It's not just the desktop. So much F/OSS software is like using the commercial equivalent circa 10 or 15 years ago it's absurd. Makes you wonder if the people who are developing it are not just reinventing the wheel, but the only wheel they could find to reinvent was hacked out of stone.
(FWIW, I'm quite a fan of F/OSS software and I'll happily concede there are F/OSS products out there that are easily equivalent to - if not streets ahead - of commercial equivalents.)
UI design is hard, and it's something seldom taught in a lot of CS courses (or if it is, it's entirely optional). Which means there's no shortage of developers, but developers who can design something you'd actually want to use are pretty thin on the ground.
IANAtelecoms engineer, but I have a sneaking suspicion the cost isn't the fibre or the routers. The cost is paying somebody to work out what route the fibre will take, organise all the permissions you need to start digging (Needs to go over private land? Got to approach the landowner. Needs to cross a road? Got to approach the council) - some of these permissions cost money - then you've got to pay someone to actually go out there, dig a trench, lay fibre and bury it - making good any roads you dug up as you're going along.
ICBW but I suspect not every area in the country has the luxury of ducting to push more cables down.
Here in the UK the (former) monopoly telco is legally obliged to provide a telephone line anywhere in the country, and IIRC they're not allowed to charge you extra just because you live in the middle of nowhere.
This obligation goes back years - they have no obligation to ensure you can get ADSL over that line. And if you run up something like Firebug, you'll soon discover that pretty much nobody today is developing websites with a view to ensuring they're useable over dialup.
I daresay you might get away with dialup if you use NoScript, block images, flash etc. But I wonder how many useable websites will be left if you do that?
Building legislation is always a few years behind everything else, and is almost invariably a reaction to legislation or safety issues rather than a reaction to an inconvenience.
Fun fact: The UK enacted the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, which essentially forced organisations to make allowances for people with disabilities.
UK building regulations caught up in 2004. Lots of large organisations commissioned buildings some years after 1995 and found they had to make changes shortly after the builders had left, and because it had all been done according to building regulations there was very little they could do apart from stump up the cost.
Thing is, emulation introduces a huge overhead. You really don't want to do it unless the architecture you're emulating is several times slower than the host architecture you're emulating it on.
That's not the case with emulating x86 on ARM.
I think the purpose is less to do with "let's run Windows everywhere" and more to do with "this way we only need to maintain one OS and maybe a different shell for tablet devices. With the added bonus that we can still take advantage of the Windows name as a marketing tool".
Now whether it's because you work for a reasonably large organisation (where if you were to give everyone admin rights, you'd need to triple the size of the IT department just to keep up with all the PC reimaging) or you're just working for an organisation that understands that while IT is a tool, it's a tool you have to use properly I'm not sure.
The great majority of businesses either aren't that large or don't appreciate that, and as a result you get horror stories like you're reading here.
(This is before we even start to discuss ISVs, who seem to have some sort of morbid fascination with giving their own developers admin rights and rather than insisting on writing software properly, instead settle for a line in the instruction manual to the effect of "this software requires admin rights to function")
I seriously doubt it. Even if Sony couldn't find anything in particular to go after him for, one of the curious aspects of the legal system is that you can tie someone up in it for years and the legal profession on the whole doesn't see anything wrong with doing this. Which is fantastically expensive - and while Geohot may have had some donations now he's in the media spotlight, it's questionable how long these would continue. It winds up being a competition to see who's going to stop paying lawyers first.
Faced with the prospect of either:
1. Losing a very expensive lawsuit and either declaring myself bankrupt or being beholden to Sony for the rest of my natural life (Would bankruptcy even work? Does bankruptcy get you out of court judgements in the US?) 2. Winning a very expensive lawsuit only to be faced with appeal after appeal until such time as I say "Enough! What sort of settlement will shut you up?"
I'd consider early settlement - even quite an expensive one - to be a very favourable outcome. If Geohot's got away with agreeing to never doing anything similar with a Sony product again, Sony have had their publicity "pour encourager les autres", I'd say he did alright.
Music. Being streamed in realtime from one wireless device to another.
Do you know, I rather suspect the reason for the encryption might be less to do with Apple and more to do with a certain industry we all love to hate. Last two initials of the organisation that represents them are AA.
I don't know if there needs to be any sort of connection, informal or otherwise.
The Daily Mail is in the same business, and more-or-less the entire newspaper industry is facing the same problem. They're all blaming it on the Internet, and if they're not actively setting up paywalls themselves they're almost certainly watching very closely those that are to see how it pans out. Frankly, if there was an equivalent of the RIAA or the MPAA for newspapers, we'd probably have another cartel spewing venom and suing everyone for daring to read what they put on their own website.
More to the point - I don't know what the results on Google looked like when the "journalist" did their research, but I took the liberty of checking what they were the day that article appeared in the dead tree edition.
The first page on Google consisted of (in no particular order):
Videos uploaded by Adele's record label.
Adele's own website.
The Wikipedia entry relating to Adele
Adele's Myspace page
(IIRC these first few were all near the top).
A lyrics page containing Adele lyrics. Note that these lyrics pages only ever publish lyrics - the days of the online guitar archive are long gone. Nobody's reading those pages and thinking "I don't need to buy the record now".
A page on a record label's website about Adele. I assume it's her record label.
A fan page - of the sort that says "this artist is wonderful, get her music here" and only links to genuine links to buy & download because the last thing a fan wants to do is screw the artist over.
The Amazon MP3 download service containing links to Adele's music. Again, perfectly legal.
This is broadly what I'd expect of Google. Which means one of two things:
1. There was for a period of time an anomaly which Google spotted and fixed - but not before a journalist had spotted it themselves. 2. The entire premise of the article is fiction, designed to stir up hate against Google.
Considering what the traditional media think of Google, who's for (2)?
Do people even do their research anymore? No. They just all jump on a stupid band wagon like somehow Sony Music == SCEA. Just a hint: the PS3 *allows* the ripping of CDs to non copy protected files. They're totally different divisions.
That's not just lack of research, that's complete failure to understand how sizeable businesses work.
Hint: With few exceptions, many (maybe most) sizeable businesses contain a number of broadly independent units that are free to make their own decisions and the only reporting they have to do to the very top is to show how much money they've made. It's actually pretty rare for them to all have to toe a particular party line - it's certainly not unusual to find that the only common thing between a number of divisions is the brand name they sell under.
If they're evenly spread worldwide, we can safely assume that the odd Sony store here and there will have one person come in, decide that they'd look a bit silly trying to run a protest on their own and walk away again.
Thanks for clarifying, as I said I wasn't certain I was right. Sounds like Microsoft are essentially skipping over the paradigms in shell languages like bash and looking straight at languages like Python.
This is part of the problem - Microsoft have essentially been hoist by their own petard. They developed such a reputation for a lousy product back in the 1990s that many people's automatic assumption when they see a system that's unstable today is to blame Microsoft rather than investigate deeper.
It'd cost a fortune in developer time, and you'd be replacing a perfectly stable kernel with another perfectly stable kernel. Oh, and you'd need to rewrite a lot of userland stuff or run almost the whole lot through some sort of compatibility layer.
Seriously, Windows is a mature product these days. It's far from perfect, but the old days of being horrifically unstable were on their way out in the days of Windows NT, and were more-or-less complete when the '9x line was finally killed off and XP was introduced. There were still annoyances back then (the absence of a firewall would have been a much smaller problem were it not for the number of broadband ISPs who supplied USB modems and refused to support anyone who used a firewall of any description), but to talk about Windows like it's still stuck in the days of Windows '9x and would benefit from Microsoft doing an Apple and introducing a whole new OS based on a Unix kernel is spectacularly ignorant.
To be fair to Microsoft, I'm pretty sure Powershell is partly hamstrung by the design of Windows.
IIRC (and ICBveryW), Windows is more-or-less entirely object-oriented in design. Seriously, you can't do a damn thing without messing around with all the overhead of instantiating objects, assigning attributes or calling methods. Which means that any sort of scripting language needs to do one of two things:
1. Be wholly object oriented. Pros: Relatively easy to develop the language. Cons: The syntax for the resulting scripting language will be somewhat verbose compared to, say, bash.
2. Provide a fantastically rich set of shortcuts to avoid all the overhead involved in OO. This isn't a big deal in Unix, mainly because of the "each command does only one small thing" ethos. Not so in Windows. Even if you were to go down that path, sooner or later you'd need to include OO unless you wanted to guarantee that the scripting language couldn't easily interact with anything else.
The only thing they would gain here is the ability to run an systems without any video chip, which they have no hope in hell of winning. If you refer to the ability to manage them via serial console *in addition* to video, they do have serial console support to do some basic things including starting CMD/PowerShell. Sure, we love our VTs on occasion, but a very small minority of people use them except when they *have* to. Perhaps inherent capability to ssh in and get cmd/powershell would be nice, but getting rid of the GUI on VGA console won't really win them anything in the market.
Granted, it opens a command window complete with all the window decorations you'd expect, but I can't imagine it'd be that difficult to turn it into nothing but a serial console.
No chance Microsoft will ditch backwards compatibility. The absolute most they'd do is ditch it in the core OS and implement it in the form of an integrated virtual machine running in userland, which IIRC is broadly what they do in recent versions anyhow.
What would be the point? The kernel for Windows is perfectly stable, barring shitty drivers.
The UI may occasionally do odd things, but that's true of any OS. As far as the average enduser is concerned, it doesn't really matter two hoots if the underlying OS is still functioning if you can't interact with it.
Really? I don't know if it's different where you are, but here in the UK Nokia's presence in all the big phone stores is seriously down over the last 6 years.
They're not dead by any means, I grant you, but the days when everyone and his dog had a Nokia 3310 except for business users who were given a 6210 are long gone.
Someone mod this guy "funny". Anyone who seriously believes any tax is earmarked for anything rather than just going into one big pot... well, I've got this bridge you might be interested in buying.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the desktop. So much F/OSS software is like using the commercial equivalent circa 10 or 15 years ago it's absurd. Makes you wonder if the people who are developing it are not just reinventing the wheel, but the only wheel they could find to reinvent was hacked out of stone.
(FWIW, I'm quite a fan of F/OSS software and I'll happily concede there are F/OSS products out there that are easily equivalent to - if not streets ahead - of commercial equivalents.)
UI design is hard, and it's something seldom taught in a lot of CS courses (or if it is, it's entirely optional). Which means there's no shortage of developers, but developers who can design something you'd actually want to use are pretty thin on the ground.
Really? I've just looked for the splash for 2.7 and I can't find anything that looks like that.
IANAtelecoms engineer, but I have a sneaking suspicion the cost isn't the fibre or the routers. The cost is paying somebody to work out what route the fibre will take, organise all the permissions you need to start digging (Needs to go over private land? Got to approach the landowner. Needs to cross a road? Got to approach the council) - some of these permissions cost money - then you've got to pay someone to actually go out there, dig a trench, lay fibre and bury it - making good any roads you dug up as you're going along.
ICBW but I suspect not every area in the country has the luxury of ducting to push more cables down.
Here in the UK the (former) monopoly telco is legally obliged to provide a telephone line anywhere in the country, and IIRC they're not allowed to charge you extra just because you live in the middle of nowhere.
This obligation goes back years - they have no obligation to ensure you can get ADSL over that line. And if you run up something like Firebug, you'll soon discover that pretty much nobody today is developing websites with a view to ensuring they're useable over dialup.
I daresay you might get away with dialup if you use NoScript, block images, flash etc. But I wonder how many useable websites will be left if you do that?
Building legislation is always a few years behind everything else, and is almost invariably a reaction to legislation or safety issues rather than a reaction to an inconvenience.
Fun fact: The UK enacted the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, which essentially forced organisations to make allowances for people with disabilities.
UK building regulations caught up in 2004. Lots of large organisations commissioned buildings some years after 1995 and found they had to make changes shortly after the builders had left, and because it had all been done according to building regulations there was very little they could do apart from stump up the cost.
Thing is, emulation introduces a huge overhead. You really don't want to do it unless the architecture you're emulating is several times slower than the host architecture you're emulating it on.
That's not the case with emulating x86 on ARM.
I think the purpose is less to do with "let's run Windows everywhere" and more to do with "this way we only need to maintain one OS and maybe a different shell for tablet devices. With the added bonus that we can still take advantage of the Windows name as a marketing tool".
You should count yourself fantastically lucky.
Now whether it's because you work for a reasonably large organisation (where if you were to give everyone admin rights, you'd need to triple the size of the IT department just to keep up with all the PC reimaging) or you're just working for an organisation that understands that while IT is a tool, it's a tool you have to use properly I'm not sure.
The great majority of businesses either aren't that large or don't appreciate that, and as a result you get horror stories like you're reading here.
(This is before we even start to discuss ISVs, who seem to have some sort of morbid fascination with giving their own developers admin rights and rather than insisting on writing software properly, instead settle for a line in the instruction manual to the effect of "this software requires admin rights to function")
I seriously doubt it. Even if Sony couldn't find anything in particular to go after him for, one of the curious aspects of the legal system is that you can tie someone up in it for years and the legal profession on the whole doesn't see anything wrong with doing this. Which is fantastically expensive - and while Geohot may have had some donations now he's in the media spotlight, it's questionable how long these would continue. It winds up being a competition to see who's going to stop paying lawyers first.
Faced with the prospect of either:
1. Losing a very expensive lawsuit and either declaring myself bankrupt or being beholden to Sony for the rest of my natural life (Would bankruptcy even work? Does bankruptcy get you out of court judgements in the US?)
2. Winning a very expensive lawsuit only to be faced with appeal after appeal until such time as I say "Enough! What sort of settlement will shut you up?"
I'd consider early settlement - even quite an expensive one - to be a very favourable outcome. If Geohot's got away with agreeing to never doing anything similar with a Sony product again, Sony have had their publicity "pour encourager les autres", I'd say he did alright.
Hence outsourcing it. The people doing the astroturfing aren't Sony employees, and so are not bound by Sony's terms of employment.
Sounds to me like the marketing department found a way around a rule invented by the HR department.
Hmm.
Music. Being streamed in realtime from one wireless device to another.
Do you know, I rather suspect the reason for the encryption might be less to do with Apple and more to do with a certain industry we all love to hate. Last two initials of the organisation that represents them are AA.
I don't know if there needs to be any sort of connection, informal or otherwise.
The Daily Mail is in the same business, and more-or-less the entire newspaper industry is facing the same problem. They're all blaming it on the Internet, and if they're not actively setting up paywalls themselves they're almost certainly watching very closely those that are to see how it pans out. Frankly, if there was an equivalent of the RIAA or the MPAA for newspapers, we'd probably have another cartel spewing venom and suing everyone for daring to read what they put on their own website.
More to the point - I don't know what the results on Google looked like when the "journalist" did their research, but I took the liberty of checking what they were the day that article appeared in the dead tree edition.
The first page on Google consisted of (in no particular order):
(IIRC these first few were all near the top).
This is broadly what I'd expect of Google. Which means one of two things:
1. There was for a period of time an anomaly which Google spotted and fixed - but not before a journalist had spotted it themselves.
2. The entire premise of the article is fiction, designed to stir up hate against Google.
Considering what the traditional media think of Google, who's for (2)?
Do people even do their research anymore? No. They just all jump on a stupid band wagon like somehow Sony Music == SCEA. Just a hint: the PS3 *allows* the ripping of CDs to non copy protected files. They're totally different divisions.
That's not just lack of research, that's complete failure to understand how sizeable businesses work.
Hint: With few exceptions, many (maybe most) sizeable businesses contain a number of broadly independent units that are free to make their own decisions and the only reporting they have to do to the very top is to show how much money they've made. It's actually pretty rare for them to all have to toe a particular party line - it's certainly not unusual to find that the only common thing between a number of divisions is the brand name they sell under.
If they're evenly spread worldwide, we can safely assume that the odd Sony store here and there will have one person come in, decide that they'd look a bit silly trying to run a protest on their own and walk away again.
Thanks for clarifying, as I said I wasn't certain I was right. Sounds like Microsoft are essentially skipping over the paradigms in shell languages like bash and looking straight at languages like Python.
This is part of the problem - Microsoft have essentially been hoist by their own petard. They developed such a reputation for a lousy product back in the 1990s that many people's automatic assumption when they see a system that's unstable today is to blame Microsoft rather than investigate deeper.
The important question is do Microsoft care?
Right... but what would be the point?
It'd cost a fortune in developer time, and you'd be replacing a perfectly stable kernel with another perfectly stable kernel. Oh, and you'd need to rewrite a lot of userland stuff or run almost the whole lot through some sort of compatibility layer.
Seriously, Windows is a mature product these days. It's far from perfect, but the old days of being horrifically unstable were on their way out in the days of Windows NT, and were more-or-less complete when the '9x line was finally killed off and XP was introduced. There were still annoyances back then (the absence of a firewall would have been a much smaller problem were it not for the number of broadband ISPs who supplied USB modems and refused to support anyone who used a firewall of any description), but to talk about Windows like it's still stuck in the days of Windows '9x and would benefit from Microsoft doing an Apple and introducing a whole new OS based on a Unix kernel is spectacularly ignorant.
To be fair to Microsoft, I'm pretty sure Powershell is partly hamstrung by the design of Windows.
IIRC (and ICBveryW), Windows is more-or-less entirely object-oriented in design. Seriously, you can't do a damn thing without messing around with all the overhead of instantiating objects, assigning attributes or calling methods. Which means that any sort of scripting language needs to do one of two things:
1. Be wholly object oriented. Pros: Relatively easy to develop the language. Cons: The syntax for the resulting scripting language will be somewhat verbose compared to, say, bash.
2. Provide a fantastically rich set of shortcuts to avoid all the overhead involved in OO. This isn't a big deal in Unix, mainly because of the "each command does only one small thing" ethos. Not so in Windows. Even if you were to go down that path, sooner or later you'd need to include OO unless you wanted to guarantee that the scripting language couldn't easily interact with anything else.
Decoupling of the GUI from the os
The only thing they would gain here is the ability to run an systems without any video chip, which they have no hope in hell of winning. If you refer to the ability to manage them via serial console *in addition* to video, they do have serial console support to do some basic things including starting CMD/PowerShell. Sure, we love our VTs on occasion, but a very small minority of people use them except when they *have* to. Perhaps inherent capability to ssh in and get cmd/powershell would be nice, but getting rid of the GUI on VGA console won't really win them anything in the market.
Really? Microsoft think they've already got a version of Windows that doesn't depend on the GUI.
Granted, it opens a command window complete with all the window decorations you'd expect, but I can't imagine it'd be that difficult to turn it into nothing but a serial console.
No chance Microsoft will ditch backwards compatibility. The absolute most they'd do is ditch it in the core OS and implement it in the form of an integrated virtual machine running in userland, which IIRC is broadly what they do in recent versions anyhow.
What would be the point? The kernel for Windows is perfectly stable, barring shitty drivers.
The UI may occasionally do odd things, but that's true of any OS. As far as the average enduser is concerned, it doesn't really matter two hoots if the underlying OS is still functioning if you can't interact with it.
Really? I don't know if it's different where you are, but here in the UK Nokia's presence in all the big phone stores is seriously down over the last 6 years.
They're not dead by any means, I grant you, but the days when everyone and his dog had a Nokia 3310 except for business users who were given a 6210 are long gone.
Politicians seldom raise a tax that they personally are going to be heavily impacted by.
Earmarked?!
Someone mod this guy "funny". Anyone who seriously believes any tax is earmarked for anything rather than just going into one big pot... well, I've got this bridge you might be interested in buying.