Word. My parents never kept any slaves, either. Slavery is a myth.
I'm not saying that you should deny that Microsoft have done bad things in the past. I am saying judge them for what they have do now and have done for the past decade. They really did pull their collective socks up.
Just because you cannot see a downside doesn't mean MS hasn't thought it through and found a new way to screw FOSS.
It also doesn't mean that they have found a way to screw FOSS. People keep quoting Embrace, Extend, Extinguish when they create ties with the FOSS community, but nobody has ever been able to tell me how the Extingish part is supposed to work.
As to their current behavior, what is it about them shaking down companies for patents on alleged MS IP in Linux that you don't understand.
But like it or not, that is not bad behaviour. That is the patent system doing what it is designed to do. It is no different than people clamping down on GPL violations.
If you don't punish companies for their pas behaviour, and they can make a quick present day profit, why would they refrain from bad behaviour?
I think that the huge fines that they have received for some of their past behaviour would be reason enough to prevent them from doing it again. And if you keep punishing them no matter whether they are being good or evil now, then what is the incentive for them to be good?
Another alternative is to punish them when they do something wrong. And don't punish them for doing things that everyone else does. For example, who doesn't bundle a browser with their OS these days?
You want to deal with their crap, have fun. But don't paint it pink and put bows on it.
Fair enough, but similarly don't paint it brown and flush it down the toilet. Unjust or over-enthusiastic praise for something that Microsoft does would be wrong. Just as wrong as belittling every good thing that they do because decades ago they wouldn't allow a beta version of Windows 3.1 to run on DR-DOS (to use one of the complaints people have).
Failure: there is always why the contribution was made to consider.
Microsoft has way too much past history to redeem. The fact that many younger people aren't aware of said nasty history is sad.
That is true. It is terrible that there is a generation of people who judge the company by their actions of today, and not by what the company did before they were born. Oh wait, no it isn't terrible.
Sorry, but that sounds like someone who would refuse to drive a BMW because they hate the Bosch. There comes a time when you start looking like some old fogie from an old peoples home ranting and raving about long dead issues that nobody cares about.
But to avoid problems with companies contributing to Linux in the future, perhaps the open source community needs to publish the list of approved reasons for doing so. In this case, Microsoft submitted changes to the Linux kernel to make it work better with their OS. Is that really so bad? If Nvidia or AMD did this to support their video cards, we would all be cheering about what a great thing this was. So why is it different for Microsoft?
Provide a list of companies that shows more of them succeded by partnering with Microsoft than failed and I'll consider admitting to short-sightedness. Nokia doing away with all but MS based phones is the most blatent result of doing deals with Microsoft.
I fail to see how this relates to your original contention that Microsoft would close all their open source products to make a buck. Here it is again:
Microsoft is about their bottom line, plain and simple. Even if open sourcing something today is profitable, they would not hesitate to close it tomorrow if it hurts profits.
Instead of backing up that assertion, you have lept to a different subject and hoped that nobody would notice. But still, I will play. Considering that Windows runs on 90% of computers in the world, that means that by far the majority of computer manufactures are successfully partnering with Microsoft just as Nokia is doing now.
And on your original point, if Microsoft closes their open software, then we can just use the last version that was open. It is hard to extinguish software when the code is made public.
Just another in a long list of Microsoft/Windows security fails. Big shocker.
I know that you are probably trolling here (considering that this is a generic technique that could be applied to other operating systems), but since you have to turn off Windows Defender to get this to work (at least in Win8) then it isn't that great a failure.
They pair very low-end AMD CPU with best GPU on the market at the time. Results: the CPU does affect the performance. No suprises there..
The quoted test was probably more limited by the PCIe slot running at x4 instead of x16 rather than the low spec CPU. If you can't get data to the graphics card quickly enough then even the fastest CPU will be hampered.
AGP bridges suck.
PCI-E DDR2 rigs aren't even that old or even considered "obsolete" either.
You obviously didn't read the article. They tested whether there was any benefit to upgrading the graphics card, and the figures show that there is. They didn't use an AGP motherboard. And it doesn't matter whether you call the system old or not, because the topic was whether you could improve a 5 year old system.
The answer is yes. It doesn't matter what your theory says, because in practice you can extend the life of an old system with a single hardware upgrade.
Based on their previous actions, they will allow the use of this project in distros but will sue any commercial implementation that uses it. So they haven't sued Ubuntu or Mint, but have sued TomTom.
My way to fix this is much more simpler. Simply make the "AS-IS" clause of their EULA null and void and allow the users to sue for the damages when their defective products really hurts real people. A few high profile suits will make them put more of a priority on these vulnerabilities.
This would probably also dramatically increase the cost of all the software, not only to pay for the lawsuits but also for all the extra development work required.
Because no system is perfect. The code behind any modern operating system is far too complicated for any individual to understand. All the best intentions and best practices in the world will not completely catch all the bugs. But they do catch some, so it is worth trying to catch them.
To use a car analogy, what you said is like questioning the worth of seatbelts. Just because they don't save every life in an accident doesn't mean that it not worth wearing them.
What is your solution then? Release patches that are rushed and untested? Mark everything as "top priority" so that all bugs are finished faster?
As a developer in a small team, I can get away with shipping bug fixes without having to go through a process like I described. A small team can be agile and responsive like that. But I can imagine how chaotic this would be in a large organisation. Just because you can't understand that bug fixing actually takes time means that you would be more suited to a career in management rather than programming.
When a bug report is received, it gets evaluated and prioritised. It can take a non trivial time to track down and fix the bug (and any associated bugs in similar code). It takes time to test it in all the platforms and configurations (they have had to hastily recall patches in the past where the fix does more damage than the original bug).
It probably goes through some review process before being merged into the main code line (large companies can't allow anarchy with their code edits). Finally, patches are buffered to a schedule to allow their clients to plan for their own testing and application of patches.
All this takes time. You can make a system where you don't have this level of beurocracy, but that can cause its own problems and delays. So why did this specific Java bug take five months to fix? Without being privy to their processes we can't say for sure. Perhaps the extra step of outsourcing the fix to a third world country took a bit more time!
But this is exactly what the advocates of the R18+ rating system promised would happen. They said that this would actually be better for the children because there were games being misrated because they no alternative. This is not an unforseen consequence or the wowsers being proven right.
Lumia phones are NOT SELLING WELL. Don't repeat astroturfing media BS.
Compare this to previous quarterly sales figures for the iPhone and it is not a disastrous as you want to believe. It is certainly not bad enough to make any claim of Lumia sales to have only come from Astroturfers.
Nokia did not sell 4M phones with a new OS (WP7/8). It sold 4.4M smartphones which include Symbian OS.
Only 2.9M were Windows phone.
You are incorrect, and have misunderstood the sentence that discussed the figures. They sold 4.4 million Windows Phone devices this quarter, compared to 2.9 million sold in the last quarter. It is a 50% improvement. From the article:
During the quarter, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones - a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices
While Steam is not all nice, they do promise to release the games to their customers if ever they should go under.
Valve does not own the rights to the majority of games on their service. They cannot promise to release anything other than Valve published titles. There are a lot of third party games that use Steamworks DRM.
How happy would Rockstar be if Valve released a cracked version of Max Payne 3 just because they were going out of business?
That is true. When I was looking for a netbook, I chose an AMD based one precisely for the better 3D. I now use it as a gaming system. As long as you are happy to play games from around 2005, then it performs fine. But it is far beyond what the Atom based netbooks can do.
There are occasions where I think that it is the CPU that is limiting a game rather than the GPU. I wonder in those situations how the Atom systems would fare.
I just wish that you could still find these AMD netbooks around. Netbooks are getting rare (and will die out soon), and the only ones that I ever find these days are Atoms.
There are "crippled" products on the market, sold by others as well as Intel. Sometimes it's so they can build one part in their fab, cripple the mainstream part with a fuse, and then charge a premium for the un-crippled part.
Sometimes that actually turns our cheaper to make it this way. They could design a low end CPU to sell cheaper than their premium product, but the cost of producing an entirely different fabrication line for that CPU might actually more than just including a switch in their higher end processor to cripple the chip. The costs include having to reconfigure the production line to a different line of wafers.
Using the same chip design means that they can still sell the CPUs that fail quality control testing. If one of the cores fails in a quad core CPU, they can just turn that one off and sell it as a dual core part. So instead of increasing the price of the premium chip by having the "fuse" as you put it, they are making the chip cheaper because it reduces the wastage if having to discard the failed processors.
So what is your solution then? Does Intel need to come out with a range of very low powered CPUs based on their main Ivy Bridge processors with better performance than their Atom line? Do you think that they could announce this, and then we could discuss the story here on Slashdot?
You can see where I am smugly going here. That is exactly what TFA was all about. In act, it also said:
Atom chips will move to an entirely new design later this year that is expected to get them closer to Intel's mainstream processors in performance.
Really? Who actually said that? Can you point to any post from some Windows user saying how backwards it was to use the keyboard?
Windows was originally designed so that it could be optionally be used without a mouse, so it had keyboard shortcuts for everything. You can operate menus, move & resize windows, launch programs and even use the ribbon interface with the keyboard. Windows 8's use of the keyboard is nothing new.
The second season of Space 1999 was definitely as you describe, but the first season was not like that. It was much more serious and realistic. It is just like Lost in Space. The early black and white episodes of that show were ten thousand times better than the later, colour, and campy episodes.
I can just imagine that there was some stupid network executive behind the downfall of both these shows, who thought that science fiction was just for kids and that kids only want to see monsters and aliens. It would be interesting to read an account of the behind the scenes decisions that changed these shows.
The problem with the whole climate change thing is not that it will get hotter than ever before or that the oceans will become more acidic than it has ever been. The problem is that it is happening too quickly for the fauna and flora to adapt. Changes that have previously taken thousands of years are happening in hundreds.
History has shown that when there is a sudden change due to things like massive volcano explosions or meteor strikes that the effect on the species around it can be devestating. If you prevent this from happening, then why wouldn't you?
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Word. My parents never kept any slaves, either. Slavery is a myth.
I'm not saying that you should deny that Microsoft have done bad things in the past. I am saying judge them for what they have do now and have done for the past decade. They really did pull their collective socks up.
Just because you cannot see a downside doesn't mean MS hasn't thought it through and found a new way to screw FOSS.
It also doesn't mean that they have found a way to screw FOSS. People keep quoting Embrace, Extend, Extinguish when they create ties with the FOSS community, but nobody has ever been able to tell me how the Extingish part is supposed to work.
As to their current behavior, what is it about them shaking down companies for patents on alleged MS IP in Linux that you don't understand.
But like it or not, that is not bad behaviour. That is the patent system doing what it is designed to do. It is no different than people clamping down on GPL violations.
If you don't punish companies for their pas behaviour, and they can make a quick present day profit, why would they refrain from bad behaviour?
I think that the huge fines that they have received for some of their past behaviour would be reason enough to prevent them from doing it again. And if you keep punishing them no matter whether they are being good or evil now, then what is the incentive for them to be good?
Another alternative is to punish them when they do something wrong. And don't punish them for doing things that everyone else does. For example, who doesn't bundle a browser with their OS these days?
You want to deal with their crap, have fun. But don't paint it pink and put bows on it.
Fair enough, but similarly don't paint it brown and flush it down the toilet. Unjust or over-enthusiastic praise for something that Microsoft does would be wrong. Just as wrong as belittling every good thing that they do because decades ago they wouldn't allow a beta version of Windows 3.1 to run on DR-DOS (to use one of the complaints people have).
Failure: there is always why the contribution was made to consider.
Microsoft has way too much past history to redeem. The fact that many younger people aren't aware of said nasty history is sad.
That is true. It is terrible that there is a generation of people who judge the company by their actions of today, and not by what the company did before they were born. Oh wait, no it isn't terrible.
Sorry, but that sounds like someone who would refuse to drive a BMW because they hate the Bosch. There comes a time when you start looking like some old fogie from an old peoples home ranting and raving about long dead issues that nobody cares about.
But to avoid problems with companies contributing to Linux in the future, perhaps the open source community needs to publish the list of approved reasons for doing so. In this case, Microsoft submitted changes to the Linux kernel to make it work better with their OS. Is that really so bad? If Nvidia or AMD did this to support their video cards, we would all be cheering about what a great thing this was. So why is it different for Microsoft?
Provide a list of companies that shows more of them succeded by partnering with Microsoft than failed and I'll consider admitting to short-sightedness. Nokia doing away with all but MS based phones is the most blatent result of doing deals with Microsoft.
I fail to see how this relates to your original contention that Microsoft would close all their open source products to make a buck. Here it is again:
Microsoft is about their bottom line, plain and simple. Even if open sourcing something today is profitable, they would not hesitate to close it tomorrow if it hurts profits.
Instead of backing up that assertion, you have lept to a different subject and hoped that nobody would notice. But still, I will play. Considering that Windows runs on 90% of computers in the world, that means that by far the majority of computer manufactures are successfully partnering with Microsoft just as Nokia is doing now.
And on your original point, if Microsoft closes their open software, then we can just use the last version that was open. It is hard to extinguish software when the code is made public.
Just another in a long list of Microsoft/Windows security fails. Big shocker.
I know that you are probably trolling here (considering that this is a generic technique that could be applied to other operating systems), but since you have to turn off Windows Defender to get this to work (at least in Win8) then it isn't that great a failure.
They pair very low-end AMD CPU with best GPU on the market at the time. Results: the CPU does affect the performance. No suprises there..
The quoted test was probably more limited by the PCIe slot running at x4 instead of x16 rather than the low spec CPU. If you can't get data to the graphics card quickly enough then even the fastest CPU will be hampered.
AGP bridges suck. PCI-E DDR2 rigs aren't even that old or even considered "obsolete" either.
You obviously didn't read the article. They tested whether there was any benefit to upgrading the graphics card, and the figures show that there is. They didn't use an AGP motherboard. And it doesn't matter whether you call the system old or not, because the topic was whether you could improve a 5 year old system.
The answer is yes. It doesn't matter what your theory says, because in practice you can extend the life of an old system with a single hardware upgrade.
Based on their previous actions, they will allow the use of this project in distros but will sue any commercial implementation that uses it. So they haven't sued Ubuntu or Mint, but have sued TomTom.
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was a 2 year old game when the tx2500 was released.
My way to fix this is much more simpler. Simply make the "AS-IS" clause of their EULA null and void and allow the users to sue for the damages when their defective products really hurts real people. A few high profile suits will make them put more of a priority on these vulnerabilities.
This would probably also dramatically increase the cost of all the software, not only to pay for the lawsuits but also for all the extra development work required.
Because no system is perfect. The code behind any modern operating system is far too complicated for any individual to understand. All the best intentions and best practices in the world will not completely catch all the bugs. But they do catch some, so it is worth trying to catch them.
To use a car analogy, what you said is like questioning the worth of seatbelts. Just because they don't save every life in an accident doesn't mean that it not worth wearing them.
What is your solution then? Release patches that are rushed and untested? Mark everything as "top priority" so that all bugs are finished faster?
As a developer in a small team, I can get away with shipping bug fixes without having to go through a process like I described. A small team can be agile and responsive like that. But I can imagine how chaotic this would be in a large organisation. Just because you can't understand that bug fixing actually takes time means that you would be more suited to a career in management rather than programming.
When a bug report is received, it gets evaluated and prioritised. It can take a non trivial time to track down and fix the bug (and any associated bugs in similar code). It takes time to test it in all the platforms and configurations (they have had to hastily recall patches in the past where the fix does more damage than the original bug).
It probably goes through some review process before being merged into the main code line (large companies can't allow anarchy with their code edits). Finally, patches are buffered to a schedule to allow their clients to plan for their own testing and application of patches.
All this takes time. You can make a system where you don't have this level of beurocracy, but that can cause its own problems and delays. So why did this specific Java bug take five months to fix? Without being privy to their processes we can't say for sure. Perhaps the extra step of outsourcing the fix to a third world country took a bit more time!
But this is exactly what the advocates of the R18+ rating system promised would happen. They said that this would actually be better for the children because there were games being misrated because they no alternative. This is not an unforseen consequence or the wowsers being proven right.
Lumia phones are NOT SELLING WELL. Don't repeat astroturfing media BS.
Compare this to previous quarterly sales figures for the iPhone and it is not a disastrous as you want to believe. It is certainly not bad enough to make any claim of Lumia sales to have only come from Astroturfers.
Nokia did not sell 4M phones with a new OS (WP7/8). It sold 4.4M smartphones which include Symbian OS. Only 2.9M were Windows phone.
You are incorrect, and have misunderstood the sentence that discussed the figures. They sold 4.4 million Windows Phone devices this quarter, compared to 2.9 million sold in the last quarter. It is a 50% improvement. From the article:
During the quarter, Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones - a significant rise from the previous quarter, which featured sales of 2.9 million Lumia devices
While Steam is not all nice, they do promise to release the games to their customers if ever they should go under.
Valve does not own the rights to the majority of games on their service. They cannot promise to release anything other than Valve published titles. There are a lot of third party games that use Steamworks DRM.
How happy would Rockstar be if Valve released a cracked version of Max Payne 3 just because they were going out of business?
That is true. When I was looking for a netbook, I chose an AMD based one precisely for the better 3D. I now use it as a gaming system. As long as you are happy to play games from around 2005, then it performs fine. But it is far beyond what the Atom based netbooks can do.
There are occasions where I think that it is the CPU that is limiting a game rather than the GPU. I wonder in those situations how the Atom systems would fare.
I just wish that you could still find these AMD netbooks around. Netbooks are getting rare (and will die out soon), and the only ones that I ever find these days are Atoms.
There are "crippled" products on the market, sold by others as well as Intel. Sometimes it's so they can build one part in their fab, cripple the mainstream part with a fuse, and then charge a premium for the un-crippled part.
Sometimes that actually turns our cheaper to make it this way. They could design a low end CPU to sell cheaper than their premium product, but the cost of producing an entirely different fabrication line for that CPU might actually more than just including a switch in their higher end processor to cripple the chip. The costs include having to reconfigure the production line to a different line of wafers.
Using the same chip design means that they can still sell the CPUs that fail quality control testing. If one of the cores fails in a quad core CPU, they can just turn that one off and sell it as a dual core part. So instead of increasing the price of the premium chip by having the "fuse" as you put it, they are making the chip cheaper because it reduces the wastage if having to discard the failed processors.
So what is your solution then? Does Intel need to come out with a range of very low powered CPUs based on their main Ivy Bridge processors with better performance than their Atom line? Do you think that they could announce this, and then we could discuss the story here on Slashdot?
You can see where I am smugly going here. That is exactly what TFA was all about. In act, it also said:
Atom chips will move to an entirely new design later this year that is expected to get them closer to Intel's mainstream processors in performance.
Really? Who actually said that? Can you point to any post from some Windows user saying how backwards it was to use the keyboard?
Windows was originally designed so that it could be optionally be used without a mouse, so it had keyboard shortcuts for everything. You can operate menus, move & resize windows, launch programs and even use the ribbon interface with the keyboard. Windows 8's use of the keyboard is nothing new.
The second season of Space 1999 was definitely as you describe, but the first season was not like that. It was much more serious and realistic. It is just like Lost in Space. The early black and white episodes of that show were ten thousand times better than the later, colour, and campy episodes.
I can just imagine that there was some stupid network executive behind the downfall of both these shows, who thought that science fiction was just for kids and that kids only want to see monsters and aliens. It would be interesting to read an account of the behind the scenes decisions that changed these shows.
The problem with the whole climate change thing is not that it will get hotter than ever before or that the oceans will become more acidic than it has ever been. The problem is that it is happening too quickly for the fauna and flora to adapt. Changes that have previously taken thousands of years are happening in hundreds.
History has shown that when there is a sudden change due to things like massive volcano explosions or meteor strikes that the effect on the species around it can be devestating. If you prevent this from happening, then why wouldn't you?