There are plenty of cases where Java doesn't work, and for the ones where it does, a flaw in the JVM affects all OSes.
Also, what does a VPN have to do with anything? I think the word you're looking for is DMZ...
But Schneier's point goes deeper. Monoculture is not only cheaper in terms of training your support staff in IT. It's cheaper to develop for (even Java apps have portability issues), it's a cheaper cost to society (imagine how much farther KDE would get if the Gnome team switched completely, or vice versa), it's cheaper in just about every way imaginable until we see that catastrophic failure.
But then, the alternative is just another kind of security through obscurity: I'm secure because I'm an obscure OS like Linux or BSD, and not a mainstream one like Windows. In this case, just as in the normal "security through obscurity", it may make more sense to simply try to be secure in the first place, and not rely on people not finding you, or not figuring it out.
After all, if there were 3-5 wildly popular OSes instead of one, that just means you'd wait till you have 3-5 zero-day attacks and roll them all up into one super-worm.
Well, except that in the case of the ice, I think it still might have cracked had he grabbed it in the center, because that's kind of like grabbing a bunch of chunks of ice half that diameter by the edge. It might still have worked for ice, but I'd be skeptical of the island if it wasn't made of Kryptonian crystals.
And yes, I did wonder about the plane. I figure if people had their seatbelts on, it would help, at least. But by then, I figure, Superman won, and it's really time for the crowd and the cheering.
Well, if we wanted to be sure, we could wrap the mother in lead or something.
As for the sex bit, if we could keep the baby from killing the mother with normal (green) kryptonite (given a small enough quantity), couldn't we do the same to Superman during sex? You don't need the gold kryptonite to do that. Kryptonite-laced condom, etc etc... It would be a tricky thing to pull off, but it could work. It might hurt, but after that long, I'm sure he'd be willing. Besides, it adds a bit of kink to it -- of course the most powerful man in the world would want to be a sub.
And yet, you do mention that Halo side-scroller...
So yes, unless MS was planning to directly compete with you (make their own RTS), I feel somewhat ripped off, having never gotten to see what you did with this thing.
First off, neither consoles nor PCs (for gaming) are going away.
Agreed, as much as I wish consoles would go away (or at least become more flexible).
I dropped Battlefield 2 like you wouldn't believe. BF2 is the prime example of where I fear PC gaming is going. Bloated games made to sell more expensive hardware.
True, but then, it depends. Check out the minimum requirements for games like Half-Life 2. Being at the low end means you'll probably have to tweak the graphics down every time, whereas I'm tweaking them up, but most decent games should work.
Sure, the maps are huge, which would require plenty of muscle, but loading times and the overall lack of polish are the killer.
Well, unless you're playing online, you're going to have to load most of the map in order to run a server for your bots to play on. So loading times naturally follow from huge maps. Still, some loading times are ridiculous, I agree, although I haven't seen BF2.
I don't like how closed down consoles are for the games that could stand to be modded, but for highly structured online games like racers, It makes perfect sense to keep the consumer out of the hardware and software.
Not really. It doesn't necessarily make it harder to cheat -- you should see the shit that happens with Halo 2 on Xbox Live -- and if you can't imagine how you'd make a good mod for a racing game, that's your lack of imagination, not a limitation of the genre. Unfortunately, you never really see racers, sports games, or anything out of EA that's moddable, but that's a technical thing and mostly a management decision -- again, not a limitation of the genre.
PC's are becoming a niche market - for MMORPG's. Everything else to this point seems better fit for a console.
FPS. I like the mouse.
RTS. And the genre isn't dead, there are still interesting things being done with games like Natural Selection and Tremulous.
Mods. Free games. Everything on a console seems to have a price tag these days. While Steam is leading the PC in that same general direction, it's still possible to find a huge number of very interesting, very fun games that you can download and play for free, that only require that you've bought one game.
Development. As an aspiring game developer, I need games to work on my development machine. Unless Sony can clean up their act to where I'd touch them with a 10 foot pole AND actually make the PS3 enough of a "computer" that I can use it as a development rig, my development machine will remain a PC.
The number of dollars saved from having to test and develop for endless combinations of CPU/GPU/OS/etc is enormous.
Give me a number or stop talking out your ass.
I'd argue it's significantly easier to develop using something like RenderWare, or even your own custom engine on top of SDL/OpenGL and make it run on Windows, Linux, and OS X, than to develop for the three or four consoles out right now, trying to squeeze every last bit out of each one without going too far.
That extra time/money is spent enhancing the game rather than just making it work.
Interesting... I'd rather some console games spent more time just making it work. Nothing sucks more than to have it destroy your game halfway through, and often no way to get a patch. PC games, at least it's possible to patch, backup your savegames, etc.
While your point is somewhat true, the things you mention are embarrassingly wrong.
Consider RAM--consoles will never have tons of gigabytes of space.
Maybe not, but they don't have that much less right now. Perhaps they will never have as much space as PCs, but then, consoles will also never have the spyware to fill it. In any case, saying that they will never have gigabytes of RAM is just stupid. The N64 had an upgrade that gave you 4 megs more RAM, which was a huge improvement. Compare that to the specs for today's consoles -- even last gen, the PS2 had 32 megs.
So yes, consoles will eventually have that, but PC gaming may be far beyond it by then.
Or hard disk space--for that matter.
I have a 100 gig Windows partition set aside for gaming. I don't use most of it, I just occasionally uninstall games. And I don't have a single savegame over 50 or 100 megs, so I could even save all my savegames and reinstall the games later if I want.
And the larger the environments get, the more we might see procedural generation, which actually uses insanely less disk space -- there was a 96 kilobyte modern FPS for Windows recently. It uses more RAM, but it could just as easily generate the level and save it in some temporary disk file while you're playing, then delete it when you're done.
I'd argue that it's nice to have RAID, but really, the disk doesn't seem to be the bottleneck for loading games anymore, it seems to be the CPU. Besides, simply moving to a hard disk for this will speed up console games immensely -- that is, the ones that actually have any loading times to speak of. I can still list far more console games than PC games which do dynamic loading, and games aren't nearly complex enough yet that I could move fast enough through a game that the hard disk couldn't keep up.
And despite all the cell's cores, we'll have more cores with PC's.
Yes. Yes we will. And they will all be CPUs.
As I understand it, the point of the Cell is, rather than having a CPU and a GPU, they have tons of cores, each of which is good at a specific kind of math, so if you can split up your program properly... Remember the buzz about the physics and AI cards, even a gaming network card? All that stuff comes standard on the Cell.
SLI will never go into consoles as well.
Are you fucking serious? The PS2 -- which came out far before there was a hint of SLI on desktop systems -- had two vector processing units. It's not exactly a new concept.
In any case, the Xbox 360 seems to be able to handle high def output just fine. I've never seen a computer scale any modern game to that much resolution.
For the top end (yes, some gamers do have money), it's PC.
For gamers who can afford the PC upgrade cycle to be able to truly claim power as their reason for not using consoles, they probably could buy a console or two anyway. I know I'll be seriously debating whether to upgrade my gaming rig or buy a Wii. That's not to say that I won't keep playing on the PC, or upgrade it later, but the biggest problem I have with consoles these days is political -- I don't want to support either Sony or Microsoft.
They already exist, just not on those formats. You can buy them for download, or as WMV files on DVDs. I think they were also the first ones to do this.
At this point, it was hard to keep reading. I don't consider it "stealing the idea" when it's an obvious homage, and everyone knows what the source material is.
Especially in the mod scene; you've all heard the stories about the DBZ/StarWars/Trekkie mods which got stopped.
This bit is actually completely uninformed. Trek in particular has, at least recently, allowed a blatant fan series to go on unhindered. There isn't a good legal reason for it, but there is a tacit agreement.
They knew the risks, took the risk, and now they're whining.
Actually, they're not whining at all. RTFA.
They should develop their own IP.
Depends what the goal is. If the goal is just to make a good game, then sure, develop your own IP. But for whatever reason, a lot of people feel the need to do things like write fan fiction, shoot fan movies, and develop fan games, because the actual, canonical original didn't go as far as they wanted it to. Or maybe they just wanted to explore that universe in a new direction.
It's not that hard to develop your own IP, or even borrow from stuff whose copyright has long since expired. If they chose not to, I'd look for reasons other than laziness.
Portability is currently handled by distro maintainers.
This is true. It's also not nearly as bad as it could be. I can still download a binary build of Doom 3 or Quake 4 and run its installer script, and have it pretty much just work on any modern distro, x86 or amd64. Gentoo provides an ebuild for convenience, not because it wouldn't ordinarily work.
Malware could be confused by a different directory structure in a different distro.
Maybe, maybe not. Distros tend to be converging on directory structures, so it depends on what you're trying to do. For instance, if you want something to run at boot time, different init systems will confuse you, but Gentoo is the only Linux I know which uses anything terribly custom.
I mean, yeah, they'd have problems with GoboLinux, but really, does anyone use that?
(Different processors are also a possible problem for malware, but nowadays almost everything other than high-powered servers are x86/amd64.)
That's not true at all (there are other things than desktops and servers), but it seems mostly true on desktops, so ok. But even different archs isn't a huge deal. Imagine malware written as a shell script. And there have been cross-platform worms, at least as proof-of-concept -- you detect what kind of machine you're about to infect, then send the binary that works there. The payload is the versions for everything else, plus whatever else you want to do with them.
And again, the easier we make it to port apps -- a requirement for having enough meaningful diversity for any of this to matter -- the easier it will be for malware to be portable as well. People joke about wine being malware-compatible -- that seems a bit harder, because Wine creates its own little environment, and to go outside of that, you have to realize you're running in wine and plan for it. But remember what I said about shell scripting? Imagine the same thing, only for C# programs. When Vista rolls around, the difference between a.NET program and a Windows binary won't really matter -- they're all.exe files anyway. So the more compatible mono is, the more likely the malware will be able to do what it wants to do on whatever OS you run it on, on whatever arch, attaching itself to other "assemblies" on the system...
For the same reason they might buy advertising in EA's games. That's not entirely without precedent -- TV networks advertise on each other all the time.
It's just that in this case, the advertising happens to be free, for both of them.
bickering about the finer points of spelling, grammar, and some vague point the parent didn't even imply, but is willing to debate at length for the hell of it, since no mod will ever find this thread to mod us offtopic, so who cares about the karma?
Therefore a system designed for common users without built-in automated patching must be rejected.
Linux, then. You want to be able to patch not only the OS and core apps, but any app you have to install. Neither Windows nor OS X has anything like this that is at all easy to use or up-to-date.
A lot of us aren't in OSS for the the ride to the top. I personally couldn't care if 1% of the population used OSS or 99%.
I hear you, but it is damned inconvenient to be that 1%.
For instance, there are some HD videos I could buy -- pornos that have WMVs in them -- and play those on Linux, using the Windows Media Player DLL, and only assuming I can run x86 apps. Most HD movies now are Blu-Ray, which Linux will not crack^Wsupport for at least a couple of years, if ever.
Another example: Music. I can still buy overpriced CDs, but if I want to buy music online, I have to find those few sites willing to sell un-DRM'd music at a reasonable price. And while I'm at it, if I wanted some huge amount of music, services like Napster beat me for sheer price (small monthly fee + lots of bandwidth = more music than I can listen to), but I must boycott those services because I can't play them on Linux, and probably wouldn't want to if I could.
I have to carefully choose which games I buy or download. Generally, unless it has a native Linux port or a demo I can make work under Wine, I won't buy it. That severely limits which games I can buy, whereas on Windows, I don't even have to glance at the specs yet -- that will only matter when Vista comes out and I have to be careful not to buy Vista-only games.
And then there's the legal issues. The only way I can play DVDs on my Linux is blatantly illegal. But at least I can still do it -- if the media companies win, I'll be a minority looking for the DVD version when everyone else has Blu-Ray. I'll be the guy on old, crappy cable because it's the only thing left that still works with my MythTV box. Basically, everything new in any kind of multimedia or entertainment is something I'll have to boycott, because it will all have insane amounts of DRM crap on it.
Worse than that, pretty much no one understands what my problem is. Companies will claim to be cross-platform by supporting Windows and Mac. No one gets why I won't just use Windows or Mac, and things like package managers are meaningless to them, because in that particular area, Linux is so far ahead of its time that no one has a clue what I'm talking about. The general attitude seems to be that someone like me should be pretty much sticking to Windows, so I don't have to spend time messing with Wine, and so that my stuff will just work.
All of these problems would go away with even a little more marketshare and mindshare. Look at where Apple is. Not everything works on a Mac, but at least people know what you're talking about when you complain that sometihng doesn't have a Mac version. Then we'd only have BSD at the other end, claiming superiority over Linux, and wondering why no one has a BSD version of this or that Linux program.
All that will happen is that eventually, I will not know enough of Windows to troubleshoot their machines anymore
I'm already past that point, and I simply refuse to troubleshoot their machines anyway, beyond a quick glance./p.
Sure, they do share most of the Linux kernel, but even there every distro has their own set of kernel patches.
And when there are gaping security holes, they usually affect every distro. You don't usually see "Only affects distro x." It's not just the kernel, either. There's glibc, among other things -- we do try to share libs where it makes sense. This also means, when a fix is issued, it affects everything.
The point is, the kernel gets closer to bug-free every day, and fixing a bug in the kernel fixes the same bug everywhere. And by the way, there are apps with relatively perfect security, some that you can pretty much mathematically prove are secure, and some that have simply been out so long without problems that... Take something simple, like DNS. Is there really going to be a security flaw in djbdns? Somehow, I doubt it.
And if you continue along this line of thinking, there are whole classes of security flaws that really should not exist. Take buffer overflows. There are two or three ways to patch your kernel to make it difficult or impossible to exploit an appliaction buffer overflow for anything other than DoS, if that. Or use a language that doesn't allow buffer overflows -- a language which includes bounds-checking on everything anyway.
Diversity is good, but not for reasons of security. And it also comes at the expense of portability for normal apps. That is, if your distro is so different that a [virus|worm|trojan|spyware] isn't portable to it, then you're probably going to have problems porting your normal apps to it. Or what is it that makes malware especially difficult to port?
You do realise that theres effectually very little difference between the two?
Yes, I do. I don't imagine that you making them wildly different will make it that much harder.
And yes, writing a cross os virus is much harder then you seem to think.
Well, if there ends up being very little difference, then it will probably be much easier than I think. But do you say this from personal experience? If not, can you give me any reason more specific than "it's hard"?
Ok, my facts are now straight, and I still don't get it. Why couldn't MS do the same with these guys? Or at least sign some sort of a deal such that they're free to develop the product until MS decides they can't?
To answer your rhetorical question, it's not because Mac or Linux are worse development platforms, but that people are trained on Windows and MS Visual Crap, and because cross-compiling can be hard. It may actually be easier to develop a Windows app in Windows. Then there's also the question of why do most people use Windows in the first place?
Not to mention, you need a Windows box to test on. Unless you're going to make the app cross-platform, you have to test it as a Windows app, which means either Windows or Wine. Wine may not work as well as you'd like, and virtualization seems like a huge waste, especially on a development box, since most development tools (open source included) are huge and bloated, and will easily soak up a gig of RAM for no apparent reason.
On OS X, I frequently have the experience of plugging in new hardware and having it work, to the extent that I can plug in new hardware (a camera, a USB drive), whereas on Windows, sometimes it's that easy, and sometimes you need a driver download, and often you need to install the hardware vendor's crap software just to get the drivers.
However, I have noticed people switching to Mac -- people who are sick of being a Linux guru and wanting their stuff to just work, and people who are sick of dealing with Windows [in]security and [in]flexibility issues. It's the best of both worlds to a lot of people -- under the hood is a powerful Unix, but stuff just works, and more often than on Windows. Sadly, their Unix is crippled, and their shiny interface can be a bit inflexible at times, and to top it all off, the xcode-users list is full of people who mostly hate to be reminded of the Unix under the hood, and hate that xcode requires them to learn a bit about the commandline from time to time.
I'm sorry, were you trolling, or are you actually this deluded?
If Microsoft was good at software development, why do so many of their products suck so much? I'm not talking about feature bloat, I'm talking about unneccesary bloat and major security flaws. Why can even the tiniest browser beat Internet Explorer at security?
Small 3rd party products are loved because they get the job done, not because they're only used by people who need them. Or are you implying that we like our third party stuff because we can get a small app, dedicated to exactly what we want? True enough, but what's stopping MS from splitting their apps up into smaller, more flexible pieces?
And we don't always choose open source for that reason. Eclipse is huge, bloated, and slow, and packs way more features than any one project will ever use, and there's still and addon structure for it. But people prefer eclipse because it gets the job done, better and faster than the competition.
Now, why do people prefer pretty much any antivirus solution under the sun to McAffee or Norton? Answer: they both suck. By disabling McAffee, I immediately noticed a speedup of about 20-30 times what it was. My roommate had Norton instead, and it constantly killed the games he was playing, or alternatively lagged the crap out of him -- in a 2D RPG! He had to interrupt his game every 20 mins or so to kill Norton.
And consider: OS X somehow manages to be very, very usable to geek and newbie alike, without actually getting too bloated. I'd argue the same about Linux, but your average newbie will believe me about OS X, and really, it's true of both.
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There are plenty of cases where Java doesn't work, and for the ones where it does, a flaw in the JVM affects all OSes.
Also, what does a VPN have to do with anything? I think the word you're looking for is DMZ...
But Schneier's point goes deeper. Monoculture is not only cheaper in terms of training your support staff in IT. It's cheaper to develop for (even Java apps have portability issues), it's a cheaper cost to society (imagine how much farther KDE would get if the Gnome team switched completely, or vice versa), it's cheaper in just about every way imaginable until we see that catastrophic failure.
But then, the alternative is just another kind of security through obscurity: I'm secure because I'm an obscure OS like Linux or BSD, and not a mainstream one like Windows. In this case, just as in the normal "security through obscurity", it may make more sense to simply try to be secure in the first place, and not rely on people not finding you, or not figuring it out.
After all, if there were 3-5 wildly popular OSes instead of one, that just means you'd wait till you have 3-5 zero-day attacks and roll them all up into one super-worm.
Well, except that in the case of the ice, I think it still might have cracked had he grabbed it in the center, because that's kind of like grabbing a bunch of chunks of ice half that diameter by the edge. It might still have worked for ice, but I'd be skeptical of the island if it wasn't made of Kryptonian crystals.
And yes, I did wonder about the plane. I figure if people had their seatbelts on, it would help, at least. But by then, I figure, Superman won, and it's really time for the crowd and the cheering.
RTFA. He just found the image that's used for the Black Screen of Death and replaced it with a Windows BSOD screenshot.
Well, in that same Superman Returns, he lifts a continent by his hands. I think that's just a bit less probable than the ice.
But yes, the scenes with the plane were arguably the best in the movie.
Well, if we wanted to be sure, we could wrap the mother in lead or something.
As for the sex bit, if we could keep the baby from killing the mother with normal (green) kryptonite (given a small enough quantity), couldn't we do the same to Superman during sex? You don't need the gold kryptonite to do that. Kryptonite-laced condom, etc etc... It would be a tricky thing to pull off, but it could work. It might hurt, but after that long, I'm sure he'd be willing. Besides, it adds a bit of kink to it -- of course the most powerful man in the world would want to be a sub.
And yet, you do mention that Halo side-scroller...
So yes, unless MS was planning to directly compete with you (make their own RTS), I feel somewhat ripped off, having never gotten to see what you did with this thing.
Agreed, as much as I wish consoles would go away (or at least become more flexible).
True, but then, it depends. Check out the minimum requirements for games like Half-Life 2. Being at the low end means you'll probably have to tweak the graphics down every time, whereas I'm tweaking them up, but most decent games should work.
Well, unless you're playing online, you're going to have to load most of the map in order to run a server for your bots to play on. So loading times naturally follow from huge maps. Still, some loading times are ridiculous, I agree, although I haven't seen BF2.
Not really. It doesn't necessarily make it harder to cheat -- you should see the shit that happens with Halo 2 on Xbox Live -- and if you can't imagine how you'd make a good mod for a racing game, that's your lack of imagination, not a limitation of the genre. Unfortunately, you never really see racers, sports games, or anything out of EA that's moddable, but that's a technical thing and mostly a management decision -- again, not a limitation of the genre.
FPS. I like the mouse.
RTS. And the genre isn't dead, there are still interesting things being done with games like Natural Selection and Tremulous.
Mods. Free games. Everything on a console seems to have a price tag these days. While Steam is leading the PC in that same general direction, it's still possible to find a huge number of very interesting, very fun games that you can download and play for free, that only require that you've bought one game.
Development. As an aspiring game developer, I need games to work on my development machine. Unless Sony can clean up their act to where I'd touch them with a 10 foot pole AND actually make the PS3 enough of a "computer" that I can use it as a development rig, my development machine will remain a PC.
Give me a number or stop talking out your ass.
I'd argue it's significantly easier to develop using something like RenderWare, or even your own custom engine on top of SDL/OpenGL and make it run on Windows, Linux, and OS X, than to develop for the three or four consoles out right now, trying to squeeze every last bit out of each one without going too far.
Interesting... I'd rather some console games spent more time just making it work. Nothing sucks more than to have it destroy your game halfway through, and often no way to get a patch. PC games, at least it's possible to patch, backup your savegames, etc.
While your point is somewhat true, the things you mention are embarrassingly wrong.
Maybe not, but they don't have that much less right now. Perhaps they will never have as much space as PCs, but then, consoles will also never have the spyware to fill it. In any case, saying that they will never have gigabytes of RAM is just stupid. The N64 had an upgrade that gave you 4 megs more RAM, which was a huge improvement. Compare that to the specs for today's consoles -- even last gen, the PS2 had 32 megs.
So yes, consoles will eventually have that, but PC gaming may be far beyond it by then.
I have a 100 gig Windows partition set aside for gaming. I don't use most of it, I just occasionally uninstall games. And I don't have a single savegame over 50 or 100 megs, so I could even save all my savegames and reinstall the games later if I want.
And the larger the environments get, the more we might see procedural generation, which actually uses insanely less disk space -- there was a 96 kilobyte modern FPS for Windows recently. It uses more RAM, but it could just as easily generate the level and save it in some temporary disk file while you're playing, then delete it when you're done.
I'd argue that it's nice to have RAID, but really, the disk doesn't seem to be the bottleneck for loading games anymore, it seems to be the CPU. Besides, simply moving to a hard disk for this will speed up console games immensely -- that is, the ones that actually have any loading times to speak of. I can still list far more console games than PC games which do dynamic loading, and games aren't nearly complex enough yet that I could move fast enough through a game that the hard disk couldn't keep up.
Yes. Yes we will. And they will all be CPUs.
As I understand it, the point of the Cell is, rather than having a CPU and a GPU, they have tons of cores, each of which is good at a specific kind of math, so if you can split up your program properly... Remember the buzz about the physics and AI cards, even a gaming network card? All that stuff comes standard on the Cell.
Are you fucking serious? The PS2 -- which came out far before there was a hint of SLI on desktop systems -- had two vector processing units. It's not exactly a new concept.
In any case, the Xbox 360 seems to be able to handle high def output just fine. I've never seen a computer scale any modern game to that much resolution.
For gamers who can afford the PC upgrade cycle to be able to truly claim power as their reason for not using consoles, they probably could buy a console or two anyway. I know I'll be seriously debating whether to upgrade my gaming rig or buy a Wii. That's not to say that I won't keep playing on the PC, or upgrade it later, but the biggest problem I have with consoles these days is political -- I don't want to support either Sony or Microsoft.
Should be a damn long time if people can't get it straight.
HDCP is to plug the analog hole. I want the h.264-compressed file, not the raw stream.
There's a whole different DRM scheme to encrypt the content on the disk itself, which is what we want.
They already exist, just not on those formats. You can buy them for download, or as WMV files on DVDs. I think they were also the first ones to do this.
At this point, it was hard to keep reading. I don't consider it "stealing the idea" when it's an obvious homage, and everyone knows what the source material is.
This bit is actually completely uninformed. Trek in particular has, at least recently, allowed a blatant fan series to go on unhindered. There isn't a good legal reason for it, but there is a tacit agreement.
Actually, they're not whining at all. RTFA.
Depends what the goal is. If the goal is just to make a good game, then sure, develop your own IP. But for whatever reason, a lot of people feel the need to do things like write fan fiction, shoot fan movies, and develop fan games, because the actual, canonical original didn't go as far as they wanted it to. Or maybe they just wanted to explore that universe in a new direction.
It's not that hard to develop your own IP, or even borrow from stuff whose copyright has long since expired. If they chose not to, I'd look for reasons other than laziness.
This is true. It's also not nearly as bad as it could be. I can still download a binary build of Doom 3 or Quake 4 and run its installer script, and have it pretty much just work on any modern distro, x86 or amd64. Gentoo provides an ebuild for convenience, not because it wouldn't ordinarily work.
Maybe, maybe not. Distros tend to be converging on directory structures, so it depends on what you're trying to do. For instance, if you want something to run at boot time, different init systems will confuse you, but Gentoo is the only Linux I know which uses anything terribly custom.
I mean, yeah, they'd have problems with GoboLinux, but really, does anyone use that?
That's not true at all (there are other things than desktops and servers), but it seems mostly true on desktops, so ok. But even different archs isn't a huge deal. Imagine malware written as a shell script. And there have been cross-platform worms, at least as proof-of-concept -- you detect what kind of machine you're about to infect, then send the binary that works there. The payload is the versions for everything else, plus whatever else you want to do with them.
And again, the easier we make it to port apps -- a requirement for having enough meaningful diversity for any of this to matter -- the easier it will be for malware to be portable as well. People joke about wine being malware-compatible -- that seems a bit harder, because Wine creates its own little environment, and to go outside of that, you have to realize you're running in wine and plan for it. But remember what I said about shell scripting? Imagine the same thing, only for C# programs. When Vista rolls around, the difference between a .NET program and a Windows binary won't really matter -- they're all .exe files anyway. So the more compatible mono is, the more likely the malware will be able to do what it wants to do on whatever OS you run it on, on whatever arch, attaching itself to other "assemblies" on the system...
For the same reason they might buy advertising in EA's games. That's not entirely without precedent -- TV networks advertise on each other all the time.
It's just that in this case, the advertising happens to be free, for both of them.
No, the Ultimate Insult is simple: "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle."
I guess there's nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
bickering about the finer points of spelling, grammar, and some vague point the parent didn't even imply, but is willing to debate at length for the hell of it, since no mod will ever find this thread to mod us offtopic, so who cares about the karma?
Linux, then. You want to be able to patch not only the OS and core apps, but any app you have to install. Neither Windows nor OS X has anything like this that is at all easy to use or up-to-date.
I hear you, but it is damned inconvenient to be that 1%.
For instance, there are some HD videos I could buy -- pornos that have WMVs in them -- and play those on Linux, using the Windows Media Player DLL, and only assuming I can run x86 apps. Most HD movies now are Blu-Ray, which Linux will not crack^Wsupport for at least a couple of years, if ever.
Another example: Music. I can still buy overpriced CDs, but if I want to buy music online, I have to find those few sites willing to sell un-DRM'd music at a reasonable price. And while I'm at it, if I wanted some huge amount of music, services like Napster beat me for sheer price (small monthly fee + lots of bandwidth = more music than I can listen to), but I must boycott those services because I can't play them on Linux, and probably wouldn't want to if I could.
I have to carefully choose which games I buy or download. Generally, unless it has a native Linux port or a demo I can make work under Wine, I won't buy it. That severely limits which games I can buy, whereas on Windows, I don't even have to glance at the specs yet -- that will only matter when Vista comes out and I have to be careful not to buy Vista-only games.
And then there's the legal issues. The only way I can play DVDs on my Linux is blatantly illegal. But at least I can still do it -- if the media companies win, I'll be a minority looking for the DVD version when everyone else has Blu-Ray. I'll be the guy on old, crappy cable because it's the only thing left that still works with my MythTV box. Basically, everything new in any kind of multimedia or entertainment is something I'll have to boycott, because it will all have insane amounts of DRM crap on it.
Worse than that, pretty much no one understands what my problem is. Companies will claim to be cross-platform by supporting Windows and Mac. No one gets why I won't just use Windows or Mac, and things like package managers are meaningless to them, because in that particular area, Linux is so far ahead of its time that no one has a clue what I'm talking about. The general attitude seems to be that someone like me should be pretty much sticking to Windows, so I don't have to spend time messing with Wine, and so that my stuff will just work.
All of these problems would go away with even a little more marketshare and mindshare. Look at where Apple is. Not everything works on a Mac, but at least people know what you're talking about when you complain that sometihng doesn't have a Mac version. Then we'd only have BSD at the other end, claiming superiority over Linux, and wondering why no one has a BSD version of this or that Linux program.
I'm already past that point, and I simply refuse to troubleshoot their machines anyway, beyond a quick glance./p.
So what's wrong with just clicking on the program anyway (in the dock)? That brings all its windows to the front, unless they're on other desktops.
And when there are gaping security holes, they usually affect every distro. You don't usually see "Only affects distro x." It's not just the kernel, either. There's glibc, among other things -- we do try to share libs where it makes sense. This also means, when a fix is issued, it affects everything.
The point is, the kernel gets closer to bug-free every day, and fixing a bug in the kernel fixes the same bug everywhere. And by the way, there are apps with relatively perfect security, some that you can pretty much mathematically prove are secure, and some that have simply been out so long without problems that... Take something simple, like DNS. Is there really going to be a security flaw in djbdns? Somehow, I doubt it.
And if you continue along this line of thinking, there are whole classes of security flaws that really should not exist. Take buffer overflows. There are two or three ways to patch your kernel to make it difficult or impossible to exploit an appliaction buffer overflow for anything other than DoS, if that. Or use a language that doesn't allow buffer overflows -- a language which includes bounds-checking on everything anyway.
Diversity is good, but not for reasons of security. And it also comes at the expense of portability for normal apps. That is, if your distro is so different that a [virus|worm|trojan|spyware] isn't portable to it, then you're probably going to have problems porting your normal apps to it. Or what is it that makes malware especially difficult to port?
There are compromises. You could grant such rights under a license that says "We can stop you whenever we want."
Seems to have worked well for Star Trek.
Yes, I do. I don't imagine that you making them wildly different will make it that much harder.
Well, if there ends up being very little difference, then it will probably be much easier than I think. But do you say this from personal experience? If not, can you give me any reason more specific than "it's hard"?
Ok, my facts are now straight, and I still don't get it. Why couldn't MS do the same with these guys? Or at least sign some sort of a deal such that they're free to develop the product until MS decides they can't?
To answer your rhetorical question, it's not because Mac or Linux are worse development platforms, but that people are trained on Windows and MS Visual Crap, and because cross-compiling can be hard. It may actually be easier to develop a Windows app in Windows. Then there's also the question of why do most people use Windows in the first place?
Not to mention, you need a Windows box to test on. Unless you're going to make the app cross-platform, you have to test it as a Windows app, which means either Windows or Wine. Wine may not work as well as you'd like, and virtualization seems like a huge waste, especially on a development box, since most development tools (open source included) are huge and bloated, and will easily soak up a gig of RAM for no apparent reason.
On OS X, I frequently have the experience of plugging in new hardware and having it work, to the extent that I can plug in new hardware (a camera, a USB drive), whereas on Windows, sometimes it's that easy, and sometimes you need a driver download, and often you need to install the hardware vendor's crap software just to get the drivers.
However, I have noticed people switching to Mac -- people who are sick of being a Linux guru and wanting their stuff to just work, and people who are sick of dealing with Windows [in]security and [in]flexibility issues. It's the best of both worlds to a lot of people -- under the hood is a powerful Unix, but stuff just works, and more often than on Windows. Sadly, their Unix is crippled, and their shiny interface can be a bit inflexible at times, and to top it all off, the xcode-users list is full of people who mostly hate to be reminded of the Unix under the hood, and hate that xcode requires them to learn a bit about the commandline from time to time.
I'm sorry, were you trolling, or are you actually this deluded?
If Microsoft was good at software development, why do so many of their products suck so much? I'm not talking about feature bloat, I'm talking about unneccesary bloat and major security flaws. Why can even the tiniest browser beat Internet Explorer at security?
Small 3rd party products are loved because they get the job done, not because they're only used by people who need them. Or are you implying that we like our third party stuff because we can get a small app, dedicated to exactly what we want? True enough, but what's stopping MS from splitting their apps up into smaller, more flexible pieces?
And we don't always choose open source for that reason. Eclipse is huge, bloated, and slow, and packs way more features than any one project will ever use, and there's still and addon structure for it. But people prefer eclipse because it gets the job done, better and faster than the competition.
Now, why do people prefer pretty much any antivirus solution under the sun to McAffee or Norton? Answer: they both suck. By disabling McAffee, I immediately noticed a speedup of about 20-30 times what it was. My roommate had Norton instead, and it constantly killed the games he was playing, or alternatively lagged the crap out of him -- in a 2D RPG! He had to interrupt his game every 20 mins or so to kill Norton.
And consider: OS X somehow manages to be very, very usable to geek and newbie alike, without actually getting too bloated. I'd argue the same about Linux, but your average newbie will believe me about OS X, and really, it's true of both.