The difference is that, while a major open source project might not accept your "patch of the day", you could fork the project into one that *does* include your patch.
Of course, for major project, forking is usually "in theory" thing rather than a practical thing.
I was wondering how slashdot would report this story. I knew that they would give it negative spin because it's not open source, but I didn't think they would actually try to suggest that Microsoft claimed that this was open source and then bash them for not meeting that claim.
Microsoft fully acknowledges that this code is to be released under MSRL, "Microsoft Reference Licenese", which Microsoft does not claim to be an open source license (it is not one of the Ms licenses that were submitted to OSI).
But the code is still valuable as it eases debugging. This similar to Microsoft's providing the source code to ATL, MFC, and their CRT. Much of this code was already available under Rotor2, but now we get lots more code, including WinForms and WPF, and more will be rleased in the future.
And it's not just code, but Microsoft including integrated debugging of.NET libs into VS 2008, including downloading the appropriate source from Microsoft's site on demand. There are other goodies as well.
1. Vista's OpenFile dialogs do allow for customization, and most apps do open the dialiog to the locaiton where it was last used in that app, even persisting that state from previous sessions..NET apps have been doing that for years.
2. Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason. Apple HAD to create Expose to fix that Mac-unique problem.
3. "And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap."
This reveals that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Vista does do awyay with the "My ***" stuff, and renames "Documents and Settings" to "Users". So where XP had "c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents", Vista has "C:\Users\[username]\Documents". I'd bet that the vast majority of slashdotters don't know the first thing about Vista, as evidenced by complaining about issues that don't exist, and you illustrate the point perfectly.
As for not being able to use the Escape key to kill things, I find it incredible that a Mac guy would cite that as a Windows problem. I see the spinning beachball of death constantly in Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Opera, and the escape key does NOTHING to kill whatever the app is doing. I have to sit there and wait it out, or finally kill the app altogether.
And the 8.3 file system? What the hell are you doing that you encounter 8.3 files "so many times"?
ALL OF THEM. Hollywood would love an excuse to not allow PC-playback of hi-def discs because PCs are the intruments of piracy. 99.99999999% of accumulated optical disc playback time is done by dedicated players, not PCs. Hollywood wouldn't mind missing out on PC revenue at all if they had an excuse to do so.
What's so "refreshing" about it? Wasn't Dibona a slashdot editor before he went to Google? It's not like this is hostile territory for Google posters. Slashdot is one of Google's propaganda arms. Slashdot is to Google as Fox News is to Bush.
Now, it *is* refreshing when Microsoft guys post here (and they do), because they enter hostile territory and give a different perspective than the slashdot group-think. And it *would* be refreshing for Apple guys to post here because they never post anywhere. But Google guys posting here adds absolutely nothing.
"MS should've followed Apple's playbook. Release the OS according to it's already delayed schedule, let early adopter screw with it, but don't force the new OS on people who simply want new hardware."
Huh. You must not have been around when Apple RTM'ed OSX 10.0 in a barely beta state.
"But it's kinda stupid cuz the actual females playing as females do that too."
Well, that's what females do in real life; use their feminine wiles to their advantage.;)
But your complaint is absurd. If one is unable to resist the feminine wiles of an online-character, then it's his own fault, not fault of the the person playing the female character.
I've known many that have played characters of the player's opposite sex (both men playing as women and women playing as men), and I see no problem with it. The whole point of playing RPGs (either multi-player or single-player) is to get to assume a role you could never assume in real life. The ability to choose your character's gender, ethnicity, etc, goes along with that.
This business of requiring webcams for anyone playing as a woman is the stupidest thing I've heard of in a long time.
MS has a legit reason to try to ban modded Xboxes from XBox Live becasue modded Xboxes can be used for cheating which ruins the XBox Live experience for everyone else.
As for this iPhone issue, I couldn't care less. iPhone owners are a bunch of rich spoiled brats that got these phones as status symbols. If they got pwned, that's great!
"Gyp is nowhere near the in the same league as jewed (are chinked or niggered even words?). "
Agreed. "Gypped" is more akin to "Welched", as in "He welched on paying off our bet". For some reason or another, the Welsh gained a rep among the English for not paying off debts, and thus the verb "welch" came into being. But the thing is, today 99.999% of people that use "welch" or "gypped" have no idea that it originally referred to a particular ethnic group (which is why "gypped" is spelled "jipped" a lot of the time). As such, it's nowhere in the same league as "Jewed", etc, where the ethnicity in question is clear, and therefore the bigotry is also clear.
"Up until Panther, each version of OSX ran faster than the previous one. But Tiger is definitely slower than Panther. Looks like Leopard will continue the trend."
I agree, but it must be noted that OSX 10.0 was dog slow and 10.1, while faster, was slow as well. So making 10.2 and 10.3 faster than their predecessors wasn't so remarkable.;) 10.4 is slower than 10.3 (in my experience), and 10.5 looks like it'll be slower still. So it seems that once OSX reached a decent level performance wise (10.3), Apple simply couldn't keep the speed increase trend going while adding features.
I see many here making excuses for Google ("You'll never be safe with online service providers", "There's nothing Google can do", etc) and offering solutions ("Use Firefox with Noscript", etc). But I can't help but laugh because I know that if this were about Microsoft web services being exploited, the comments would be completely different. The number of comments would be at least five times greater than they are here and would be filled with gloating and screaming over Microsoft's "incompetence" and whatnot.
You know that there is some truth in what I say.
It looks to me that there are major holes in Google's services, and they need to be called out on it, not given excuses.
The problem is that an OS is required in order to make a computer function. So one could look at a Windows PC as one item that happens to be built from components provided by different vendors.
In that light, tour desire that the user should see the price of Windows (OEM price is about $60, so it's not like users are going to care much to begin with), is akin to the user seeing the price of the battery when buying a car, or the price of the DVD drive when buying a DVD-player, or the price of the needle when buying a record player. In each case there is a third party market for the components I listed that allows the user to replace the built-in component with one he purchases from that third party market. But when buying the car, dvd player, and record player, the customer doesn't see individual prices for those components because these are components that provide a necessary function for the item to work at all.
Now you're going to make the argument that Windows has a monopoly position in its particular component market. First, I'm sure there are other components markets that are equally dominated by a single manufacturer, but second, the argument that Windows is a monopoly product is losing relevance as HP, Dell, and Lenovo begin shipping their Linux PCs. If major players are shipping PCs with non-Windows OSes, then how in the hell is Windows a monopoly product?
"Take a look at Mac OS X. The interface is pretty much the same for more than ten years. "
Um, OS X hasn't even been around for ten years. It was introduces in 2000 or 2001.. And OSX's interface is just as different from that of its predecessor, Mac OS 9, as Vista's is from XP's. There was plenty of whining in the Mac community over the "step back" that OSX 10.0 was. (It was indeed very much slower than Mac OS 9, but I think it's interface blew away Mac OS 9's).
"The easiest way, perhaps, would be for it to BECOME a UNIX-based system. "
Yes, because EVERY widely-used OS must be a Unix variant, after all, Unix is the be-all and end-all of OSes, designed by God himself.
Do you really want every OS to be a unix? BTW, did you notice that NONE of the problems you talked about have anything at all to do with whether an OS is built on top of Unix or NT or whatever? So why even believe anything else in your post?
Sorry, I know if offends the delicate sensibilites of slashdotters, but IIS6 has a virtually perfect record since its release. You spouted a lot of speculation that IIS6 has tons of undisclosed flaws, but you've provided zero evidence. If there are so many flaws, why have they not manifested themselves? Microsoft is better on security than they were in the past, whether you like it or not. Deal with it.
"That means that within two years from now, only 56% of survey respondents say they will have upgraded their firm's desktops to Windows Vista."
I know the article is meant to be negative, but 56% over the next two years is a LOT.
Re:How much of a market is there for Linux games?
on
Is id Abandoning Linux?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Didn't the demise of Loki demonstrate the weakness of the Linux gaming market? Loki was dedicated to porting games to Linux. But Linux gamers didn't buy Loki's games for various reasons, such as: 1. Many Linux users refuse to pay for software, period. 2. Many of the Linux users that are willing to pay for software are unwilling to pay for closed-source software.
Loki, despite making decent ports of many games, had to close down because Linux users refused to pay for the games that Loki provided.
But the hoax'ed email was inaccurate. RFM gives you 30 days to activate the OS. The hoax email indicated that you couldn't do anything with your computer, immediately. No mention of 30 days. There were other inaccuracies as well, intended to suggest that MS had turned on a new mechanism that was worse than RFM. That slashdotters ate it up shows that they aren't as "tech-savvy" as they purport to be; in fact, slashdotters are the most gullible suckers I've ever seen. They're even more gullible than is a right-winger that believes everything that Fox News tells him.
Why is this story being reposted here after just 2 days? Is it that the first story didn't "take" so now slashdot feels compelled to repost it, in hopes that it "takes" this time? The only thing that's changed since it was originally posted is that it's been debunked, but slashdot feels compelled to debunk the debunking, but by simply repeating what was originally posted? Reposting this is a waste of time and bandwidth.
Hospital computers, corporate computers, et al, should not be using Windows Update, they should be using WSUS or SMS, by which the IT staff is in complete control of when and how the machines are updated. Stop spreading FUD.
And if anyone that's not usine WSUS or SMS and is really worried about this, then TURN WINDOWS UPDATE COMPLETELY OFF!! That is, have it set to neiter auto-install updates, nor download but not auto-install updates, nor check for available updates. Turn it completely off (so it never even checks for available updates), and there is no issue.
The problem is that WU cannot check if a system needs updates if the WU client software is out of sync with the WU server software.
Now, let's say that WU is set to "download but not auto-install" or to merely "check for available updates". And let's say that when WU checks with the WU server, it sees that WU software itself needs to be updated. At this point it can either update the components and then proceed to check for available updates; or it can notify the user that WU itself needs to be updated before it can check for available updates. Slashdotters seem to prefer the latter (mainly because MS chose the former; had MS chose the latter, then slashdotters would argue for the former, but I digress). The problem with the latter choice is that the user is unaware of what security updates are available behind the WU update, and might be tempted to reject updating WU over and over, month by month, unaware that more and more real security updates are being queued up behind the WU update that the user is rejecting.
LOL I love how the first thing that slashdotters think of to solve any problem is to go to the courts. Not a day goes by without at least one slashdot story having comments with the words "sue", "lawsuit", or "class action!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that, while a major open source project might not accept your "patch of the day", you could fork the project into one that *does* include your patch.
Of course, for major project, forking is usually "in theory" thing rather than a practical thing.
I was wondering how slashdot would report this story. I knew that they would give it negative spin because it's not open source, but I didn't think they would actually try to suggest that Microsoft claimed that this was open source and then bash them for not meeting that claim.
.NET libs into VS 2008, including downloading the appropriate source from Microsoft's site on demand. There are other goodies as well.
Microsoft fully acknowledges that this code is to be released under MSRL, "Microsoft Reference Licenese", which Microsoft does not claim to be an open source license (it is not one of the Ms licenses that were submitted to OSI).
But the code is still valuable as it eases debugging. This similar to Microsoft's providing the source code to ATL, MFC, and their CRT. Much of this code was already available under Rotor2, but now we get lots more code, including WinForms and WPF, and more will be rleased in the future.
And it's not just code, but Microsoft including integrated debugging of
See here for detaitls:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx
Microsoft never claimed 'open source'. Slashdot spun it that way in order to bash Microsoft yet again.
But the Reflector tool doesn't include comments in the code, doesn't allow for integrated VS 2008 debugging, (including downloading source code on-demand, matching the exact .NET lib that you are debugging), and a whole lot more.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx
1. Vista's OpenFile dialogs do allow for customization, and most apps do open the dialiog to the locaiton where it was last used in that app, even persisting that state from previous sessions. .NET apps have been doing that for years.
2. Expose is more important on Macs than Windows. I've used MAc and Windows for years, and Mac has always had a much greater tendency to end up with windows all over the place for some reason. Apple HAD to create Expose to fix that Mac-unique problem.
3. "And ditch the whole "My Documents", "My Music" and "My Pictures" Playskool crap."
This reveals that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Vista does do awyay with the "My ***" stuff, and renames "Documents and Settings" to "Users". So where XP had "c:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents", Vista has "C:\Users\[username]\Documents".
I'd bet that the vast majority of slashdotters don't know the first thing about Vista, as evidenced by complaining about issues that don't exist, and you illustrate the point perfectly.
As for not being able to use the Escape key to kill things, I find it incredible that a Mac guy would cite that as a Windows problem. I see the spinning beachball of death constantly in Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Opera, and the escape key does NOTHING to kill whatever the app is doing. I have to sit there and wait it out, or finally kill the app altogether.
And the 8.3 file system? What the hell are you doing that you encounter 8.3 files "so many times"?
ALL OF THEM.
Hollywood would love an excuse to not allow PC-playback of hi-def discs because PCs are the intruments of piracy. 99.99999999% of accumulated optical disc playback time is done by dedicated players, not PCs. Hollywood wouldn't mind missing out on PC revenue at all if they had an excuse to do so.
What's so "refreshing" about it? Wasn't Dibona a slashdot editor before he went to Google? It's not like this is hostile territory for Google posters. Slashdot is one of Google's propaganda arms. Slashdot is to Google as Fox News is to Bush.
Now, it *is* refreshing when Microsoft guys post here (and they do), because they enter hostile territory and give a different perspective than the slashdot group-think. And it *would* be refreshing for Apple guys to post here because they never post anywhere. But Google guys posting here adds absolutely nothing.
So you aren't going to try to get OSI to certify this? Even after Michael Tiemann's "If it's not OSI, then it's not 'open source'" rant?
http://www.opensource.org/node/163
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/21/1146259
I find that hard to believe.
"MS should've followed Apple's playbook. Release the OS according to it's already delayed schedule, let early adopter screw with it, but don't force the new OS on people who simply want new hardware."
Huh. You must not have been around when Apple RTM'ed OSX 10.0 in a barely beta state.
"But it's kinda stupid cuz the actual females playing as females do that too."
;)
Well, that's what females do in real life; use their feminine wiles to their advantage.
But your complaint is absurd. If one is unable to resist the feminine wiles of an online-character, then it's his own fault, not fault of the the person playing the female character.
I've known many that have played characters of the player's opposite sex (both men playing as women and women playing as men), and I see no problem with it. The whole point of playing RPGs (either multi-player or single-player) is to get to assume a role you could never assume in real life. The ability to choose your character's gender, ethnicity, etc, goes along with that.
This business of requiring webcams for anyone playing as a woman is the stupidest thing I've heard of in a long time.
MS has a legit reason to try to ban modded Xboxes from XBox Live becasue modded Xboxes can be used for cheating which ruins the XBox Live experience for everyone else.
As for this iPhone issue, I couldn't care less. iPhone owners are a bunch of rich spoiled brats that got these phones as status symbols. If they got pwned, that's great!
"Gyp is nowhere near the in the same league as jewed (are chinked or niggered even words?). "
Agreed.
"Gypped" is more akin to "Welched", as in "He welched on paying off our bet". For some reason or another, the Welsh gained a rep among the English for not paying off debts, and thus the verb "welch" came into being. But the thing is, today 99.999% of people that use "welch" or "gypped" have no idea that it originally referred to a particular ethnic group (which is why "gypped" is spelled "jipped" a lot of the time). As such, it's nowhere in the same league as "Jewed", etc, where the ethnicity in question is clear, and therefore the bigotry is also clear.
"Up until Panther, each version of OSX ran faster than the previous one. But Tiger is definitely slower than Panther. Looks like Leopard will continue the trend."
;)
I agree, but it must be noted that OSX 10.0 was dog slow and 10.1, while faster, was slow as well. So making 10.2 and 10.3 faster than their predecessors wasn't so remarkable.
10.4 is slower than 10.3 (in my experience), and 10.5 looks like it'll be slower still. So it seems that once OSX reached a decent level performance wise (10.3), Apple simply couldn't keep the speed increase trend going while adding features.
I see many here making excuses for Google ("You'll never be safe with online service providers", "There's nothing Google can do", etc) and offering solutions ("Use Firefox with Noscript", etc). But I can't help but laugh because I know that if this were about Microsoft web services being exploited, the comments would be completely different. The number of comments would be at least five times greater than they are here and would be filled with gloating and screaming over Microsoft's "incompetence" and whatnot.
You know that there is some truth in what I say.
It looks to me that there are major holes in Google's services, and they need to be called out on it, not given excuses.
The problem is that an OS is required in order to make a computer function. So one could look at a Windows PC as one item that happens to be built from components provided by different vendors.
In that light, tour desire that the user should see the price of Windows (OEM price is about $60, so it's not like users are going to care much to begin with), is akin to the user seeing the price of the battery when buying a car, or the price of the DVD drive when buying a DVD-player, or the price of the needle when buying a record player. In each case there is a third party market for the components I listed that allows the user to replace the built-in component with one he purchases from that third party market. But when buying the car, dvd player, and record player, the customer doesn't see individual prices for those components because these are components that provide a necessary function for the item to work at all.
Now you're going to make the argument that Windows has a monopoly position in its particular component market. First, I'm sure there are other components markets that are equally dominated by a single manufacturer, but second, the argument that Windows is a monopoly product is losing relevance as HP, Dell, and Lenovo begin shipping their Linux PCs. If major players are shipping PCs with non-Windows OSes, then how in the hell is Windows a monopoly product?
"Take a look at Mac OS X. The interface is pretty much the same for more than ten years. "
Um, OS X hasn't even been around for ten years. It was introduces in 2000 or 2001..
And OSX's interface is just as different from that of its predecessor, Mac OS 9, as Vista's is from XP's. There was plenty of whining in the Mac community over the "step back" that OSX 10.0 was. (It was indeed very much slower than Mac OS 9, but I think it's interface blew away Mac OS 9's).
"The easiest way, perhaps, would be for it to BECOME a UNIX-based system. "
Yes, because EVERY widely-used OS must be a Unix variant, after all, Unix is the be-all and end-all of OSes, designed by God himself.
Do you really want every OS to be a unix?
BTW, did you notice that NONE of the problems you talked about have anything at all to do with whether an OS is built on top of Unix or NT or whatever? So why even believe anything else in your post?
IIS 6 Vulnerability Report since 2003:
Three vunlerabilies, none classified as "highly" or "extremely" critical, all patched.
Apache 2.x Vulnerability Report since 2003
33 vunlerabilies, 3% classified as "highly" critical, 9% unpatched, 3% only partially patched.
Sorry, I know if offends the delicate sensibilites of slashdotters, but IIS6 has a virtually perfect record since its release.
You spouted a lot of speculation that IIS6 has tons of undisclosed flaws, but you've provided zero evidence. If there are so many flaws, why have they not manifested themselves? Microsoft is better on security than they were in the past, whether you like it or not. Deal with it.
"That means that within two years from now, only 56% of survey respondents say they will have upgraded their firm's desktops to Windows Vista."
I know the article is meant to be negative, but 56% over the next two years is a LOT.
Didn't the demise of Loki demonstrate the weakness of the Linux gaming market?
Loki was dedicated to porting games to Linux. But Linux gamers didn't buy Loki's games for various reasons, such as:
1. Many Linux users refuse to pay for software, period.
2. Many of the Linux users that are willing to pay for software are unwilling to pay for closed-source software.
Loki, despite making decent ports of many games, had to close down because Linux users refused to pay for the games that Loki provided.
But the hoax'ed email was inaccurate. RFM gives you 30 days to activate the OS. The hoax email indicated that you couldn't do anything with your computer, immediately. No mention of 30 days. There were other inaccuracies as well, intended to suggest that MS had turned on a new mechanism that was worse than RFM. That slashdotters ate it up shows that they aren't as "tech-savvy" as they purport to be; in fact, slashdotters are the most gullible suckers I've ever seen. They're even more gullible than is a right-winger that believes everything that Fox News tells him.
Why is this story being reposted here after just 2 days? Is it that the first story didn't "take" so now slashdot feels compelled to repost it, in hopes that it "takes" this time? The only thing that's changed since it was originally posted is that it's been debunked, but slashdot feels compelled to debunk the debunking, but by simply repeating what was originally posted? Reposting this is a waste of time and bandwidth.
Hospital computers, corporate computers, et al, should not be using Windows Update, they should be using WSUS or SMS, by which the IT staff is in complete control of when and how the machines are updated. Stop spreading FUD.
And if anyone that's not usine WSUS or SMS and is really worried about this, then TURN WINDOWS UPDATE COMPLETELY OFF!!
That is, have it set to neiter auto-install updates, nor download but not auto-install updates, nor check for available updates. Turn it completely off (so it never even checks for available updates), and there is no issue.
The problem is that WU cannot check if a system needs updates if the WU client software is out of sync with the WU server software.
Now, let's say that WU is set to "download but not auto-install" or to merely "check for available updates". And let's say that when WU checks with the WU server, it sees that WU software itself needs to be updated. At this point it can either update the components and then proceed to check for available updates; or it can notify the user that WU itself needs to be updated before it can check for available updates. Slashdotters seem to prefer the latter (mainly because MS chose the former; had MS chose the latter, then slashdotters would argue for the former, but I digress). The problem with the latter choice is that the user is unaware of what security updates are available behind the WU update, and might be tempted to reject updating WU over and over, month by month, unaware that more and more real security updates are being queued up behind the WU update that the user is rejecting.
I think this osnews post covers the issues well:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18617&comment_id=271599
LOL
I love how the first thing that slashdotters think of to solve any problem is to go to the courts. Not a day goes by without at least one slashdot story having comments with the words "sue", "lawsuit", or "class action!!!"