there to make ripping more difficult. They freely admit that if you can listen to it, then you can copy it. Any audio on a CD must go through a simple DAC at some point so you can hear it, and that point is the point where you can rip it in full fidelity (if at realtime speeds).
That crossed my mind as well, but that doesn't make sense. xcopy copied recursively. So?
Who the hell are these guys? I'm glad the game publishing industry is so clued up on these things that nobody uses. If they were really serious they'd go after Alcohol Software or Elaborate Bytes, both of whom offer CD/DVD copying software with options to "break" copy protection. Of course they don't "break" the copy protection at all, they simply copy the copy protection.
As Macrovision (creators of SafeDisc) have said in the past, their products are not so much copy protection as copy dissuasion: making it more of a pain in the ass to copy stuff. And it sure is. Copying a SafeDisced game takes hours in raw mode, as exactly duplicating the ECC/EDC data on the disc is a painfully slow process (probably because ECC/EDC checking has to be done in software for every block when it's disabled on the drive).
Anyway, all the above is besides the point. 321Studios have made a critical error which I see as remarkably foolish: Marketing their product as "HAY GUYS, SOFTWAREZ TO KOPY UR GAMEZ!" Who in their right mind would do this and not expect their ass to be kicked severely by some legal body? You don't get any more obvious than calling it "GameXCopy" which is a name that doesn't even make sense anyway. What the hell is the X about? Other software remains legal because it sells itself on the fact you can create exact clones of any CD for back up purposes: not just games.
It's not this kind of software they should be going after anyway. People don't copy games onto another CD anymore. People create images of a game and distribute it over the internet. It's considerably easier to create an image file, and from what I can tell GameXCopy doesn't let you do this. Furthermore, software such as Daemon Tools, Alcohol 120% and Virtual CloneDVD will let you mount ripped protected images in Windows as if they were a CD-ROM drive. Just download and mount. No burning. Surely this should be what they're worried about?
We're redefining what the PDA is. Mobile phones are swiftly becoming the new PDA. They store contacts, run software, play MP3s, games, etc as well as having the handy ability to make phone calls. I think the PDA is not dead, it's just merging with mobile phones, which is a lot more useful device than the plain old PDA.
.NET removes this object and this is probably why it hasn't received a patch yet. But, now this "Explosive hole" has been blown in IE, there will probably be a patch soon (MS only patches when things go medium or critical, and this flaw was not exploited in the wild and has not gone "critical" up until now, despite what security sites say). I can't comment on what Microsoft chooses to patch and when because I don't work for them, and I know there are many holes unpatched in IE.
Sadly the biggest security flaw is the user, no matter what browser or OS they use. And you can't patch them. In every case it's more of a PEBKAC issue than anything else, and I realise IE's auto component-install service has not exactly helped here, since it's still the best way to exploit machines (make the user click "OK" on the big and confusing box that appears).
"Riiiight... Like how Apache has a larger market share than IIS, and it has way less security vulnerabilities."
Apache is not a tool for end users and neither is IIS. Therefore there it does not apply to my point. IIS is insecure because IT HAS LESS MARKET SHARE THAN APACHE. Do you see now? Probably not. You say that Apache has very few holes, well, that's because
a) Apache is more mature than IIS and more widespread and all those holes have been found and fixed in the same manner that the holes in the widespread IE browser are being found and fixed
b) YOU never get told about the holes or the holes are never found because open source projects don't get the press that end-user tools such as IE get.
The press report Microsoft security holes. Certain massive holes such as the OpenSSL hole that appeared a year or two ago don't get any generalized press because the public wouldn't understand them or the press don't understand them.
"I'm sure there's plenty more holes in IE left to be found, and many more will be created when other crap is stacked on top of it and leveraged by the operating system."
Probably not as many holes as are waiting to be found in non-dominant browsers such as Opera or Mozilla because they have not had the exposure to people looking for such holes as Internet Explorer has had. Plus, you have no logic or evidence to support your point, thus your point is void.
"A good thing is healthy competition, and good open source alternatives should make Microsoft improve the quality of their products to compete; we have just started to see that."
To compete with what? Microsoft are not worried by Linux on the desktop. On the desktop they're worried by Macs, and always have been. The whole Start menu was ripped right out of a Mac, in fact the majority of the Windows interface was. The KDE/Gnome interface? Well that was ripped out of Windows AND Macs. Sadly it's not the best of both worlds. Microsoft are worried about Linux/UNIX in business, which is where Microsoft gets its main source of revenue. This is why you only ever see ads for business products from Microsoft (especially on Open Source/Linux oriented sites -- hello Linux Today). In the desktop arena the only people Microsoft is currently competing with in real terms, real life, in the real fucking world where you buy your software off the shelf in WalMart is the crackers. It's not Linux or UNIX that is making Microsoft compete more in DESKTOP arenas, it's Macs, and it always has been.
Nothing's a fortress
How true this is, and it's what a lot of people forget before jumping on the bandwaggon to badmouth Microsoft and Internet Explorer. The only bad thing that Internet Explorer has done is to create a whole bunch of websites that only work properly in Internet Explorer, but that's a web developers/designers fault, not IEs.
Given widespread distribution to the tune of over 80% usage (according to various webstats I've looked at) IE probably is one of the more secure browsers. I've made this point before about the security of the Windows OS. The fact is, if your browser dominates the market then any security holes are found quickly by miscreants and (hopefully) patched. You'll notice the complexity of this hole is quite advanced, looks like we're running out of holes to find in IE.
And that surely is a good thing?