This analogy is inherently flawed. Computer "viruses", or worms, or whatever you want to call them, have no more reason to be arbitrarily limited to one OS than any other piece of software. If there was any real competition among them, we'd see this a lot more.
Besides, MS already does this. It's called Home edition and Professional edition, and the same malware works across both. Certainly, if they want the software to be compatible across different Microsoft OSes, the malware will be, too.
What if you can't infiltrate the one piece of security software? Wouldn't it be better for everyone to have that one?
Certainly, it's better to have alternatives if there's some problem with the existing one. But I think the downside of having one standard setup to rule them all is mostly negated by F/OSS -- rather than all the security work (and all the other work) going into many separate pieces of software, they go into one.
I am not saying there shouldn't be alternatives, but every time I hear the anti-monoculture stuff, I have to throw out a devil's advocate.
I haven't heard a single complaint from Microsoft about Red vs Blue, and that was arguably a commercial venture for at least awhile. In fact, Bungie included features in Halo 2 specifically to help RVB -- the ability to lower your weapon, for one.
Ok, fine, it wasn't a game, it's a TV series, but isn't that reasonable competition for, say, the Halo movie?
Not to mention that this actually hurts MS more than it helps them, though it probably won't have much of an effect.
Can anyone give me a moral and/or legal downside to leaving the mod team alone? Or maybe signing some rights over to them, if you need to make it legal?
Ok, I really, really can't imagine how fan stuff, when clearly marked as such, is going to significantly impact their sales.
Historically, I imagine it's helped, more than anything. Consider all the Star Wars fan films. Consider Star Trek New Voyages.
Really, how, exactly, is this competition? It's even a different genre, fercryinoutloud. "Oh, I love RTSes, but the StarCraft story just sucks ass, so I played Halo instead. But now that there's a Halo RTS, I won't have to buy Halo 3!"
Yeah, notice how on that comparison table, they only list one advantage of MCE -- it is simple to setup, whereas MythTV requires moderate Linux know-how. Also, MythTV does not run on Windows, as far as I know, while MCE does. Absolutely everything else in that table is in favor of MythTV. Pay nothing, get more features and flexibility.
So yes, I'd say the reviewer prefers MythTV. The only reason MCE was mentioned at all is to have something to compare to, and as a reference point for people who may know nothing about MythTV or PVRs, but have a fuzzy idea of what MCE is.
While the summary is a little over eager, it's not actually wrong, just not as reasonably verified as we're used to from Slashdot.
I know there's a voice actor who I hear every time I call my ISP. He says "You've got spam!" Then it tells me why, if spam is at all a problem for me, "You NEED LISCO!"
<foo> Damn, more spam invading my inbox <Aviator> Nooooobody expects the Spammer's Imposition! <Aviator> Our two weapons are offshore servers and feeble laws. Feeble laws and offshore servers. <Aviator> And fake headers. Our THREE weapons are offshore servers, feeble laws and fake headers. <Aviator> And gulliable horny lamers. Our FOUR weapons are... I'll come in again. -!- Aviator [dsm@mimas] has quit [Come, Cardinal Bigglesworth!] -!- Aviator [dsm@mimas] has joined #chat <foo> Riiiiiight... * Aviator tortures foo with the comfy V14Gr/ and the soft Debt Consolidation
Seriously, I'm all for world peace, ending hunger, and Linux for everyone, but you have to leave some stupidity in the world, because in a perfect world, all the comedians are hilarious all the time, but that doesn't work, because in a perfect world, there's no good material for them.
Works pretty damned well under Wine or OS X. It's also not exactly the most resource-intensive game out there. So I can see buying Vista for Halo 2, but WoW?
Their "tops" -- PageFlakes and YouOS -- are just like any other portal site. I can understand the appeal of replacing desktop apps, to a point, but I really, really don't see the point of replacing functionality that's already there in a web browser.
As far as I know, most native Linux games (unreal, doom, etc) simply distribute an install script, which is essentially the Linux equivalent of a self-extracting zipfile. Distros are free to repackage it, as far as I know, and Gentoo does. Just work with the existing distro maintainers.
You may have other problems, like making everything consistent across distros. You can either go the typical gaming route -- statically link everything you can, and include a couple of.so's in your installation dir -- basically, just like you'd do for Windows. Or, you can be a good citizen and actually do an automated compilation/test for every distro, so that you can actually have it link against the local versions of whatever libraries you're using -- so you actually share them.
I think he was creating an appliance, which may mean rolling your own distro, which realistically means forking someone else's. But even someone else's distro, you're going to want packages for distribution to the end-user. Only use version control for things you actually need to tweak, but as soon as you start to tweak them, try to use the same version control as upstream, and pull from their repository. And of course, for your own product, it doesn't much matter, but you want version control for yourself and packages for your users.
Having the process without the software is much, much harder.
I've been using Mercurial to manage my own projects. I figure I can always figure out how to expand it later if I get another developer. I wanted something simple, lightweight, and hackable, yet still with all the features of, say, SVN or CVS, even making the commandline look similar, so that people coming from other systems aren't immediately lost. I think this is the best we've got as far as that goes.
MS are the definitive example that software doesn't have to be perfect before it's released. (Open Source follows a similar model, but goes further by providing the definitive example of how to enable users to help you fix the bugs, not just find them)
Funny comparison. Open source tends to release early and often. Thus, you'll see the CVS (or whatever) available for months or years before an actual numbered release, then you'll see tons of releases numbered things like 0.0.1 and 0.5.4. Everyone likes to have their own numbering scheme, but in general, 1.0 is solid. They don't always use alpha/beta/rc names, but they do exist -- the latest minor version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.18 (as opposed to 2.6.17) is on rc6, and I imagine it will be released sometime in the next couple months. That's not to say nothing happens in between, that's why I'm running 2.6.17.11.
And certainly software can't be perfect.
But when software is actually released, there usually aren't any bugs, or there's a very small list of known bugs. Most of the time I open a manpage and scroll to the bottom, looking for a list of known bugs, there either isn't one, or there's a little smiley and it says "none, I hope" or something similar.
And you're right. MS, on top of releasing software that isn't perfect (did I ever ask for perfection?), is likely going to release software with thousands of known bugs. Probably had thousands when they went to release candidate status.
RC is for tracking down more bugs, not fixing the ones you already have. If they needed more user testing to help with some bugs that are difficult to pin down... Well, fine, but they could've called it Beta 3. At least then there'd be less cause for dispute. Beta is not as well defined. But generally, release candidate means "we can't break it anymore", and a release is either a release candidate that RC testers can't break anymore, or a product that marketing, management, or The Powers That Be has decided must be released, bugs or not.
MS should be honest and skip RC entirely. Go straight from Beta to Release.
So you have to make exactly one reasonable comment. That doesn't seem too hard, even to do over and over again and being paid absoltely nothing. Just take a look through Slashdot comments...
So, one reasonable comment, then a deluge of spam. Now, multiply that one reasonable comment by your generic sweatshop taskforce, and it suddenly becomes much more difficult. Do you block users wholesale, automatically, because you suspect they're spam? Do you go through the users again, by hand?
Hmm, I wonder how I'd actually solve this problem? I guess I'd take the tactic that's working for me with email -- statistical filters. It's much easier to scan the beginning of 100 or 200 comments that are probably spam, looking for anything that's blatantly not, and then actually moderate 10 or so that it's not sure about. But I've never really seen this kind of filtering applied to anything other than email, even when it's appropriate.
I honestly don't remember, but this looks familiar. Actually, someone on Slashdot told me, so if that's not it, you can look through my comments and try to find the reply... But it's a LOT of comments.
Yes, AU and BITS was on. Disabling them did not prevent AU from working -- I think what happened was going to the Windows Update web site turned them back on. I want to do my updates manually, not automatically.
And yes, I was using my admin account.
I would not be surprised if my school's software manually disabled it, but whatever it was, the point is, MS could easily do the same thing in a "patch".
The fact that the panel was disabled, and that there's even a setting for that, suggests that they might actually do that with a future version. Kind of like Steam. Just keep making the loud noise, make sure they don't even get a chance to try it, because when we stop being noisy, we get stuff like DVD encryption with unskippable commercials.
It's a legit copy of XP Pro, and the panel has stayed functional once I re-enabled it. It started out functional. I have no idea what disabled it, probably something like the McAffee that my school gave me...
As I've said several times, and had to clarify, once, for no apparent reason, my Automatic Updates control panel, from every way I know to get to it, was entirely greyed out and stuck on "automatic". The only way I avoided updating was avoiding booting Windows, I just ran Linux. I eventually found the registry hack to re-enable the panel that lets me disable updates.
Yes. That entire panel was disabled for me. I saw the same options you did -- automatic, download only, notifications only, and turn off. But -- do I really need a screenshot, or will you just take my word for it? The entire panel was greyed out, and it was stuck on Automatic. Tweaking the registry was what gave me the ability to click the "Turn Off" option.
Here's my semi-objective analysis, based on that screenshot:
Processor: Maybe. They're looking at a 1 ghz machine. But dual-core processor? Mine plays HD fine, and it's only a 2.4 ghz amd64. In 32-bit and 64-bit mode. Think about it -- the only reason they're recommending dual-core is so that they can guarantee they have one mostly to themselves, so the other can run your spyware.
Graphics card: 256 megs seems a bit much. I mean, I have that, but let's think here -- what exactly would it use video RAM for? It's just pumping raw video to the screen. Unless there's a hardware decoder (thus invalidating the high CPU requirement), the most I imagine you would want or need here is a cheap PCI Express card -- a year ago, I got one for about $50, they should be even cheaper now.
OS: I play all my media on Linux. So yeah, won't work here, but that's a DRM issue more than anything else.
Driver: Why is this even an issue? My driver updates automatically. Why has nVidia still not done this on Windows? At least notifications? Please?
Blu-Ray Drive: Ok, nice that the software checks for it, but no. You should be able to play high def content off of other media. Elephant's Dream was 10 minutes long and 815 megs, about a tenth of a DVD, so it seems like if you cut the commentary and crap, you can fit some movies (an hour and 40 minutes worth) on existing dual-layer DVDs.
Software player: What player, exactly, are they looking for? Shouldn't Windows Media be able to handle it? MS already has its own high def standard... But then, the software player should be cheap or free. Remember, you're competing with VLC, mplayer, xine, quicktime, Windows Media... Granted, CyberLink makes PowerDVD (I think) which was pretty decent on Windows, but it's been so long since I've bothered that I don't really know.
HDCP: That's your own damned fault. My monitor is big enough and sharp enough, I have DVI, which is easily fast enough, and my video card is probably several times faster than what's needed. But nevertheless -- "upgrade recommended?" You mean not required? Oh right, because you won't start actually requiring it until we've all bought enough hardware and media that you can force the issue. Which is hopefully never, but I'm not taking the chance. No deal.
Only good news? SP2. Yeah, thanks for not being total asshats and making me pay $200 for an OS upgrade just to watch movies, on top of all the hardware shit you'd be making me buy.
Slashdot Mirror
This analogy is inherently flawed. Computer "viruses", or worms, or whatever you want to call them, have no more reason to be arbitrarily limited to one OS than any other piece of software. If there was any real competition among them, we'd see this a lot more.
Besides, MS already does this. It's called Home edition and Professional edition, and the same malware works across both. Certainly, if they want the software to be compatible across different Microsoft OSes, the malware will be, too.
What if you can't infiltrate the one piece of security software? Wouldn't it be better for everyone to have that one?
Certainly, it's better to have alternatives if there's some problem with the existing one. But I think the downside of having one standard setup to rule them all is mostly negated by F/OSS -- rather than all the security work (and all the other work) going into many separate pieces of software, they go into one.
I am not saying there shouldn't be alternatives, but every time I hear the anti-monoculture stuff, I have to throw out a devil's advocate.
I haven't heard a single complaint from Microsoft about Red vs Blue, and that was arguably a commercial venture for at least awhile. In fact, Bungie included features in Halo 2 specifically to help RVB -- the ability to lower your weapon, for one.
Ok, fine, it wasn't a game, it's a TV series, but isn't that reasonable competition for, say, the Halo movie?
Not to mention that this actually hurts MS more than it helps them, though it probably won't have much of an effect.
Can anyone give me a moral and/or legal downside to leaving the mod team alone? Or maybe signing some rights over to them, if you need to make it legal?
Ok, I really, really can't imagine how fan stuff, when clearly marked as such, is going to significantly impact their sales.
Historically, I imagine it's helped, more than anything. Consider all the Star Wars fan films. Consider Star Trek New Voyages.
Really, how, exactly, is this competition? It's even a different genre, fercryinoutloud. "Oh, I love RTSes, but the StarCraft story just sucks ass, so I played Halo instead. But now that there's a Halo RTS, I won't have to buy Halo 3!"
Yeah, notice how on that comparison table, they only list one advantage of MCE -- it is simple to setup, whereas MythTV requires moderate Linux know-how. Also, MythTV does not run on Windows, as far as I know, while MCE does. Absolutely everything else in that table is in favor of MythTV. Pay nothing, get more features and flexibility.
So yes, I'd say the reviewer prefers MythTV. The only reason MCE was mentioned at all is to have something to compare to, and as a reference point for people who may know nothing about MythTV or PVRs, but have a fuzzy idea of what MCE is.
While the summary is a little over eager, it's not actually wrong, just not as reasonably verified as we're used to from Slashdot.
They found a working ZPM?
I don't even like the show that much, but to me, Atlantis == Stargate, especially when I'm just waking up.
I know there's a voice actor who I hear every time I call my ISP. He says "You've got spam!" Then it tells me why, if spam is at all a problem for me, "You NEED LISCO!"
What, and spare us the fun?
Here's another classic:
Seriously, I'm all for world peace, ending hunger, and Linux for everyone, but you have to leave some stupidity in the world, because in a perfect world, all the comedians are hilarious all the time, but that doesn't work, because in a perfect world, there's no good material for them.
So do I, but does the start menu work like that?
Works pretty damned well under Wine or OS X. It's also not exactly the most resource-intensive game out there. So I can see buying Vista for Halo 2, but WoW?
Their "tops" -- PageFlakes and YouOS -- are just like any other portal site. I can understand the appeal of replacing desktop apps, to a point, but I really, really don't see the point of replacing functionality that's already there in a web browser.
...you may not have to do a thing.
.so's in your installation dir -- basically, just like you'd do for Windows. Or, you can be a good citizen and actually do an automated compilation/test for every distro, so that you can actually have it link against the local versions of whatever libraries you're using -- so you actually share them.
As far as I know, most native Linux games (unreal, doom, etc) simply distribute an install script, which is essentially the Linux equivalent of a self-extracting zipfile. Distros are free to repackage it, as far as I know, and Gentoo does. Just work with the existing distro maintainers.
You may have other problems, like making everything consistent across distros. You can either go the typical gaming route -- statically link everything you can, and include a couple of
I think he was creating an appliance, which may mean rolling your own distro, which realistically means forking someone else's. But even someone else's distro, you're going to want packages for distribution to the end-user. Only use version control for things you actually need to tweak, but as soon as you start to tweak them, try to use the same version control as upstream, and pull from their repository. And of course, for your own product, it doesn't much matter, but you want version control for yourself and packages for your users.
Having the process without the software is much, much harder.
I've been using Mercurial to manage my own projects. I figure I can always figure out how to expand it later if I get another developer. I wanted something simple, lightweight, and hackable, yet still with all the features of, say, SVN or CVS, even making the commandline look similar, so that people coming from other systems aren't immediately lost. I think this is the best we've got as far as that goes.
Funny comparison. Open source tends to release early and often. Thus, you'll see the CVS (or whatever) available for months or years before an actual numbered release, then you'll see tons of releases numbered things like 0.0.1 and 0.5.4. Everyone likes to have their own numbering scheme, but in general, 1.0 is solid. They don't always use alpha/beta/rc names, but they do exist -- the latest minor version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.18 (as opposed to 2.6.17) is on rc6, and I imagine it will be released sometime in the next couple months. That's not to say nothing happens in between, that's why I'm running 2.6.17.11.
And certainly software can't be perfect.
But when software is actually released, there usually aren't any bugs, or there's a very small list of known bugs. Most of the time I open a manpage and scroll to the bottom, looking for a list of known bugs, there either isn't one, or there's a little smiley and it says "none, I hope" or something similar.
And you're right. MS, on top of releasing software that isn't perfect (did I ever ask for perfection?), is likely going to release software with thousands of known bugs. Probably had thousands when they went to release candidate status.
RC is for tracking down more bugs, not fixing the ones you already have. If they needed more user testing to help with some bugs that are difficult to pin down... Well, fine, but they could've called it Beta 3. At least then there'd be less cause for dispute. Beta is not as well defined. But generally, release candidate means "we can't break it anymore", and a release is either a release candidate that RC testers can't break anymore, or a product that marketing, management, or The Powers That Be has decided must be released, bugs or not.
MS should be honest and skip RC entirely. Go straight from Beta to Release.
So you have to make exactly one reasonable comment. That doesn't seem too hard, even to do over and over again and being paid absoltely nothing. Just take a look through Slashdot comments...
So, one reasonable comment, then a deluge of spam. Now, multiply that one reasonable comment by your generic sweatshop taskforce, and it suddenly becomes much more difficult. Do you block users wholesale, automatically, because you suspect they're spam? Do you go through the users again, by hand?
Hmm, I wonder how I'd actually solve this problem? I guess I'd take the tactic that's working for me with email -- statistical filters. It's much easier to scan the beginning of 100 or 200 comments that are probably spam, looking for anything that's blatantly not, and then actually moderate 10 or so that it's not sure about. But I've never really seen this kind of filtering applied to anything other than email, even when it's appropriate.
I honestly don't remember, but this looks familiar. Actually, someone on Slashdot told me, so if that's not it, you can look through my comments and try to find the reply... But it's a LOT of comments.
I did fix it with a registry hack.
Yes, AU and BITS was on. Disabling them did not prevent AU from working -- I think what happened was going to the Windows Update web site turned them back on. I want to do my updates manually, not automatically.
And yes, I was using my admin account.
I would not be surprised if my school's software manually disabled it, but whatever it was, the point is, MS could easily do the same thing in a "patch".
This had lots of school stuff on it, but it was my machine. Stopping and disabling the service did not help at all.
The fact that the panel was disabled, and that there's even a setting for that, suggests that they might actually do that with a future version. Kind of like Steam. Just keep making the loud noise, make sure they don't even get a chance to try it, because when we stop being noisy, we get stuff like DVD encryption with unskippable commercials.
It's a legit copy of XP Pro, and the panel has stayed functional once I re-enabled it. It started out functional. I have no idea what disabled it, probably something like the McAffee that my school gave me...
Actually, they did, for awhile.
As I've said several times, and had to clarify, once, for no apparent reason, my Automatic Updates control panel, from every way I know to get to it, was entirely greyed out and stuck on "automatic". The only way I avoided updating was avoiding booting Windows, I just ran Linux. I eventually found the registry hack to re-enable the panel that lets me disable updates.
Yes. That entire panel was disabled for me. I saw the same options you did -- automatic, download only, notifications only, and turn off. But -- do I really need a screenshot, or will you just take my word for it? The entire panel was greyed out, and it was stuck on Automatic. Tweaking the registry was what gave me the ability to click the "Turn Off" option.
Maybe the 20 something gamers with the disposable income? I don't imagine there are that many who didn't buy a 360 so they could afford a PS3.
Here's my semi-objective analysis, based on that screenshot:
Processor: Maybe. They're looking at a 1 ghz machine. But dual-core processor? Mine plays HD fine, and it's only a 2.4 ghz amd64. In 32-bit and 64-bit mode. Think about it -- the only reason they're recommending dual-core is so that they can guarantee they have one mostly to themselves, so the other can run your spyware.
Graphics card: 256 megs seems a bit much. I mean, I have that, but let's think here -- what exactly would it use video RAM for? It's just pumping raw video to the screen. Unless there's a hardware decoder (thus invalidating the high CPU requirement), the most I imagine you would want or need here is a cheap PCI Express card -- a year ago, I got one for about $50, they should be even cheaper now.
OS: I play all my media on Linux. So yeah, won't work here, but that's a DRM issue more than anything else.
Driver: Why is this even an issue? My driver updates automatically. Why has nVidia still not done this on Windows? At least notifications? Please?
Blu-Ray Drive: Ok, nice that the software checks for it, but no. You should be able to play high def content off of other media. Elephant's Dream was 10 minutes long and 815 megs, about a tenth of a DVD, so it seems like if you cut the commentary and crap, you can fit some movies (an hour and 40 minutes worth) on existing dual-layer DVDs.
Software player: What player, exactly, are they looking for? Shouldn't Windows Media be able to handle it? MS already has its own high def standard... But then, the software player should be cheap or free. Remember, you're competing with VLC, mplayer, xine, quicktime, Windows Media... Granted, CyberLink makes PowerDVD (I think) which was pretty decent on Windows, but it's been so long since I've bothered that I don't really know.
HDCP: That's your own damned fault. My monitor is big enough and sharp enough, I have DVI, which is easily fast enough, and my video card is probably several times faster than what's needed. But nevertheless -- "upgrade recommended?" You mean not required? Oh right, because you won't start actually requiring it until we've all bought enough hardware and media that you can force the issue. Which is hopefully never, but I'm not taking the chance. No deal.
Only good news? SP2. Yeah, thanks for not being total asshats and making me pay $200 for an OS upgrade just to watch movies, on top of all the hardware shit you'd be making me buy.