Because ODF doesn't support all the legacy Office-isms like linebreaksLikeWord97.
Oh, yes, obviously this is a reason to create a new, entirely different standard, rather than extending ODF. You know, when Macromedia invented Flash, it was a mistake to embed it in HTML -- obviously, they should've invented FlashML, to power the Myspace Generation Internet.
Never mind that had the very idea been brought up in the ODF community, it'd be laughed down. Maybe we should have "boldandfontsizelikeWord2003Heading1"? Or, we could, you know, extend the style engine so you can just have a Word2003Heading1 style.
Would you rather they keep the file format closed?
Actually, the format is closed, exactly because of bullshit like that -- that nowhere in their six thousand page spec did they find the space to explain what lineBreaksLikeWord97 actually means, let alone make the standard flexible enough that custom line break styles could be defined entirely in the document, and not in the application.
So yes, I would rather they stuck to proprietary, binary formats, so people like you would stop being able to pretend OOXML is an open standard, when it's neither. I wouldn't even mind people like you, were it not for the fact that there are plenty of you in government.
It seems pretty obvious, anyway, although maybe that's because I've seen tons of games use similar techniques.
But the point is, you don't need FMVs, period, and you certainly don't want to force them on your users everywhere your engine forces a level break.
My comment about the "cinematic" HL2 sequence was to point out that you don't need a technological limitation and an actual "Loading, please wait..." screen to make a break in story continuity.
With protocols like Skype and Bittorrent using encryptions and any number of random TCP or UDP ports to bypass firewalls it's quite hard to know what is legitimate Internet usage by your client and what is from the botnets these days.
With a flat rate for bandwidth usage, it really doesn't matter anymore. Botnet or BitTorrent means a higher bill.
Ubuntu does not come with client software for windows machines to automatically back up the windows box nightly onto the Ubuntu server. WHS does.
apt-get install backuppc
Ubuntu requires you to install Samba. WHS uses windows shares / web server interface.
apt-get install lighttpd
Or are you implying that Samba is somehow worse than a native Windows share?
Ubuntu requires raid hardware or software. WHS uses a 'storage pool' methodology and allows disk redundancy without raid, and automatic growth of the 'storage pool' by plugging in a USB drive or ESATA device(s).
How automatic? I wouldn't want it to automatically format my flash drive because I plugged it in temporarily.
Or if you mean "automatic" by "prompting the user to do something", well, we can do RAID 5 restriping easily enough.
Ubuntu would not give you Remote Desktop access to your windows machines without configuring Wine, I think.
apt-get install rdesktop
And you imply that Wine is hard to configure. It's not, not anymore.
Ubuntu requires you to install CVS to get versioning of files, which requires you to actively commit files. WHS automatically saves changes between versions and allows you to step back, all through the nightly automatic backup.
Did you completely fucking miss the part about "backuppc", which I mentioned before? Here, go read.
You'd have to write your own web service to access the machines from outside the network.
apt-get install openvpn
You'd also have to configure the router yourself.
Want to be the router? apt-get install firehol dnsmasq.
I thought this through, I run a small business (20 hours a week of development) and did my homework before making the decision to buy WHS.
Apparently not enough to even know about the existence of rdesktop.
Now, I never claimed that Ubuntu would support everything you need out of the box. I am, however, claiming that to install and configure what you need, including Ubuntu and these additional packages, will take far less time than $169 worth -- and you get free upgrades for life.
Here's what you've said so far that I can't do with Ubuntu, under that configuration:
Disk redundancy without RAID. You haven't convinced me this is a good thing.
Automatically configure a router, assuming it supports uPnP But for 99% of home users, everything you need is right here, in fact, probably here.
If these are really that needed, redundancy without RAID can be done with ChironFS, and uPnP is actually kind of dangerous, from a security standpoint. But I bet I could add these features in very little time -- small enough that, hell, I could sell it for less than $100 as an instant NAT OS.
Your argument seems to be "if there's any chance at all that a system will corrupt data or lose data, then the system is broken." By that definition, all computer systems are "broken" and always will be.
That's a strawman.
In the real world, you don't demand absolute safety, because that's not achievable. You simply do your best to determine how much safety you can achieve at an affordable cost.
You also don't demand absolute security. However, when somebody finds a security hole, you generally consider security to be broken -- that's why it's called a security hole. And you frequently rush a patch out the door as quickly as you can -- or at least, as quickly as you can be sure your patch doesn't break anything else.
I consider this to be broken because reliable storage is really a solved problem. Just about every database out there supports transactions. At the filesystem layer, we have metadata journalling, thus the filesystem itself is immune to corruption, so long as the disk, RAM, and CPU hold. At the block layer (disk) level, we can do RAID, bad block relocation, and so on. For RAM, there's ECC. For stupid users, there's filesystem snapshots.
The only place this has not been solved is in files stored on the filesystem.
I realize that there's no excuse for not having backups. However, it seems to me that the number of times you have some critical hardware failure is going to be far, far less than the number of times you have a power failure, or even a software failure -- many, many more of these result in a crash than in loss of data.
As for "affordable cost", the only part of this that isn't affordable is the lack of software that supports it, right now. I cannot imagine that it would take more resources to add this to an existing filesystem than it does to, say, add ipv6 support, or any of the other things people do to OS kernels. And I cannot imagine it being particularly hard to implement at the application level, especially if it ends up being a library which either uses transactions or "mv+fsync" and similar tricks on systems that don't support transactions.
I've heard stories about projects where the fragmentation caused by the script runtime alone was orders of magnitude greater than that caused by the rest of the engine
There are a number of LGPL and BSD-licensed physics and scripting engines out there now. Do all of them have this problem?
And the odd stutter whenever you have to compact memory
Is it infeasible to do this in smaller steps, such that you can guarantee each step fits inside a single tick of the game? (Usually a frame)
And wouldn't that solve the locking issue, also? (Wait on what you need for this step to be unlocked, move it as soon as it is.)
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium.
I agree with you there.
However, I would say that you should have breaks in the story determined by a designer, not by some arbitrary technological limitation which usually amounts to the programmers being lazy. (Or not having enough resources, but this has been going on for years, so you'd think more of them would have started to get it right.)
HL2 is nearly-seamless, though there is the "slow teleport" which definitely qualifies as a break in the continuity
And which could be covered by a "cinematic" sequence, such as HL2 has. Another G-Man-in-the-face sequence, even. No reason to also freeze the whole world with a "loading" screen with nothing happening, no motion, no sound, no even a progress bar.
Levels work as both a story tool, and a gameplay tool. If they're eliminated, you need a reason for that too, which is OK, but they shouldn't be eliminated "just because."
They should, however, be eliminated from game engines.
The reason is simple: You can fake levels in a level-less engine, worst case, you can add a fake loading screen where it's not needed. But you can't remove level breaks from an engine that requires it.
If you're talking about an arena game, that hardly makes sense without a level, although the "level" could be larger than what fits into RAM -- which is, I think, what the article complains about.
But if you're talking about an MMO, sure, the server needs to keep the whole thing in RAM, and maybe it needs to be segmented into a few different servers. That doesn't excuse making the player wait, though.
For example, if botnets are clogging up the intarwebs (or BitTorrent, or whatever), as an ISP, I'd do one of two things: Either instantly block access to people you're detecting botnet traffic from, and explain the problem to them over the phone, or start charging people a flat rate per amount of bandwidth used, and log it -- either they'll be stung when they see what's eating their Internet bill, or they'll not care and pay absurdly high Internet bills, thus funding your new infrastructure to support them.
In other words, make it painful enough for them not to be educated, and/or pleasant enough for you to deal with uneducated people.
Maybe there is more of a learning curve than I'm allowing for here, but it costs me far, far less than $169 of my time to setup a Linux server with Samba and BackupPC on a RAID. RAID implies that everything is on more than one disk, whether you remember to flag it or not; Samba gives you filesharing and media streaming (or lighttpd if your media clients only support web); BackupPC supports as many PCs as you want, with incremental and full versions, allowing you to restore a file, folder, or an entire backup (or browse without restoring).
Presumably, then, your Windows Home Server does something for you that my Ubuntu Server doesn't. Whatever it is, is it worth $169? Specifically, if it's ease of use, are you paid enough that $169 is cheaper for you than 2 hours or so (at most) following some Linux tutorials? I imagine most people would come away with money to spare on an extra drive or two.
I realize, for many people, Linux is not going to work on the desktop, much as I wish it would. But Linux excels on the server, and with neither of them preinstalled, the cash cost of Windows is suddenly very obvious. The only better OS for this might be Solaris or BSD, and they're both free, too.
You should reserve "broken" for software where even the core functionality has dangerous problems, such as not being reliable, or having an excessively complicated design.
Filesystems lack transactions. I call that "broken", because it is dangerous to not only lose new data, but corrupt the old data in the process. In that sense, FAT32 is "broken" not because of the 2 gig limit, but because it lacks a journal, so it's entirely too easy to corrupt in the event that you forget to unmount (remove safely, eject...)
Technically, it's a performance improvement, because you can hack around it by calling fsync enough, and in the right places, and by either making heavy use of temporary files or writing your own journal inside the file.
But I consider it broken that to get acceptable reliability, you have to either kill performance with temporary files + renaming + fsync, or basically re-implement most of the features of the filesystem inside the file -- I think that meets your requirement of "complex".
Also, I use "broken" because most people, even programmers, are completely unaware of the issue, and it is an important one. Most filesystems are already mostly capable of supporting an API like this, but it really should be done now, for all filesystems (the way permissions are now).
This is especially frustrating for me now, as I'm currently working with an API even more minimalistic than POSIX. My only saving grace is that I'm mostly dealing with XML files, and thus, corruption is instantly noticeable. But I long for at least the POSIX guarantee that a 'rename' on top of an existing file would be atomic -- I just have a 'move' that is:
Like, say, when you plug in a peripheral that doesn't work.
Dude, I know. I had a Powerbook. I know what the Mac Experience is, and I know why it's attractive.
I also know that the second you want some non-standard hardware, or, really, non-standard anything, it's a crapshoot. And as a Linux user, when I say hardware support is a "crapshoot", it means really, really fucking bad.
But as you may not realize, I actually am a software developer -- so if I really can't find anyone else to write the driver, I can write it myself. As a user, if you really can't find a driver, you can pay me to write one.
On my Ubuntu install, actually, Firefox updates are disabled by default, out of the box. Since I'm not root, the "Check for Updates" item in the "Help" menu is grayed out. It is actually impossible for me to install a Firefox update......except through apt. But then, I have to be root to even run apt, and while it's not trivial, it's still relatively easy for any competent admin to setup a repository, and review -- even with full source -- every update before it hits the repository.
Or, as sibling posters are saying, you could do it through WSUS. So what's the problem?
Most users, when told about freeware the first time, say "So you mean, I can have a little man-ape-gone-wrong-thing[1] to give me weather and stocks? Cool, gimme!"
The second time, they've just had a geek reformat their hard drive, lost a bunch of stuff, and are now slowly learning about Internet safety. This time, their first question is "So, it's free. Doesn't that mean it's spyware? How do I know what's spyware and what isn't?" Also, often, you hear things like "How can they afford to give stuff away for free? Who makes this stuff? What's the catch?"
To explain that there is no catch, beyond that the software might just not be particularly good, you really have to explain the concept of freedom.
To answer your points:
a) If they don't yet have anything that works for their purposes, free software can fill that gap. b) If they don't yet have habits... c) What requires more work, a free download, or a paid download? (Or, if it's "freeware", maybe it comes with spyware...)
Given an equivalent piece of free or non-free software, free seems the clear winner, but you kind of do have to explain freedom. I realize that they're not always equivalent -- for instance, Gimp is not yet a replacement for Photoshop.
[1] Apologies to Joss Whedon. Comparing Jayne to Bonzi Buddy is unfair. (Unfair to Jayne, I think... or maybe Bonzi Buddy, who knows.)
Last I heard, Steve Jobs had some issues with nVidia, thus you get ATI for all new macs, end of story. Unless someone else comes along -- Intel, maybe?
Could be completely unfounded rumor, so take with a grain of salt, but it does sound like the Apple we know and love [to hate].
By the way -- this is why I love to be a PC/Linux user. I can buy whatever hardware I want, I'm not bound by the moods of His Holy Turtleneckness. The disadvantage is, it has to be something with a Linux driver, but in a pinch, I can write my own. But really, not that much doesn't have a Linux driver these days.
I do have a windows installation that I keep around for games. Everything else has been Linux-only for about three years now.
See, that just seems bizarre to me. If you're willing to accept lower-quality video, due to DRM, why do you accept Windows (DRM'd) to play closed-source video games (DRM'd) on a whole separate computer (more expensive than an HD-DVD player, to be sure)?
I'll probably swap the DVD for an HD-DVD in my media player once the standards have become more established (i.e. when I can play back an HD-DVD in xine)
Here's a question, though: What if it doesn't?
What if HD-DVDs completely take over from DVDs, but the best you can do is download pirated video? (And thus miss out on all the features I'm developing -- some of them will really be pretty cool.)
I don't mean to be pushing the format. I'm more curious in how your ethics work.
I fail to see how their absence in an API designed almost 40 years ago means that API is "broken".
Well, 40 years ago, they would have been good features, too.
I don't mean to imply that I'm judging the original designers. However, these features are so essential now that I consider any API not supporting them to be broken, just as I consider FAT (or at least, most FAT partitions) to be broken by not supporting files bigger than -- what is it, 2 gigs? 4 gigs?
By "broken", I mean that very basic functionality is missing, in a way in which it's not really possible to extend the system to implement them. For example, transactions can only be implemented on a modern filesystem by doing it yourself, in your own format (with your own journal), and calling 'sync' on a big file, at which point, why not write your own filesystem?
Modern Unix systems do come with modern file systems.
Which are hindered by this ancient API.
(My own employers are trying get everybody to adopt ZFS, which I believe supports all the semantics you want and much more.)
If it does, how does it support them?
More relevantly, are they done in such a way that any filesystem can implement them, or only ZFS?
Consider file permissions. POSIX basically requires them, although there are plenty of filesystems like VFAT which will show you any permission set you want it to (because the underlying device doesn't support them), and toys for FUSE which outright ignore file permissions.
Anyway...
If you want to discuss ZFS, you'll have to wait till I get some decent VMs set up here on which to install Solaris -- or at least, I should read the specs. But I do suggest you re-read them carefully -- I want to be able to perform a number of FS operations, on a set of files, and ensure that all of them are either committed as a unit, or fail. And I want to do it without interrupting the rest of the system.
No, that was somewhat sarcastic. I was trying to understand any reason someone might have for preferring Blu-Ray, but really, you should prefer HD-DVD.
Even apart from the fact that Java and javascript are two completely different and unrelated beasts, Java is far superior to javascript for anything that you might consider using Java for, whereas javascript is pretty much your only option if you want to do client-side scripting.
Except, on Blu-Ray, Java is your only option if you want to do client-side "scripting".
But what does this have to do with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray? Do HD-DVD players not support Java, and BR players not suppport javascript?
Yes.
Though technically, there is a JavaScript interpreter/compiler written in Java / targeting the JVM. Thus, I'm fairly sure you can run JavaScript on Blu-Ray, if you really want to. Similarly, you could probably adapt Google Web Toolkit and develop an HD-DVD client in Java, and compile it to JavaScript.
Personally, I prefer JavaScript. However, there are a very large number of reasons to prefer HD-DVD aside from the language, so I was implying that if you'd really rather develop for Blu-Ray, you must really be a Java zealot.
Either would be stupid.
On the client side? Not so much, I think. It makes the players quite a lot cheaper to implement, and the standard quite a lot smaller.
So even if Google renamed "java.*" packages to "android.*" packages, it might not pass the muster in court unless they actually stopped using cloned Sun's libraries, which would be a hard pill to swallow.
Given our court system, you may be right.
But understand, all of that is GPL'd. (Or am I wrong about that?) The fact that it's GPL'd means Sun has no control over it except the name and the requirement that it also be GPL'd (and thus have source code available). Similarly, the only control anyone has over Linux is whoever owns the trademark and logo.
But I'm with the other posters. I don't think Sun's really gonna move on this. Wouldn't be much to gain for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you can wipe it and install another OS. And everything may well appear to work.
But this is getting a bit more dangerous now, with some of the more badly-behaved ACPI implementations. Google for "Ubuntu destroys laptops".
LGPLv2 would probably work.
BSD only requires attribution, if that.
Yeah, that's an improvement -- a tax on all recordable media because it could be used for piracy, then pass it all on directly to the MAFIAA.
Oh, yes, obviously this is a reason to create a new, entirely different standard, rather than extending ODF. You know, when Macromedia invented Flash, it was a mistake to embed it in HTML -- obviously, they should've invented FlashML, to power the Myspace Generation Internet.
Never mind that had the very idea been brought up in the ODF community, it'd be laughed down. Maybe we should have "boldandfontsizelikeWord2003Heading1"? Or, we could, you know, extend the style engine so you can just have a Word2003Heading1 style.
Actually, the format is closed, exactly because of bullshit like that -- that nowhere in their six thousand page spec did they find the space to explain what lineBreaksLikeWord97 actually means, let alone make the standard flexible enough that custom line break styles could be defined entirely in the document, and not in the application.
So yes, I would rather they stuck to proprietary, binary formats, so people like you would stop being able to pretend OOXML is an open standard, when it's neither. I wouldn't even mind people like you, were it not for the fact that there are plenty of you in government.
It seems pretty obvious, anyway, although maybe that's because I've seen tons of games use similar techniques.
But the point is, you don't need FMVs, period, and you certainly don't want to force them on your users everywhere your engine forces a level break.
My comment about the "cinematic" HL2 sequence was to point out that you don't need a technological limitation and an actual "Loading, please wait..." screen to make a break in story continuity.
Why did Microsoft feel the need to invent, push, and strongarm OOXML when ODF already exists?
Don't answer that, it's a rhetorical question.
With a flat rate for bandwidth usage, it really doesn't matter anymore. Botnet or BitTorrent means a higher bill.
apt-get install backuppc
apt-get install lighttpd
Or are you implying that Samba is somehow worse than a native Windows share?
How automatic? I wouldn't want it to automatically format my flash drive because I plugged it in temporarily.
Or if you mean "automatic" by "prompting the user to do something", well, we can do RAID 5 restriping easily enough.
apt-get install rdesktop
And you imply that Wine is hard to configure. It's not, not anymore.
Did you completely fucking miss the part about "backuppc", which I mentioned before? Here, go read.
apt-get install openvpn
Want to be the router? apt-get install firehol dnsmasq.
Apparently not enough to even know about the existence of rdesktop.
Now, I never claimed that Ubuntu would support everything you need out of the box. I am, however, claiming that to install and configure what you need, including Ubuntu and these additional packages, will take far less time than $169 worth -- and you get free upgrades for life.
apt-get install backuppc samba lighttpd openvpn rdesktop mdadm firehol dnsmasq
Here's what you've said so far that I can't do with Ubuntu, under that configuration:
If these are really that needed, redundancy without RAID can be done with ChironFS, and uPnP is actually kind of dangerous, from a security standpoint. But I bet I could add these features in very little time -- small enough that, hell, I could sell it for less than $100 as an instant NAT OS.
That's a strawman.
You also don't demand absolute security. However, when somebody finds a security hole, you generally consider security to be broken -- that's why it's called a security hole. And you frequently rush a patch out the door as quickly as you can -- or at least, as quickly as you can be sure your patch doesn't break anything else.
I consider this to be broken because reliable storage is really a solved problem. Just about every database out there supports transactions. At the filesystem layer, we have metadata journalling, thus the filesystem itself is immune to corruption, so long as the disk, RAM, and CPU hold. At the block layer (disk) level, we can do RAID, bad block relocation, and so on. For RAM, there's ECC. For stupid users, there's filesystem snapshots.
The only place this has not been solved is in files stored on the filesystem.
I realize that there's no excuse for not having backups. However, it seems to me that the number of times you have some critical hardware failure is going to be far, far less than the number of times you have a power failure, or even a software failure -- many, many more of these result in a crash than in loss of data.
As for "affordable cost", the only part of this that isn't affordable is the lack of software that supports it, right now. I cannot imagine that it would take more resources to add this to an existing filesystem than it does to, say, add ipv6 support, or any of the other things people do to OS kernels. And I cannot imagine it being particularly hard to implement at the application level, especially if it ends up being a library which either uses transactions or "mv+fsync" and similar tricks on systems that don't support transactions.
There are a number of LGPL and BSD-licensed physics and scripting engines out there now. Do all of them have this problem?
Is it infeasible to do this in smaller steps, such that you can guarantee each step fits inside a single tick of the game? (Usually a frame)
And wouldn't that solve the locking issue, also? (Wait on what you need for this step to be unlocked, move it as soon as it is.)
I agree with you there.
However, I would say that you should have breaks in the story determined by a designer, not by some arbitrary technological limitation which usually amounts to the programmers being lazy. (Or not having enough resources, but this has been going on for years, so you'd think more of them would have started to get it right.)
And which could be covered by a "cinematic" sequence, such as HL2 has. Another G-Man-in-the-face sequence, even. No reason to also freeze the whole world with a "loading" screen with nothing happening, no motion, no sound, no even a progress bar.
They should, however, be eliminated from game engines.
The reason is simple: You can fake levels in a level-less engine, worst case, you can add a fake loading screen where it's not needed. But you can't remove level breaks from an engine that requires it.
Develop and/or adopt a standard engine that supports doing things the right way.
If you're talking about an arena game, that hardly makes sense without a level, although the "level" could be larger than what fits into RAM -- which is, I think, what the article complains about.
But if you're talking about an MMO, sure, the server needs to keep the whole thing in RAM, and maybe it needs to be segmented into a few different servers. That doesn't excuse making the player wait, though.
For example, if botnets are clogging up the intarwebs (or BitTorrent, or whatever), as an ISP, I'd do one of two things: Either instantly block access to people you're detecting botnet traffic from, and explain the problem to them over the phone, or start charging people a flat rate per amount of bandwidth used, and log it -- either they'll be stung when they see what's eating their Internet bill, or they'll not care and pay absurdly high Internet bills, thus funding your new infrastructure to support them.
In other words, make it painful enough for them not to be educated, and/or pleasant enough for you to deal with uneducated people.
Maybe there is more of a learning curve than I'm allowing for here, but it costs me far, far less than $169 of my time to setup a Linux server with Samba and BackupPC on a RAID. RAID implies that everything is on more than one disk, whether you remember to flag it or not; Samba gives you filesharing and media streaming (or lighttpd if your media clients only support web); BackupPC supports as many PCs as you want, with incremental and full versions, allowing you to restore a file, folder, or an entire backup (or browse without restoring).
Presumably, then, your Windows Home Server does something for you that my Ubuntu Server doesn't. Whatever it is, is it worth $169? Specifically, if it's ease of use, are you paid enough that $169 is cheaper for you than 2 hours or so (at most) following some Linux tutorials? I imagine most people would come away with money to spare on an extra drive or two.
I realize, for many people, Linux is not going to work on the desktop, much as I wish it would. But Linux excels on the server, and with neither of them preinstalled, the cash cost of Windows is suddenly very obvious. The only better OS for this might be Solaris or BSD, and they're both free, too.
Filesystems lack transactions. I call that "broken", because it is dangerous to not only lose new data, but corrupt the old data in the process. In that sense, FAT32 is "broken" not because of the 2 gig limit, but because it lacks a journal, so it's entirely too easy to corrupt in the event that you forget to unmount (remove safely, eject...)
Technically, it's a performance improvement, because you can hack around it by calling fsync enough, and in the right places, and by either making heavy use of temporary files or writing your own journal inside the file.
But I consider it broken that to get acceptable reliability, you have to either kill performance with temporary files + renaming + fsync, or basically re-implement most of the features of the filesystem inside the file -- I think that meets your requirement of "complex".
Also, I use "broken" because most people, even programmers, are completely unaware of the issue, and it is an important one. Most filesystems are already mostly capable of supporting an API like this, but it really should be done now, for all filesystems (the way permissions are now).
This is especially frustrating for me now, as I'm currently working with an API even more minimalistic than POSIX. My only saving grace is that I'm mostly dealing with XML files, and thus, corruption is instantly noticeable. But I long for at least the POSIX guarantee that a 'rename' on top of an existing file would be atomic -- I just have a 'move' that is:
...right up until it Just Doesn't.
Like, say, when you plug in a peripheral that doesn't work.
Dude, I know. I had a Powerbook. I know what the Mac Experience is, and I know why it's attractive.
I also know that the second you want some non-standard hardware, or, really, non-standard anything, it's a crapshoot. And as a Linux user, when I say hardware support is a "crapshoot", it means really, really fucking bad.
But as you may not realize, I actually am a software developer -- so if I really can't find anyone else to write the driver, I can write it myself. As a user, if you really can't find a driver, you can pay me to write one.
I can buy a Linux laptop for $300.
I can also re-use my grandmother's old computer for $0. Can't really do that with OS X, either.
Or Windows SUS.
...except through apt. But then, I have to be root to even run apt, and while it's not trivial, it's still relatively easy for any competent admin to setup a repository, and review -- even with full source -- every update before it hits the repository.
On my Ubuntu install, actually, Firefox updates are disabled by default, out of the box. Since I'm not root, the "Check for Updates" item in the "Help" menu is grayed out. It is actually impossible for me to install a Firefox update...
Or, as sibling posters are saying, you could do it through WSUS. So what's the problem?
Most users, when told about freeware the first time, say "So you mean, I can have a little man-ape-gone-wrong-thing[1] to give me weather and stocks? Cool, gimme!"
The second time, they've just had a geek reformat their hard drive, lost a bunch of stuff, and are now slowly learning about Internet safety. This time, their first question is "So, it's free. Doesn't that mean it's spyware? How do I know what's spyware and what isn't?" Also, often, you hear things like "How can they afford to give stuff away for free? Who makes this stuff? What's the catch?"
To explain that there is no catch, beyond that the software might just not be particularly good, you really have to explain the concept of freedom.
To answer your points:
a) If they don't yet have anything that works for their purposes, free software can fill that gap.
b) If they don't yet have habits...
c) What requires more work, a free download, or a paid download? (Or, if it's "freeware", maybe it comes with spyware...)
Given an equivalent piece of free or non-free software, free seems the clear winner, but you kind of do have to explain freedom. I realize that they're not always equivalent -- for instance, Gimp is not yet a replacement for Photoshop.
[1] Apologies to Joss Whedon. Comparing Jayne to Bonzi Buddy is unfair. (Unfair to Jayne, I think... or maybe Bonzi Buddy, who knows.)
Last I heard, Steve Jobs had some issues with nVidia, thus you get ATI for all new macs, end of story. Unless someone else comes along -- Intel, maybe?
Could be completely unfounded rumor, so take with a grain of salt, but it does sound like the Apple we know and love [to hate].
By the way -- this is why I love to be a PC/Linux user. I can buy whatever hardware I want, I'm not bound by the moods of His Holy Turtleneckness. The disadvantage is, it has to be something with a Linux driver, but in a pinch, I can write my own. But really, not that much doesn't have a Linux driver these days.
So am I.
See, that just seems bizarre to me. If you're willing to accept lower-quality video, due to DRM, why do you accept Windows (DRM'd) to play closed-source video games (DRM'd) on a whole separate computer (more expensive than an HD-DVD player, to be sure)?
Here's a question, though: What if it doesn't?
What if HD-DVDs completely take over from DVDs, but the best you can do is download pirated video? (And thus miss out on all the features I'm developing -- some of them will really be pretty cool.)
I don't mean to be pushing the format. I'm more curious in how your ethics work.
Well, 40 years ago, they would have been good features, too.
I don't mean to imply that I'm judging the original designers. However, these features are so essential now that I consider any API not supporting them to be broken, just as I consider FAT (or at least, most FAT partitions) to be broken by not supporting files bigger than -- what is it, 2 gigs? 4 gigs?
By "broken", I mean that very basic functionality is missing, in a way in which it's not really possible to extend the system to implement them. For example, transactions can only be implemented on a modern filesystem by doing it yourself, in your own format (with your own journal), and calling 'sync' on a big file, at which point, why not write your own filesystem?
Which are hindered by this ancient API.
If it does, how does it support them?
More relevantly, are they done in such a way that any filesystem can implement them, or only ZFS?
Consider file permissions. POSIX basically requires them, although there are plenty of filesystems like VFAT which will show you any permission set you want it to (because the underlying device doesn't support them), and toys for FUSE which outright ignore file permissions.
Anyway...
If you want to discuss ZFS, you'll have to wait till I get some decent VMs set up here on which to install Solaris -- or at least, I should read the specs. But I do suggest you re-read them carefully -- I want to be able to perform a number of FS operations, on a set of files, and ensure that all of them are either committed as a unit, or fail. And I want to do it without interrupting the rest of the system.
No, that was somewhat sarcastic. I was trying to understand any reason someone might have for preferring Blu-Ray, but really, you should prefer HD-DVD.
Except, on Blu-Ray, Java is your only option if you want to do client-side "scripting".
Yes.
Though technically, there is a JavaScript interpreter/compiler written in Java / targeting the JVM. Thus, I'm fairly sure you can run JavaScript on Blu-Ray, if you really want to. Similarly, you could probably adapt Google Web Toolkit and develop an HD-DVD client in Java, and compile it to JavaScript.
Personally, I prefer JavaScript. However, there are a very large number of reasons to prefer HD-DVD aside from the language, so I was implying that if you'd really rather develop for Blu-Ray, you must really be a Java zealot.
On the client side? Not so much, I think. It makes the players quite a lot cheaper to implement, and the standard quite a lot smaller.
Given our court system, you may be right.
But understand, all of that is GPL'd. (Or am I wrong about that?) The fact that it's GPL'd means Sun has no control over it except the name and the requirement that it also be GPL'd (and thus have source code available). Similarly, the only control anyone has over Linux is whoever owns the trademark and logo.
I'll agree with you there.