Believe it or not, not everyone who disaggrees with your dogma is a retard who's never seen computers before. I know this might be hard to believe for _some_ of the Linux zealots. Who think that because they compiled something made by someone else (and even then via some automated compiled script made by someone else), they're automatically geniuses.
As was said before, this kind of snotty "we can't possibly have any faults! it's you who's a drooling idiot!" attitude, isn't doing Linux any good. Even if I was Joe Average, getting some random fanboy insulting me whenever I dare complain, wouldn't exactly count a compelling reason to switch to Linux.
And that goes double when you have to build up straw men and put words into the others' mouth to have _any_ reason to insult them.
I'm not talking about the kernel's swapping policy. (I.e., "keep it all in RAM" vs "swap it soon and often".) I like it kept in RAM too, if the beast already allocated that memory. Won't argue with you about that policy.
My wish is that all that crap wasn't loaded into RAM at all to start with. Regardless of whether it stays in RAM, or is swapped to disc all the time. How about just writing code that doesn't need 200 MB just to paint dialogue boxes?
Or how about everyone starting to use the standard libraries, wherever possible?
E.g., the font rendering ones. Why do I need 5 different font rendering libraries loaded in RAM at the same time? And of course, each one has loaded the fonts in its cache. So now those TTF fonts are loaded 5 times each. If I've installed a whole CD worth of freeware TTF fonts, now even 1 GB of RAM is too little.
E.g., all the sound daemons. If half the effort which went into writing yet another sound daemon, went into ALSA, we wouldn't need sound daemons in the first place.
And yet, somehow all those "features" on Linux, end up using more memory and requiring more CPU speed than the Windows "bloat". An interesting point of view... to say the least.
The fact is that on my home machine, in Windows 2000, I have more free RAM and faster boot up times _with_ IE loaded (if nothing else as a desktop/file manager), than in KDE _without_ Konqueror loaded.
There are no two ways about it. KDE isn't "feature rich", it's a piece of badly-programmed bloatware. Even if you turned off all the "features", it's still more bloated, slower and less user-friendly than Windows with all of that turned on. (In fact, even than windows with 6 pieces of spyware of your choice.)
Note that so far I'm only talking about KDE, not about Linux in general. Yes, I know, you can run another dektop environment. I'm writing this in XFce myself, so, yeah, I know already.
The problem comes when you need to load any app that's based on KDE. Then all the bloated beast is loaded into RAM. Not only then there goes your machine's RAM, you also get to wait several extra seconds for all that KDE bloat to load. Not "features", but hundreds of megabytes of pure library bloat, which you can't turn off. Whoppee.
Now say a friend tells you to also run some Gnome program. Whether it's Gnomeeting, Evolution or whatever, it doesn't matter. You're now _also_ loading the Gnome libraries in memory, alongside the KDE ones which already were making your machine swap. Whoppe. The RAM and CPU manufacturers must be doing cartwheels for joy by now.
Now also add Mozilla and a few others who can't just be a browser or whatever, they also have to have _yet_ _another_ set of their very own GUI widgets and bloated libraries.
Then edit something in OOo. OOops, yet another case of its own libraries. It can't even freaking use the perfectly good font rendering of X, it just has to come with its own font directory and libraries. And manage to look _worse_ than X's font rendering. (To its defense, though, it's just as retarded under Windows too.)
Well, not to sound only negative, here's my constructive suggestion for the day: if you're going to advocate Linux, might as well get a profit out of it. Buy shares in some memory manufacturer;)
"Keep in mind that Linux would always be by the people, for the people regardless of the actions of companies." [...] " Say that IBM/Sun/Red Hat/Suse/etc all drop Linux like a rock for their own proprietary solutions. Would it matter? No, because there would be enough Linux-savvy people to keep it going"
That's the kind of simplified black-vs-white view of the world I'm talking about actually. No offense intended. There sure is enough marketting painting Linux that way, so I'm not that surprised that people believe it.
If you'll look at who's contributing to Linux, either the kernel or various Gnu stuff in it (e.g., GCC), you'll notice something about the nice myth of it just happening because of some uber-coders having too much time at home. Namely, that it's just that: a myth.
Most of the contributions come from IBM, Intel, Suse, Red Hat, etc. Some people are actually paid to write that free software.
SCO's lawsuit against IBM, since this _is_ a thread about SCO, is precisely about that. Code which IBM, as a company, paid for and donated to Linux.
Linux currently exists not as much because of idealists like you or me. (Well, you may not be a linux "fanboy", but _I_ used to be one.) It exists as an elaborate chess game in the war for market share between corporations.
Microsoft is now the common enemy. The computer market went from "IBM PC compatible" to "Intel compatible" to "Windows compatible." That's two corporations pissed off by MS just in that one phrase. Add Novell, who went from owning the network market, to being a relatively minor player. Sun's McNeally until recently was foaming at the mouth against MS. Etc.
Even Dell's self-contradicting occasional flirting with Linux and then denying that it even exists on their radar, is just normal negotiation with MS in the business world.
Basically all this advocacy you people are doing (and which I myself have at one point been doing) is nothing more than voluntary marketting for Corporation A against Corporation B. You're an unpaid pawn in other people's corporate wars. No more. No less. It makes as much sense as rabidly advocating that people switch to Pepsi from Coca Cola, or to Nike from Adidas.
Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it. I'm going to keep buying Linux distros myself too. I think the market could use some more competition anyway. Just, you know, be aware _what_ you're doing.
So what would happen in the _very_ unlikely scenario that all these corporations simultaneously stopped paying people to develop Linux? My best guess is that Linux would go the way of BeOS or OS/2 in no time.
You do know that virtually every single ATA drive manufactured today has SMART capabilities, right?
Basically, the drive has a little more sectors than it reports to your computer. If the data in one sector starts needing retries to read, the hard drive will automatically copy the sector's data to a one of those extra sectors, and mark the original sector as bad.
This is great for MTBF, because you typically no longer end up with a bad sector in the middle of your valuable database, like in the old MFM or RLL days.
This is absolute nightmare for wiping the data, because a few sectors of old data may not even be visible to your precious wipe-disk utility. Regardless of whether you use 7 passes or 700 passes, those sectors won't be overwritten even once.
I.e., do you _really_ want to take risks? Sure, not much data will be in those sectors, and someone would pretty much need to go low level to read them. But you don't know _what_ is there. It could be a few credit card numbers, it could be top secret information, it could be anything.
There's nothing to keep them from screwing it hard enough with proprietary drivers, if they _really_ wanted to, and if they were in a position to do so. E.g., I don't even have to think hard to imagine a scenario like, "there's these cool virtualization features or whatnot, but they only work if you have the secret IBM drivers that activate that. Oh, and it's all patented."
Plus, as the endless "Linux vs GNU/Linux" show or Apple's building a propritary MacOS/X on top of BSD prove, there's far more to an OS than the kernel.
For example, IBM could jolly well come up with their own proprietary compiler that produces great code, but is slightly incompatible with GCC. Like MS did with MSVC. Sure, some people will curse and have even more #include blocks to work on both, but a lot won't. That's what's been happening in the Windows world.
For that matter, they could go deeper down MS road, and provide their own foundation classes that go with it too.
Etc.
Now I'm not saying that it would go as long a way as doing the same with a 100% closed-source OS. And I'm sure the Linux community would work hard to emulate all that.
Most of the paper comes from trees planted precisely for that purpose. They get planted, they get cut down and turned into paper, and other trees are planted in their place.
I.e., the whole idiocy of "waaah, must save the trees from the evil paper-using people" is just as retarded, as trying to save the grain plants from the evil bakeries and whiskey distilleries. What's the point? That crop was planted there precisely for that purpose, and another crop will be planted next year.
I.e., while I can see some point in saving non-renewable resources (oil, coal, etc), I fail to see what's the point in fighting to save a _crop_ which was planted for the purpose of being harvested. That's all that those trees are. A crop. No more. No less.
Unlike with oil, noone's going to invade, say, Canada for its trees. They'll just _plant_ more trees. And if more paper is needed, more crop will be planted.
"By the way, that same saying holds true for the Microsoft crowd. . . but they probably know that already."
Not sure in which way it applies to "the Microsoft crowd."
Microsoft never promised to GPL Windows. And I'd expect to see pink pigs flying and Satan going to work on skis before that happens.
And, to the best of my knowledge, SCO never tried to stop MS from doing anything. Nor claimed ownership to any Windows code. So in which way did MS get bit? No, seriously, I'm really interested.
Not that anyone expected Microsoft to go GPL anyway. Most of us "Microsoft crowd" really couldn't give a damn about ideological crusades, nor about fanboy allegiances to whoever is this year's fashionable underdog. Or agains whoever is the fashionable corporation to hate this year.
What's the point anyway? If your world is only made of black-vs-white, or good-vs-evil, you live in a very simplistic world. The real world is far more complex than "IBM=GOOD; MSFT=EVIL".
If you look at the history of computing, as little of it as we have so far, one thing has always been constant:
A. whoever is winning, doesn't want standards, they want people locked into their very own proprietary stuff. IBM did it, Sun did it, and Novel did it really big time. That's how the Unix fragmentation happened, and why it lost to Windows.
B. whoever is losing, is whining about how great the open standards are, and how evil proprietary solutions are.
(And some, like Sun, can't even make up their mind in which camp they really are.)
Wake up, people. We're not talking about a group of geeks fighting for ideals. We're talking about corporations who only want to make money. And _will_ change the strategy whenever it looks like another one might bring more money.
IBM is no dedicated friend of OSS, and neither is Sun. (You may notice that IBM did _not_ go GPL with either DB/2 or WebSphere.) At this point IBM merely figured out they can get an advantage out of Linux, in their fight against both MS and Sun.
_If_ IBM was to win a decisive victory, and MS became the underdog, you can fully expect the roles to be reversed yet again.
IBM will start shipping an "enhanced" version of Linux, with a whole bunch of closed source IBM-only executables in it. Just like they did with Unix. Trying to lock people in again. And spreading FUD like they already did before.
And Microsoft would most likely cheerfully go from defending the way of the proprietary solution, to praising open standards.
And knowing the/. crowd, we'll probably see the same people posting about how IBM sucks and MS is our true friend.
"Do they resign themselves only to email and web surfing once their computer is 18 months old?"
Absolutely not. We buy a new CPU and graphics card long before those 18 months have passed.
Now if only ATI would get off their asses and actually bring the X800 XT Platinum Edition to the market, I wouldn't have to make do with this 7 month old 9800 XT. Lemme tell you, this thing _crawls_ in 1600x1200x32 with 6x FSAA and 16x Aniso in some games. Not "games which don't even exxist", but actual games available here and now. It sometimes even dips lower than 60 fps;)
And don't even get me started on AMD's 939 pin socket. They've been talking and talking about it for months. Why can't I buy a 939 pin CPU and mobo already? I already have the paired Crucial RAM and Zalman copper heatsink for it. Geesh, I mean, this socket 754 AMD 64 3200+ is, what? Almost 8 months old;)
Well, sort of "ha ha, only serious." I _will_ buy a new A64 and an X800 XT, but I'm not really _that_ angry and impatient as the above paragraphs sound. I can wait another month, if needed:)
Does it make economic sense? Absolutely not. Is it what 90% of the PC market is all about? Absolutely not. Is it stupid? Absolutely.
But, hey, it doesn't make it any less real.
Another idea for you: everything in moderation
on
Rowing the Pond Again
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· Score: 1
Sure, rowing is great, golf is great, walking up a flight of stairs is great, etc. But only as part of a more complex life. Even in your example, you climbed the stairs, and then proceeded to do something else for the next 8 hours.
Now picture that anyone proposed to spend their next 90 days doing nothing but running up and down stairs. No break except to sleep, no talking to anyone, just boring repetitive mind-numbing running up and down stairs. Endless hours each day just going up and down stairs.
I don't know about you, but it strikes me as supremely idiotic. It also strikes me as a cry for attention. A _really_ sad cry for attention.
You see, a human brain is more complex than that. Even those of us typically labelled as terminal geeks, tend to lead a far more varied life, by comparison. It might involve more sitting at a computer than other people consider normal. But even then it'll be a mix of coding, playing some game, talking on IRC, reading slashdot, posting some comments, etc. You're exercising more than one part of your brain, with more than one stimulus.
Now contrast this with 90 days of just rowing. I can't imagine anyone who's not already retarded, being physically able to put up with that kind of monotony and boredom.
And again, why is it even news? What next? Everyone admiring someone who's spent 90 days in a row just clicking on the exact same monsters in Everquest, taking breaks only to eat and sleep?
I can only aggree with you there. I don't have a PhD either. And call me arrogant if you will, but I think I coded better at, say, 16 years old (i.e., before even starting college) than some of my co-workers do at 30+ years old. And the co-worker I respect the most in this team didn't even finish CS college.
But that was not my point.
My point wasn't necessarily that they should ask for an education or a PhD, but that they should at least try to get someone _competent_. If you will, merely along the lines of "if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing _well_".
Hiring the cheapest monkeys with _zero_ skill or experience, doesn't really cut costs. They end up paying them for _years_ to code and debug something that a skilled programmer (with or without a diploma) would have done in _hours_.
For those who think I'm exaggerating, true story: I've before given the example of our local Wally, who spent over two years debugging a tiny module. In fact, he _still_ is at it. Something that, by my estimates, anyone else would have done in hours. Well, another co-worker eventually got fed of arguing with Wally over the bugs, and actually went and coded an exact 1-for-1 replacement for Wally's module. Minus the bugs. It took him exactly 6 hours to do that from scratch. QED.
Bingo. Those were my thoughts when reading about that too. Most people nowadays don't just avoid PhDs or a CS education, they just want anyone competent.
They actually think they're cleverly saving costs by hiring the cheapest incompetent monkeys possible. After all, they just bought that magical "+3 cloak of productivity (+5 against bugs)" (i.e., some snake oil baroque framework or server software), so now they don't need anyone competent on those computers any more.
Plus, hey, everyone knows that programming computers is easy. Even the neighbour's geeky kid is doing it. Surely a drooling ex-burger-flipper off the street can do it just fine too.
(Funny how the same people who can't even program their VCR's clock, or keep spyware off their computer, nevertheless think that my job is something easy, eh?)
True story: I know of a team which actually hired people via reverse online auction. Whichever monkey wants the least money, gets the job. No skill needed. (Again, it's not a joke. Sadly.)
Well, yes, but here we're not talking custom solutions. I doubt that many people could even afford a custom designed GPU, by someone who's listened carefully to their problems. We're talking something which would cost billions in R&D alone.
What we're talking about is commodity off-the-shelf graphics cards. (Or sound cards, or synthetisers, or whatever else.) You buy this one, or you buy that other one, or you don't buy anything at all.
And if you expect someone to come and listen to your problems just to sell you a graphics card... well, let's just say you might as well expect hell to freeze over. Or to actually be able to play that HL2 that you paid for when you bought a Radeon 9xxx card.
Basically I'm not saying that your friend is wrong. I'm just saying that he was talking about a _very_ different market.
Well, yes and no. Methinks you're taking it too literally.
Microsoft as a company never innovated. You are right in that aspect.
I think what the article means, though, is that there are people hired at MS, who do come up with new ideas. If nothing else, by virtue of sheer size alone they must have _some_ people with ideas.
It's that kind of innovation that MS doesn't seem to want and encourage.
You're right. It's not a new issue.
E.g., I remember reading an article from back when MS bought Hotmail. The Hotmail team really wanted to add more useful features, but MS saw Hotmail as a threat to Outlook. So for a long time Hotmail was put into a forced freeze.
I'm sure one could dig up examples older than that too, but that's the one I remember at the moment.
MS was always all about protecting its cash-cows, ever since they were little calves. It threw big money at killing anything that even remotely looked like a threat to them. (E.g., Java when it looked like it would threaten the Windows lock-in.)
All that this article says is that it also fiercely protects them from ideas originating within Microsoft.
I.e., it's not as much saying that MS was ever a bastion of innovation, but rather explaining _why_ it never innovates.
"Um, there is a system call to exec a file, assuming you're talking about executing a file. All Microsoft did was attach extensions to filenames."
Assuming that you mean the idea that ".com" means "executable file", you're giving Microsoft way too much credit. That was copied verbatim from CP/M on 8080 and Z80 computers. (For that matter, so are using "/" instead of "-" for parameters, the CR+LF line terminators, the 8+3 filenames, etc.)
The only "innovation" in MS DOS was adding a ".exe" extension, to mean a different format of executable than ".com". Whether that counts as some groundbreaking invention...
Honestly, the last time Microsoft actually tried innovating on their own, was... Microsoft Bob. It contained such innovations as simply asking for a new password if you (or anyone else) typed it wrong three times in a row. (Sadly it's not a joke.) Or pioneered the retarded annoying kind of "assistants" that later became Clippy.
As an aside: Don't get me wrong, I still think that Microsoft offered better bang per buck, on the whole, compared to what else was available at the time. (E.g., what else was supposed to win the Desktop OS wars? IBM's OS/2, where one crashing application could lock the whole computer up _by_ _design_? GEM, which couldn't even run more than one app at a time? Etc.)
But innovation was _not_ their strong point. They always excelled at execution and marketting, but all the good ideas came from other places.
That is a great lesson, no doubt. One that more people would do well to keep in mind.
However, bugs happen when writing code.
Worse bugs happen when someone modifies code they don't understand. Some code depends on non-explicit assertions, such as an array size being already checked somewhere else, or some buffer being already initialized somewhere else. The maintenance programmer sees the code like through one of those cardboard tubes in toilet paper rolls, so he/she can easily miss such dependencies. When a change shortcircuits such a non-obvious check, shit happens.
E.g., true story: someone once "optimized away" the initialization of one of my decompression buffers, right before a release, but it never occured to them to also change the compression algorithm to not depend on a pre-initialized buffer. Such dependencies are probably the easiest kind to miss, because nowhere did a compression method call a decompression one, nor viceversa. You can go with a debugger through the code all day long, or make class diagrams, and never occur to you that two files are related.
(Rant: I remember it because then he made a big fuss and threatened to fire me, sue for damages, and whatnot, because "my" code didn't work. It's one of the kinds of behaviour that gives some people a PHB name.)
And it doesn't help that, in pursuit of some misunderstood cutting costs, companies:
A. hire the cheapest incompetents, who'll do worse mistakes. Which might still be ok, except,
B. they never plan for a proper testing _and_ debugging phase (no, a week tacked at the end for QA doesn't suffice)
C. nor for code reviews
D. nor for comprehensive unit tests. And even worse,
E. they accept (or in the case of client PHBs request) tons of changes without also requesting extra time for them, and then you're actually expected to do the quickest hack that could possible _look_ like it works. Remember: those deadlines must be kept at all costs, even if the client gets a piece of untested unstable crap.
F. the ever increasing reliance on buying some magical "+3 cloak of bug avoidance." Thinking that merely using some framework or library magically makes all problems go away. E.g., "it's Java, so we can't possibly have exploits or memory leaks" or worse "we use HTTPS, so we can't possibly have a security problem" or my pet peeve "it says 'enterprise' on the box, so it's inherently safe and scalable."
This kind of religious faith that just buying some magical talisman makes all problems just go away on their own, without any human responsibility or intervention, serves just to lull one in a false illusion of safety. It's probably the number 1 cause of errors A to E.
There are a ton of options they can still explore, no doubt. And I'm sure the technology will improve a lot, given enough time. Just like any other technology, in the end.
All I'm saying is that I wouldn't buy an OLED display right now. In a year or two, if they get better, maybe. But not yet.
Even at 10,000 hours for one colour component and 20,000 for the others, the time before you start seeing a different hue is still going to be mere months.
After those 10,000 hours, the blue component will have lost half of its brightness, while the green and red are still going decently strong at 75% of their original brightness. I.e., you have a hefty 50% more yellow in that image than you should.
In fact, copy the following into a file called "test.html", open it in your browser, an that's what your white will look by then:
But that's already _way_ past the point where you're starting to notice it. I'm betting that a tenth of that time is where it already starts looking wrong.
I.e., we're back at the 1000 hour figure, aren't we?
"who wants to spend a grand on a TV that is gonna look bad in a couple of years."
You're an optimist. With today's OLED technology it will look bad in mere months. These things make plasma TVs seem like they were built to last a lifetime, by comparison.
Last I've heard, OLEDs are rated for something like 1000 hours life. At, say, 8 hours a day use, that's 4 months. (And 8h per day is already less than you'll have it in use when it gets shared between you, your SO and maybe a kid using it for the game console.)
But that's not the biggest problem.
The biggest problem is that the brightness doesn't even decrease uniformly across the whole spectrum. Each of the 3 colour components has its own decay time. So it probably will take less than 4 months before the image starts to get a bit of a wrong hue.
I don't know about you, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to image quality. I'm one of those nuts who bought a 9800 XT just to be able to play with 6x FSAA and 16x Aniso, and are already waiting for the X800 XT for the same reason.
So something which is pretty much guaranteed to slowly go the wrong hue, I just don't need it. Not as a computer monitor, and not as a TV. Even if it was for free.
"Sadly, I have noticed that this trend of spyware payloads has begun to move itself into mildly useful, free utitlity applets as well"
If you think it's only beginning, you are sadly mistaken.
E.g., way back, the standard way to get BackOrifice was to be tricked into downloading some nice little application. Except it was wrapped in a wrapper that BO-ed your computer.
Even farther back in time, before the Internet worms and email viruses, in the days of proper.exe viruses and boot sector viruses, that was the _only_ way for a virus to propagate. If you wanted to start an infection, you had to get people to execute an infected program. Somehow.
L33t warez sites were in both cases one of the main ways to get either a virus or BO (or an equivalent), packed as a serial number generator or as some cracked exe or whatever. I.e., again, the malicious payload was disguised as something completely different.
Nothing new under the sun, eh?
(Incidentally, the practice of spyware calling home also dates back from those days. As dynamically allocated addresses made BO and such less useful than a static IP, plugins were written to 'call home' and tell the script kiddie the new IP address. E.g., if my memory doesn't fail me, the Butt Trumpet plugin.)
Or rather, only one thing is relatively new: malware used to be the exclusive domain of script kiddies and other low life lamers. And everyone considered them to be lowlife lamers.
Now we have corporations basing their whole business model on the exact same kind of tools and mechanisms that those script kiddies used. And insisting that it should somehow count as legitimate, just because it's done by a company.
Yes, and hearing what the third boss in Diablo did, is, of course, a lot more interesting to everyone than hearing what the milkman's mother did. Right?;)
But anyway, I'm guessing you've never heard _some_ (i.e., explicitly not all) FPS players talking about their l33t clan, did you? Well, let's just say that hearing about the mailman's mother's neighbour's sister isn't half as boring, and at most 1/10 as retarded.
You'll indeed get to hear not only what L337FR34K did, but also what L337LL4M4 did. And exactly how they shot everyone from clan B1GW4NG. And what L337LL4M4 said about that. (Typically, "LOLOLOL!!! U SUX!") And how cool _that_ was. And what did L337FR34K then go and post on some bulletin board. (E.g., "B1GW4NG CLAN SUXXX!! NE1 WANNA JOIN US? LOLOLOL".) And what the losers from B1GW4NG clan had to answer. ("NOOO! U SUX! U R CHEATERZ!!! N WE HAD BAD PING!") Etc.
And on a _really_ bad day you also get to hear how someone called "Suzy" logged on their server. Or anyone with a vaguely female sounding name. (Which for some people also includes such sexy names as "asdfgh" or "D4rthV4d3r". Gotta try to pick those up too, just in case they are female.) And how cool and witty it was when L337FR34K asked "R U A GRL??? HOW BIG R UR TITS???" Etc.
I would hardly think that IBM gives the hardware for free. You'll get some cool sounding discounts for also buying something else from them (e.g., a dysfunctional app server), and... still end up more expensive than a faster computer from Dell. Then you end up needing uber-expensive consultants to just make that dysfunctional app server work.
But somehow clueless PHBs just love discounts. If you told one "we'll give you this top-of-the-line mainframe for 1000 bucks", it wouldn't sound so cool as "it normally costs 10,000,000 dollars, but we'll give you a 50% discount, if you also license 100,000 worth of software for it. Oh, and we'll also give you this huge discount on premium support. Meaning that if you pay us ludicrious sums per month (whether you need support or not), when you do have a problem we'll at least try to fix it in two months or so." They end up paying a lot more, but still think they've made the deal of the century.
Basically I guess it boils down to: IBM is good at selling snake oil, Sun isn't. Or wasn't.
IBM is giving clueless managers an illusion of buying something safe (in more than one way: "noone ever got fired for buying IBM"), proven and well supported. They make it sound like you're getting into a nicely warm and cozy place. (Even if you're really getting into an iron maiden.)
Sun's McNealy used to just be frothing at the mouth along the lines of, "give us a ton of money so we can destroy Microsoft." Which wasn't even much of a business proposition. (I mean, ok, your "Hatfields vs McCoys" feud with Microsoft is funny and all, but what do _I_ get for my money?)
Who knows? Maybe the aggreement with Microsoft will do Sun a lot of good after all. Now maybe they can get back to some actual marketting of their products, instead of focusing on just "buy from us only because Microsoft is evil."
I don't know about that. My experience is that men and women are _exactly_ as boring, and deal with it in the same ways. It's simply different topics, when they open their mouths.
I know plenty of males who can talk no end about stuff like the database they installed at work. Or about their latest (and l33test) CS game. Where they played the same goddamn map yet again. What makes them think I'm interested in hearing for the 200'th time what he did on the same map?
Or what do you think guys do at the pub? Talk.
Basically all I'm saying is that anyone who's not a total introvert... talks about stuff. The only difference is that different humans are fond of different minutiae.
And, of course, to give a very crude analogy: it's sorta like farts. Everyone thinks his/hers don't stink. Only everyone else's stink.
So more likely what happens is:
He: . o O (God damn it. Can't she shut the heck up about what her cousin's neighbour's sister did? Just one goddamn minute. It's so boring it counts as torture already.)
She: . o O (God damn it. Can't he shut the heck up about his CS game and CORBA remote calls? Just one goddamn minute. It's so boring it counts as torture already.)
Each of them sees only the problem in the other, but not in themselves.
And that, IMHO, is the root of all those sweeping generalizations about the other genre/race/social category/etc. People seeing the problem only in others, but conveniently turning a blind eye to when they do the same.
Well, even not just for playing with one's family. Some of us actually _like_ cooperative play far more than all-out cut-throat shoot-in-the-back competition. Not just to appease the SO or whatever, but just for what it is.
As someone else put it: if I thought all-out cut-throat back-stabbing competition was fun, I'd have went to business school.
As early as the text-based MUD's it was known that you basically get 4 types of players: - socializers (like to talk and interact with other players) - achievers (want to have the biggest score) - explorers (not just exploring geography, but also every bit of game mechanics) - killers (basically hostile to other players. Not just competing for the highest frag count, like an achiever would, but actually wanting to annoy, humiliate, keep others from playing, etc.)
See Bartle's paper for more detail.
And it baffles me that most games catter either to killer-achievers or plain old killers, but pretty much every single non-MMO online game thoroughly ignores the other three categories. Pretty much every single multiplayer game nowadays is about playing _against_ other players, and not together with them.
It's not even a new problem. Even aside from Bartle's paper, there have been countless articles and flame-wars on MUD boards, explaining that some people explicitly do _not_ want to play _against_ other players. And why.
But no, every new multiplayer game just _has_ to catter to the same overcrowded market segment, and ignore everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, a troll. How cute. Mommy, can we keep him?
Believe it or not, not everyone who disaggrees with your dogma is a retard who's never seen computers before. I know this might be hard to believe for _some_ of the Linux zealots. Who think that because they compiled something made by someone else (and even then via some automated compiled script made by someone else), they're automatically geniuses.
As was said before, this kind of snotty "we can't possibly have any faults! it's you who's a drooling idiot!" attitude, isn't doing Linux any good. Even if I was Joe Average, getting some random fanboy insulting me whenever I dare complain, wouldn't exactly count a compelling reason to switch to Linux.
And that goes double when you have to build up straw men and put words into the others' mouth to have _any_ reason to insult them.
I'm not talking about the kernel's swapping policy. (I.e., "keep it all in RAM" vs "swap it soon and often".) I like it kept in RAM too, if the beast already allocated that memory. Won't argue with you about that policy.
My wish is that all that crap wasn't loaded into RAM at all to start with. Regardless of whether it stays in RAM, or is swapped to disc all the time. How about just writing code that doesn't need 200 MB just to paint dialogue boxes?
Or how about everyone starting to use the standard libraries, wherever possible?
E.g., the font rendering ones. Why do I need 5 different font rendering libraries loaded in RAM at the same time? And of course, each one has loaded the fonts in its cache. So now those TTF fonts are loaded 5 times each. If I've installed a whole CD worth of freeware TTF fonts, now even 1 GB of RAM is too little.
E.g., all the sound daemons. If half the effort which went into writing yet another sound daemon, went into ALSA, we wouldn't need sound daemons in the first place.
And yet, somehow all those "features" on Linux, end up using more memory and requiring more CPU speed than the Windows "bloat". An interesting point of view... to say the least.
;)
The fact is that on my home machine, in Windows 2000, I have more free RAM and faster boot up times _with_ IE loaded (if nothing else as a desktop/file manager), than in KDE _without_ Konqueror loaded.
There are no two ways about it. KDE isn't "feature rich", it's a piece of badly-programmed bloatware. Even if you turned off all the "features", it's still more bloated, slower and less user-friendly than Windows with all of that turned on. (In fact, even than windows with 6 pieces of spyware of your choice.)
Note that so far I'm only talking about KDE, not about Linux in general. Yes, I know, you can run another dektop environment. I'm writing this in XFce myself, so, yeah, I know already.
The problem comes when you need to load any app that's based on KDE. Then all the bloated beast is loaded into RAM. Not only then there goes your machine's RAM, you also get to wait several extra seconds for all that KDE bloat to load. Not "features", but hundreds of megabytes of pure library bloat, which you can't turn off. Whoppee.
Now say a friend tells you to also run some Gnome program. Whether it's Gnomeeting, Evolution or whatever, it doesn't matter. You're now _also_ loading the Gnome libraries in memory, alongside the KDE ones which already were making your machine swap. Whoppe. The RAM and CPU manufacturers must be doing cartwheels for joy by now.
Now also add Mozilla and a few others who can't just be a browser or whatever, they also have to have _yet_ _another_ set of their very own GUI widgets and bloated libraries.
Then edit something in OOo. OOops, yet another case of its own libraries. It can't even freaking use the perfectly good font rendering of X, it just has to come with its own font directory and libraries. And manage to look _worse_ than X's font rendering. (To its defense, though, it's just as retarded under Windows too.)
Well, not to sound only negative, here's my constructive suggestion for the day: if you're going to advocate Linux, might as well get a profit out of it. Buy shares in some memory manufacturer
"Keep in mind that Linux would always be by the people, for the people regardless of the actions of companies." [...] " Say that IBM/Sun/Red Hat/Suse/etc all drop Linux like a rock for their own proprietary solutions. Would it matter? No, because there would be enough Linux-savvy people to keep it going"
That's the kind of simplified black-vs-white view of the world I'm talking about actually. No offense intended. There sure is enough marketting painting Linux that way, so I'm not that surprised that people believe it.
If you'll look at who's contributing to Linux, either the kernel or various Gnu stuff in it (e.g., GCC), you'll notice something about the nice myth of it just happening because of some uber-coders having too much time at home. Namely, that it's just that: a myth.
Most of the contributions come from IBM, Intel, Suse, Red Hat, etc. Some people are actually paid to write that free software.
SCO's lawsuit against IBM, since this _is_ a thread about SCO, is precisely about that. Code which IBM, as a company, paid for and donated to Linux.
Linux currently exists not as much because of idealists like you or me. (Well, you may not be a linux "fanboy", but _I_ used to be one.) It exists as an elaborate chess game in the war for market share between corporations.
Microsoft is now the common enemy. The computer market went from "IBM PC compatible" to "Intel compatible" to "Windows compatible." That's two corporations pissed off by MS just in that one phrase. Add Novell, who went from owning the network market, to being a relatively minor player. Sun's McNeally until recently was foaming at the mouth against MS. Etc.
Even Dell's self-contradicting occasional flirting with Linux and then denying that it even exists on their radar, is just normal negotiation with MS in the business world.
Basically all this advocacy you people are doing (and which I myself have at one point been doing) is nothing more than voluntary marketting for Corporation A against Corporation B. You're an unpaid pawn in other people's corporate wars. No more. No less. It makes as much sense as rabidly advocating that people switch to Pepsi from Coca Cola, or to Nike from Adidas.
Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it. I'm going to keep buying Linux distros myself too. I think the market could use some more competition anyway. Just, you know, be aware _what_ you're doing.
So what would happen in the _very_ unlikely scenario that all these corporations simultaneously stopped paying people to develop Linux? My best guess is that Linux would go the way of BeOS or OS/2 in no time.
You do know that virtually every single ATA drive manufactured today has SMART capabilities, right?
Basically, the drive has a little more sectors than it reports to your computer. If the data in one sector starts needing retries to read, the hard drive will automatically copy the sector's data to a one of those extra sectors, and mark the original sector as bad.
This is great for MTBF, because you typically no longer end up with a bad sector in the middle of your valuable database, like in the old MFM or RLL days.
This is absolute nightmare for wiping the data, because a few sectors of old data may not even be visible to your precious wipe-disk utility. Regardless of whether you use 7 passes or 700 passes, those sectors won't be overwritten even once.
I.e., do you _really_ want to take risks? Sure, not much data will be in those sectors, and someone would pretty much need to go low level to read them. But you don't know _what_ is there. It could be a few credit card numbers, it could be top secret information, it could be anything.
And what for? For some $20 on EBay?
As opposed to the 12 dBA fans I have on my PC case?
There's nothing to keep them from screwing it hard enough with proprietary drivers, if they _really_ wanted to, and if they were in a position to do so. E.g., I don't even have to think hard to imagine a scenario like, "there's these cool virtualization features or whatnot, but they only work if you have the secret IBM drivers that activate that. Oh, and it's all patented."
Plus, as the endless "Linux vs GNU/Linux" show or Apple's building a propritary MacOS/X on top of BSD prove, there's far more to an OS than the kernel.
For example, IBM could jolly well come up with their own proprietary compiler that produces great code, but is slightly incompatible with GCC. Like MS did with MSVC. Sure, some people will curse and have even more #include blocks to work on both, but a lot won't. That's what's been happening in the Windows world.
For that matter, they could go deeper down MS road, and provide their own foundation classes that go with it too.
Etc.
Now I'm not saying that it would go as long a way as doing the same with a 100% closed-source OS. And I'm sure the Linux community would work hard to emulate all that.
But it also doesn't mean they wouldn't try.
Most of the paper comes from trees planted precisely for that purpose. They get planted, they get cut down and turned into paper, and other trees are planted in their place.
I.e., the whole idiocy of "waaah, must save the trees from the evil paper-using people" is just as retarded, as trying to save the grain plants from the evil bakeries and whiskey distilleries. What's the point? That crop was planted there precisely for that purpose, and another crop will be planted next year.
I.e., while I can see some point in saving non-renewable resources (oil, coal, etc), I fail to see what's the point in fighting to save a _crop_ which was planted for the purpose of being harvested. That's all that those trees are. A crop. No more. No less.
Unlike with oil, noone's going to invade, say, Canada for its trees. They'll just _plant_ more trees. And if more paper is needed, more crop will be planted.
"By the way, that same saying holds true for the Microsoft crowd. . . but they probably know that already."
/. crowd, we'll probably see the same people posting about how IBM sucks and MS is our true friend.
Not sure in which way it applies to "the Microsoft crowd."
Microsoft never promised to GPL Windows. And I'd expect to see pink pigs flying and Satan going to work on skis before that happens.
And, to the best of my knowledge, SCO never tried to stop MS from doing anything. Nor claimed ownership to any Windows code. So in which way did MS get bit? No, seriously, I'm really interested.
Not that anyone expected Microsoft to go GPL anyway. Most of us "Microsoft crowd" really couldn't give a damn about ideological crusades, nor about fanboy allegiances to whoever is this year's fashionable underdog. Or agains whoever is the fashionable corporation to hate this year.
What's the point anyway? If your world is only made of black-vs-white, or good-vs-evil, you live in a very simplistic world. The real world is far more complex than "IBM=GOOD; MSFT=EVIL".
If you look at the history of computing, as little of it as we have so far, one thing has always been constant:
A. whoever is winning, doesn't want standards, they want people locked into their very own proprietary stuff. IBM did it, Sun did it, and Novel did it really big time. That's how the Unix fragmentation happened, and why it lost to Windows.
B. whoever is losing, is whining about how great the open standards are, and how evil proprietary solutions are.
(And some, like Sun, can't even make up their mind in which camp they really are.)
Wake up, people. We're not talking about a group of geeks fighting for ideals. We're talking about corporations who only want to make money. And _will_ change the strategy whenever it looks like another one might bring more money.
IBM is no dedicated friend of OSS, and neither is Sun. (You may notice that IBM did _not_ go GPL with either DB/2 or WebSphere.) At this point IBM merely figured out they can get an advantage out of Linux, in their fight against both MS and Sun.
_If_ IBM was to win a decisive victory, and MS became the underdog, you can fully expect the roles to be reversed yet again.
IBM will start shipping an "enhanced" version of Linux, with a whole bunch of closed source IBM-only executables in it. Just like they did with Unix. Trying to lock people in again. And spreading FUD like they already did before.
And Microsoft would most likely cheerfully go from defending the way of the proprietary solution, to praising open standards.
And knowing the
"Do they resign themselves only to email and web surfing once their computer is 18 months old?"
;)
;)
:)
Absolutely not. We buy a new CPU and graphics card long before those 18 months have passed.
Now if only ATI would get off their asses and actually bring the X800 XT Platinum Edition to the market, I wouldn't have to make do with this 7 month old 9800 XT. Lemme tell you, this thing _crawls_ in 1600x1200x32 with 6x FSAA and 16x Aniso in some games. Not "games which don't even exxist", but actual games available here and now. It sometimes even dips lower than 60 fps
And don't even get me started on AMD's 939 pin socket. They've been talking and talking about it for months. Why can't I buy a 939 pin CPU and mobo already? I already have the paired Crucial RAM and Zalman copper heatsink for it. Geesh, I mean, this socket 754 AMD 64 3200+ is, what? Almost 8 months old
Well, sort of "ha ha, only serious." I _will_ buy a new A64 and an X800 XT, but I'm not really _that_ angry and impatient as the above paragraphs sound. I can wait another month, if needed
Does it make economic sense? Absolutely not. Is it what 90% of the PC market is all about? Absolutely not. Is it stupid? Absolutely.
But, hey, it doesn't make it any less real.
Sure, rowing is great, golf is great, walking up a flight of stairs is great, etc. But only as part of a more complex life. Even in your example, you climbed the stairs, and then proceeded to do something else for the next 8 hours.
Now picture that anyone proposed to spend their next 90 days doing nothing but running up and down stairs. No break except to sleep, no talking to anyone, just boring repetitive mind-numbing running up and down stairs. Endless hours each day just going up and down stairs.
I don't know about you, but it strikes me as supremely idiotic. It also strikes me as a cry for attention. A _really_ sad cry for attention.
You see, a human brain is more complex than that. Even those of us typically labelled as terminal geeks, tend to lead a far more varied life, by comparison. It might involve more sitting at a computer than other people consider normal. But even then it'll be a mix of coding, playing some game, talking on IRC, reading slashdot, posting some comments, etc. You're exercising more than one part of your brain, with more than one stimulus.
Now contrast this with 90 days of just rowing. I can't imagine anyone who's not already retarded, being physically able to put up with that kind of monotony and boredom.
And again, why is it even news? What next? Everyone admiring someone who's spent 90 days in a row just clicking on the exact same monsters in Everquest, taking breaks only to eat and sleep?
I can only aggree with you there. I don't have a PhD either. And call me arrogant if you will, but I think I coded better at, say, 16 years old (i.e., before even starting college) than some of my co-workers do at 30+ years old. And the co-worker I respect the most in this team didn't even finish CS college.
But that was not my point.
My point wasn't necessarily that they should ask for an education or a PhD, but that they should at least try to get someone _competent_. If you will, merely along the lines of "if it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing _well_".
Hiring the cheapest monkeys with _zero_ skill or experience, doesn't really cut costs. They end up paying them for _years_ to code and debug something that a skilled programmer (with or without a diploma) would have done in _hours_.
For those who think I'm exaggerating, true story: I've before given the example of our local Wally, who spent over two years debugging a tiny module. In fact, he _still_ is at it. Something that, by my estimates, anyone else would have done in hours. Well, another co-worker eventually got fed of arguing with Wally over the bugs, and actually went and coded an exact 1-for-1 replacement for Wally's module. Minus the bugs. It took him exactly 6 hours to do that from scratch. QED.
Bingo. Those were my thoughts when reading about that too. Most people nowadays don't just avoid PhDs or a CS education, they just want anyone competent.
They actually think they're cleverly saving costs by hiring the cheapest incompetent monkeys possible. After all, they just bought that magical "+3 cloak of productivity (+5 against bugs)" (i.e., some snake oil baroque framework or server software), so now they don't need anyone competent on those computers any more.
Plus, hey, everyone knows that programming computers is easy. Even the neighbour's geeky kid is doing it. Surely a drooling ex-burger-flipper off the street can do it just fine too.
(Funny how the same people who can't even program their VCR's clock, or keep spyware off their computer, nevertheless think that my job is something easy, eh?)
True story: I know of a team which actually hired people via reverse online auction. Whichever monkey wants the least money, gets the job. No skill needed. (Again, it's not a joke. Sadly.)
Well, yes, but here we're not talking custom solutions. I doubt that many people could even afford a custom designed GPU, by someone who's listened carefully to their problems. We're talking something which would cost billions in R&D alone.
What we're talking about is commodity off-the-shelf graphics cards. (Or sound cards, or synthetisers, or whatever else.) You buy this one, or you buy that other one, or you don't buy anything at all.
And if you expect someone to come and listen to your problems just to sell you a graphics card... well, let's just say you might as well expect hell to freeze over. Or to actually be able to play that HL2 that you paid for when you bought a Radeon 9xxx card.
Basically I'm not saying that your friend is wrong. I'm just saying that he was talking about a _very_ different market.
Well, yes and no. Methinks you're taking it too literally.
Microsoft as a company never innovated. You are right in that aspect.
I think what the article means, though, is that there are people hired at MS, who do come up with new ideas. If nothing else, by virtue of sheer size alone they must have _some_ people with ideas.
It's that kind of innovation that MS doesn't seem to want and encourage.
You're right. It's not a new issue.
E.g., I remember reading an article from back when MS bought Hotmail. The Hotmail team really wanted to add more useful features, but MS saw Hotmail as a threat to Outlook. So for a long time Hotmail was put into a forced freeze.
I'm sure one could dig up examples older than that too, but that's the one I remember at the moment.
MS was always all about protecting its cash-cows, ever since they were little calves. It threw big money at killing anything that even remotely looked like a threat to them. (E.g., Java when it looked like it would threaten the Windows lock-in.)
All that this article says is that it also fiercely protects them from ideas originating within Microsoft.
I.e., it's not as much saying that MS was ever a bastion of innovation, but rather explaining _why_ it never innovates.
"Um, there is a system call to exec a file, assuming you're talking about executing a file. All Microsoft did was attach extensions to filenames."
Assuming that you mean the idea that ".com" means "executable file", you're giving Microsoft way too much credit. That was copied verbatim from CP/M on 8080 and Z80 computers. (For that matter, so are using "/" instead of "-" for parameters, the CR+LF line terminators, the 8+3 filenames, etc.)
The only "innovation" in MS DOS was adding a ".exe" extension, to mean a different format of executable than ".com". Whether that counts as some groundbreaking invention...
Honestly, the last time Microsoft actually tried innovating on their own, was... Microsoft Bob. It contained such innovations as simply asking for a new password if you (or anyone else) typed it wrong three times in a row. (Sadly it's not a joke.) Or pioneered the retarded annoying kind of "assistants" that later became Clippy.
As an aside: Don't get me wrong, I still think that Microsoft offered better bang per buck, on the whole, compared to what else was available at the time. (E.g., what else was supposed to win the Desktop OS wars? IBM's OS/2, where one crashing application could lock the whole computer up _by_ _design_? GEM, which couldn't even run more than one app at a time? Etc.)
But innovation was _not_ their strong point. They always excelled at execution and marketting, but all the good ideas came from other places.
That is a great lesson, no doubt. One that more people would do well to keep in mind.
However, bugs happen when writing code.
Worse bugs happen when someone modifies code they don't understand. Some code depends on non-explicit assertions, such as an array size being already checked somewhere else, or some buffer being already initialized somewhere else. The maintenance programmer sees the code like through one of those cardboard tubes in toilet paper rolls, so he/she can easily miss such dependencies. When a change shortcircuits such a non-obvious check, shit happens.
E.g., true story: someone once "optimized away" the initialization of one of my decompression buffers, right before a release, but it never occured to them to also change the compression algorithm to not depend on a pre-initialized buffer. Such dependencies are probably the easiest kind to miss, because nowhere did a compression method call a decompression one, nor viceversa. You can go with a debugger through the code all day long, or make class diagrams, and never occur to you that two files are related.
(Rant: I remember it because then he made a big fuss and threatened to fire me, sue for damages, and whatnot, because "my" code didn't work. It's one of the kinds of behaviour that gives some people a PHB name.)
And it doesn't help that, in pursuit of some misunderstood cutting costs, companies:
A. hire the cheapest incompetents, who'll do worse mistakes. Which might still be ok, except,
B. they never plan for a proper testing _and_ debugging phase (no, a week tacked at the end for QA doesn't suffice)
C. nor for code reviews
D. nor for comprehensive unit tests. And even worse,
E. they accept (or in the case of client PHBs request) tons of changes without also requesting extra time for them, and then you're actually expected to do the quickest hack that could possible _look_ like it works. Remember: those deadlines must be kept at all costs, even if the client gets a piece of untested unstable crap.
F. the ever increasing reliance on buying some magical "+3 cloak of bug avoidance." Thinking that merely using some framework or library magically makes all problems go away. E.g., "it's Java, so we can't possibly have exploits or memory leaks" or worse "we use HTTPS, so we can't possibly have a security problem" or my pet peeve "it says 'enterprise' on the box, so it's inherently safe and scalable."
This kind of religious faith that just buying some magical talisman makes all problems just go away on their own, without any human responsibility or intervention, serves just to lull one in a false illusion of safety. It's probably the number 1 cause of errors A to E.
There are a ton of options they can still explore, no doubt. And I'm sure the technology will improve a lot, given enough time. Just like any other technology, in the end.
All I'm saying is that I wouldn't buy an OLED display right now. In a year or two, if they get better, maybe. But not yet.
Even at 10,000 hours for one colour component and 20,000 for the others, the time before you start seeing a different hue is still going to be mere months.
After those 10,000 hours, the blue component will have lost half of its brightness, while the green and red are still going decently strong at 75% of their original brightness. I.e., you have a hefty 50% more yellow in that image than you should.
In fact, copy the following into a file called "test.html", open it in your browser, an that's what your white will look by then:
<html>
<body bgcolor="#C0C080">
asdfg
</body>
</html>
Yes, _that_ horrible.
But that's already _way_ past the point where you're starting to notice it. I'm betting that a tenth of that time is where it already starts looking wrong.
I.e., we're back at the 1000 hour figure, aren't we?
"who wants to spend a grand on a TV that is gonna look bad in a couple of years." You're an optimist. With today's OLED technology it will look bad in mere months. These things make plasma TVs seem like they were built to last a lifetime, by comparison. Last I've heard, OLEDs are rated for something like 1000 hours life. At, say, 8 hours a day use, that's 4 months. (And 8h per day is already less than you'll have it in use when it gets shared between you, your SO and maybe a kid using it for the game console.) But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the brightness doesn't even decrease uniformly across the whole spectrum. Each of the 3 colour components has its own decay time. So it probably will take less than 4 months before the image starts to get a bit of a wrong hue. I don't know about you, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to image quality. I'm one of those nuts who bought a 9800 XT just to be able to play with 6x FSAA and 16x Aniso, and are already waiting for the X800 XT for the same reason. So something which is pretty much guaranteed to slowly go the wrong hue, I just don't need it. Not as a computer monitor, and not as a TV. Even if it was for free.
"Sadly, I have noticed that this trend of spyware payloads has begun to move itself into mildly useful, free utitlity applets as well"
.exe viruses and boot sector viruses, that was the _only_ way for a virus to propagate. If you wanted to start an infection, you had to get people to execute an infected program. Somehow.
If you think it's only beginning, you are sadly mistaken.
E.g., way back, the standard way to get BackOrifice was to be tricked into downloading some nice little application. Except it was wrapped in a wrapper that BO-ed your computer.
Even farther back in time, before the Internet worms and email viruses, in the days of proper
L33t warez sites were in both cases one of the main ways to get either a virus or BO (or an equivalent), packed as a serial number generator or as some cracked exe or whatever. I.e., again, the malicious payload was disguised as something completely different.
Nothing new under the sun, eh?
(Incidentally, the practice of spyware calling home also dates back from those days. As dynamically allocated addresses made BO and such less useful than a static IP, plugins were written to 'call home' and tell the script kiddie the new IP address. E.g., if my memory doesn't fail me, the Butt Trumpet plugin.)
Or rather, only one thing is relatively new: malware used to be the exclusive domain of script kiddies and other low life lamers. And everyone considered them to be lowlife lamers.
Now we have corporations basing their whole business model on the exact same kind of tools and mechanisms that those script kiddies used. And insisting that it should somehow count as legitimate, just because it's done by a company.
To me, they're still lowlife lamers.
Yes, and hearing what the third boss in Diablo did, is, of course, a lot more interesting to everyone than hearing what the milkman's mother did. Right? ;)
But anyway, I'm guessing you've never heard _some_ (i.e., explicitly not all) FPS players talking about their l33t clan, did you? Well, let's just say that hearing about the mailman's mother's neighbour's sister isn't half as boring, and at most 1/10 as retarded.
You'll indeed get to hear not only what L337FR34K did, but also what L337LL4M4 did. And exactly how they shot everyone from clan B1GW4NG. And what L337LL4M4 said about that. (Typically, "LOLOLOL!!! U SUX!") And how cool _that_ was. And what did L337FR34K then go and post on some bulletin board. (E.g., "B1GW4NG CLAN SUXXX!! NE1 WANNA JOIN US? LOLOLOL".) And what the losers from B1GW4NG clan had to answer. ("NOOO! U SUX! U R CHEATERZ!!! N WE HAD BAD PING!") Etc.
And on a _really_ bad day you also get to hear how someone called "Suzy" logged on their server. Or anyone with a vaguely female sounding name. (Which for some people also includes such sexy names as "asdfgh" or "D4rthV4d3r". Gotta try to pick those up too, just in case they are female.) And how cool and witty it was when L337FR34K asked "R U A GRL??? HOW BIG R UR TITS???" Etc.
I would hardly think that IBM gives the hardware for free. You'll get some cool sounding discounts for also buying something else from them (e.g., a dysfunctional app server), and... still end up more expensive than a faster computer from Dell. Then you end up needing uber-expensive consultants to just make that dysfunctional app server work.
But somehow clueless PHBs just love discounts. If you told one "we'll give you this top-of-the-line mainframe for 1000 bucks", it wouldn't sound so cool as "it normally costs 10,000,000 dollars, but we'll give you a 50% discount, if you also license 100,000 worth of software for it. Oh, and we'll also give you this huge discount on premium support. Meaning that if you pay us ludicrious sums per month (whether you need support or not), when you do have a problem we'll at least try to fix it in two months or so." They end up paying a lot more, but still think they've made the deal of the century.
Basically I guess it boils down to: IBM is good at selling snake oil, Sun isn't. Or wasn't.
IBM is giving clueless managers an illusion of buying something safe (in more than one way: "noone ever got fired for buying IBM"), proven and well supported. They make it sound like you're getting into a nicely warm and cozy place. (Even if you're really getting into an iron maiden.)
Sun's McNealy used to just be frothing at the mouth along the lines of, "give us a ton of money so we can destroy Microsoft." Which wasn't even much of a business proposition. (I mean, ok, your "Hatfields vs McCoys" feud with Microsoft is funny and all, but what do _I_ get for my money?)
Who knows? Maybe the aggreement with Microsoft will do Sun a lot of good after all. Now maybe they can get back to some actual marketting of their products, instead of focusing on just "buy from us only because Microsoft is evil."
I don't know about that. My experience is that men and women are _exactly_ as boring, and deal with it in the same ways. It's simply different topics, when they open their mouths.
I know plenty of males who can talk no end about stuff like the database they installed at work. Or about their latest (and l33test) CS game. Where they played the same goddamn map yet again. What makes them think I'm interested in hearing for the 200'th time what he did on the same map?
Or what do you think guys do at the pub? Talk.
Basically all I'm saying is that anyone who's not a total introvert... talks about stuff. The only difference is that different humans are fond of different minutiae.
And, of course, to give a very crude analogy: it's sorta like farts. Everyone thinks his/hers don't stink. Only everyone else's stink.
So more likely what happens is:
He: . o O (God damn it. Can't she shut the heck up about what her cousin's neighbour's sister did? Just one goddamn minute. It's so boring it counts as torture already.)
She: . o O (God damn it. Can't he shut the heck up about his CS game and CORBA remote calls? Just one goddamn minute. It's so boring it counts as torture already.)
Each of them sees only the problem in the other, but not in themselves.
And that, IMHO, is the root of all those sweeping generalizations about the other genre/race/social category/etc. People seeing the problem only in others, but conveniently turning a blind eye to when they do the same.
Well, even not just for playing with one's family. Some of us actually _like_ cooperative play far more than all-out cut-throat shoot-in-the-back competition. Not just to appease the SO or whatever, but just for what it is.
As someone else put it: if I thought all-out cut-throat back-stabbing competition was fun, I'd have went to business school.
As early as the text-based MUD's it was known that you basically get 4 types of players:
- socializers (like to talk and interact with other players)
- achievers (want to have the biggest score)
- explorers (not just exploring geography, but also every bit of game mechanics)
- killers (basically hostile to other players. Not just competing for the highest frag count, like an achiever would, but actually wanting to annoy, humiliate, keep others from playing, etc.)
See Bartle's paper for more detail.
And it baffles me that most games catter either to killer-achievers or plain old killers, but pretty much every single non-MMO online game thoroughly ignores the other three categories. Pretty much every single multiplayer game nowadays is about playing _against_ other players, and not together with them.
It's not even a new problem. Even aside from Bartle's paper, there have been countless articles and flame-wars on MUD boards, explaining that some people explicitly do _not_ want to play _against_ other players. And why.
But no, every new multiplayer game just _has_ to catter to the same overcrowded market segment, and ignore everyone else.
This industry truly baffles me.