He also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough.
F*ck you. Who is responsible for state of gaming PC market??? Serious games??? Give me a break, moron.
Games must be... games, not some twisted brain fuck. And you can go to hell with all the elitist' "seriousness" crap for "hard core gamers" of yours.
I want to have something just to forget about all the "dog food" I have to eat every day 8 to 5. No, I do not need your "serious" sh*t - I need games I can take half hour for a ride just forget the office' stench.
Banana Blitz - is cool. Nintendo's WiiPlay & WiiSports - best what happened in gaming in last five years.
I use review quite simply: I'm looking for reviews of games I know and like - and choose people/sites who have rated games I like highly. And then check what else they have rated highly. That way I have found PC's "Rise of Nation", "Heroes of Annihilated Empires" and "City Life World Edition" - IMHO great games I enjoy and play, but most of high profile review sites have given them crappy/misplaced ratings.
E.g. http://wii.ign.com/ fits me perfectly. But on other side http://ds.ign.com/ - is U-turn in the respect: they gave lots of near-perferct marks to IMHO shit games (e.g. Mario, Partners in time) and underrated lots of games I have liked (e.g. Lost Magic). Reviews on ds.ign.com marked as "UK" are pretty O.K. and mostly fit me.
[...] I'm made slightly nervous about enshrining a requirement to use it into law [...]
This is not about law. This is about how executive branch does things internally. IOW, in democracy you shouldn't be forced to buy M$Word/et just to check what/how your government does with tax payers dollars .
This is internal regulation on how bureaucracy does things - not any kind of law. For added transparency, U.S. government has policy to use existing standards. There is a standard - ODF - and during policy review they have to state why they use/do not use (underline matching) existing international standard for their internal paper work. It doesn't prescribe implementation must be open/free/open source - only resulting documents.
P.S. Reality actually looks really bleak: people are flocking to SO/OO.o solely because of its price. Higher ranks of government never really experience lack of fundings. But lower branches - like municipalities/counties - never really have chance to pile up money to buy Windows licenses and/or M$Office boxes. Nor do they have now money to upgrade themselves to Vista/Office2k7.
And how would that have been difficult/impossible with the BSD license, rather than the GPL?
When I see that happen than I would believe it. But basically it is same case as with kernel: ground of conflict of different vendors. Balance of proper support of standards and compatibility with existing HTML base is tricky thing.
At moment two open source toolkits exist - kHTML & Mozilla Gecko - and they are both (L)GPLd. Again supporting my original (great grand parent) post: for the situations (L)GPL is better.
Vorbis is intended to be implemented in hardware: attaching any kind of license is hurdle.
If that was the case, they would have left libVorbis GPL'd, and just BSD licensed Tremor. They did not.
Tremor is for "low-end" hardware - DSPs & FPGAs. libvorbis itself is used by many embedded systems. There, vorbis isn't considered software - it is part of firmware and thus part of hardware.
And how many vendors can commit???
Many.
You speak anathema. No way I would believe that elitist "core" of *BSD have given up on their sole support for elitism: cvs commit rights.
People who need such protection all encrypt whole file system and do not bother with only password/key storage. Linux/UNIX does that for all time I know (Crypto Loop patches is probably oldest patch set for Linux). Windows/Vista I heard can this now. MacOS X allows only to encrypt user home directory what is sufficient in most situations - since keys belonging to user are always saved in user's home directory.
That protection was needed by Windows XP and earlier since it didn't supported FS encryption. And even then people were selling special solutions with transparent hard drive encryption: BIOS asks for password and gives it to the hard drive and Windows goes on booting as usual.
But even more so, GPL allows Linux to "merge" back possible code base "forks". That's next to impossible with BSD licensed code most tend to keep closed.
Not at all. Following the strictest of definitions of the GPL, you can easily create something that is difficult or near impossible to merge back into the base code. This was a big complaint of KHTML developers with Apple.
That was different situation. Let look at it from other angle: who gained more from who? kHTML people proved the important point: HTML/DOM/CSS/JavaScript are no rocket science and can be implemented from ground up with some effort applied. What gained Apple? It has probably saved couple of years of works for several engineers. What gained KDE? It had become known in MacOS (and Wintel PC) world as providers of good quality software. End result, is that KDE gained more from Apple, than Apple gained from KDE.
Second point is that it was precisely problem of differently licensed code: Safari vs. Konqueror. Linux made some sacrifices on manageability to allow big vendors to work more efficiently on particular bits of software. (e.g. some archs/subarchs are supported and managed solely by vendors and often are out of line of general kernel rules (s390 supported (and used) solely by IBM).) kHTML people didn't wanted to allow Safari people commit their changes directly - nor didn't wanted to compromise and give them some sandbox to post/test their changes with Konqueror more effectively. But thanks to all the bad publicity, Apple did precisely that for KDE people. Story was covered many times on Slashdot.
Whats more the BSD license allows MORE people and companies to use the software for more purposes... RMS understands this, and gave the okay to Xiph.org to BSD Vorbis and Theora... If you're forced to release the source, you're prevented from using it in a lot of places.
As such, I can think of many BSD (and MIT) licensed programs that have become defacto standards (eg. Telnet, FTP, SMTP, DNS, NFS, SSH, and many more) but none that were GPL licensed... How many can you think of?
Yare yare. You guy completely miss the point. Go back to RTFA and check again: number of people who have committed patches and number of patches. THOUSANDS. PER MONTH. from HUNDREDS of contributors.
The kernel is conflict ground: it has to support many different architectures and many different workloads. Everybody wants now something from Linux. It is totally different from protocol/file format implementation: it could be done once properly and it would work O.K. for next decade. Check number of patches for telnet or ftp. You would find months where no single change was made: all users are happy and that's perfectly fine to not to touch well working system.
And Xiph.org case stands out completely (and not that anybody needed RMS' blessing to do their work). Vorbis is intended to be implemented in hardware: attaching any kind of license is hurdle. And BSD 3-clause one is well established standard for "no license code", or more precisely "no restrictions on code" while protecting original authors and their copyrights. It is BSD licensed not for software case - but for hardware.
FreeBSD has plenty of vnedor support as well.
And how many vendors can commit??? End of the non-story.
Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community.
It is just confirmation of old statement that GPL(v2) provides better (at moment best) ground for cooperation between vendors.
Many companies are willing to control what OS does with their software and hardware - and Linux gives them that chance on cheap. But even more so, GPL allows Linux to "merge" back possible code base "forks". That's next to impossible with BSD licensed code most tend to keep closed.
Let's just hope Linux would be able to go on surviving the "snowball" effect of the merges.
the UAC to be useful, the user needs to have a fair amount of knowledge about: what the UAC is; what application it is blocking; the consequences of blocking the action; and an alternate approach if the blocked action did something useful.
Mod me down, but UAC is another excuse M$ came up with to be able to say "Users are lame: we have warned them but they still clicked confirm."
No security system works that way. That's why impersonation was introduced into OSs (NT included) long time ago. Accounts are setup for particular tasks with limited set of privileges. Depending on the work user does, he log-ins under different account. This is not perfect, but best what people came up with.
And that works for Unix and MacOSX - and nobody's complaining. But M$... It seems to me priority of M$ is not to make system people can use and feel safe (if they do nothing extraordinary), but to create a better platform fitting to ActiveX. UAC serves no other purpose and achieves nothing else.
M$ did take user's complain literally: before in Win9x/NT times ActiveX might have worked in background w/o user knowing that something was brewing up. Now users are notified with nice UAC dialogs that something is happening - and what is happening identified with 32 digit GUID... Very user friendly, I'd say.
Maybe that's my lack of exposure to Java tools [...]
Off-topic. I have whole department sitting one floor below who would call you "luck bastard." Hint: they work with Java tools all the day.
Windows programming might be pleasant - if requirement are set well and fit into general M$Windows concepts. I had experience were people tried to best themselves with every new release and Windows was - to put it politely - "inadequate". e.g. for how long standard functions exist to open jpeg image in Windows? or png? or simple grids? or pdf? or ogg? You have to code it all by yourself. For one application - it is still O.K. For two, three - somewhat O.K. But for more it become PITA. Windows program are like snowballs of libraries: covering all what Windows didn't supported since Win9x era. Under Linux at least you do not have snowball effect and all trivial functions are in one way or another can be found in system. Though you still get all the pleasantries of multiple versions of different APIs.
This is [censored] reality. Nobody program for Windows because he likes to program for Windows: people do that mainly for money. "Work" they say.
Whatever you appear to like in competing implementations is irrelevant: M$ and corporate decision makers leaves you no choice.
And there are really only two choices: (1) you go insane and start loving whatever management tells you to love or (2) you search for another job. Since the guy is with Intel, he's likely to have good payroll and option (2) doesn't ring any bells.
[ I hope you have noticed that "I love POSIX" post is from year 2003 - and "I love Windows" from 2006. But honestly it all looks more like joke. ]
I'd say from personal experience, that threading in Windows is total mess. POSIX threads might look limiting - but on other side you need to resort to threads in *nix... well you do not have to resort to threads all. It is your own programmer's choosing: to use threads or to use state machines and async I/O. Under Windows bugs plagued/plague/will plague async I/O and programmers have no choice other then to use threads for sockets and file I/O. So under Windows you use threads for everything (except GUI which is restricted to "main thread"), while in *nix it is norm to see threads only in applications which want to take advantage of multi-processor systems for heavy computational tasks: math, code cracking, video encoding, etc. Heavy I/O tasks in *nix are all single threaded: Apache, Squid, MySQL, PostgreSQL, postfix/sendmail/exim, etc. (Though most now support optional multi-threading too - for really busy servers.)
I was helping my friend to test piece of monstrous hardware/software (with something like 128 CPU cores). Linux was very very bad on the system - both as guest and as host. (IIRC, configuration was 64 VMs 2x systems.) Windows was piece of cake to install - just to discover that beside easy installation the cluster wasn't being able to perform a single task decently. Some tests which took several hours under Linux went to days under Windows.
Worst part was that overall performance (the number as measured by my friend) we really really terrible: on average Linux performed about two times slower compared to theoretical limit (== performance of standalone dual core box multiplied by 128) and Windows performed about four times slower. (It seemed Windows implementation of software required more memory and thus required heavier compared to Linux swapping. Thus drop of performance.) (*)
That wasn't any kind of scientific test - the question was "is it possible at all?". Yes, it is. Is it usable for anything? Probably. In such systems, everything - I/O, RAID, RAM - becomes bottleneck. IOW, choose your tasks wisely.
(*) But again, if hardware management costs (NOT hardware costs) are prime factor, then installing two/four such systems might be an answer. It is still two/four blade racks compared to N racks of 1/2Us+ required for real hosts (with all extra infrastructure required).
Get back to us when you have really managed 100s of VMs.
Actual state of management software is... poor. On other side, the people who have developed their own management for cheap (e.g. blade) hosts farms - feel least urge to switch to VMs from real hosts. For well managed environment with redundant hardware it is really waste to burn CPU cycles of emulation. (*)
VMs solve no particular problem, but just propagate problem of poor OS management to another level - hardware/emulated hardware.
Needless to add, people did the same under Linux for ages with User-Mode-Linux and (what now is called) Xen. But again, the solutions to be manageable heavily rely on the fact that guest and host systems are the very same Linux (with little differences on kernel side).
In the end, when box is plain hardware you can always pull the plug. Try to emulate that with compromised/erroneous VM which started hogging all system resources from other VMs - and management interface too.
(*) Okay, I know the post is pointless, since CPU cycles are now the cheapest resource. But yet, even to my surprise, there are people who care about how fit their systems are and do not tolerate another layer which in hardware/software solves OSs problems.
On other news, I have just assembled myself VIA'a Mini-ITX system for whooping 325€ and installed Linux on it.
Let's compare. Real mini PC + Linux at price of 325€: small, noiseless so it can be put on book shelf and be forgotten about.
Now VMWare/Windows virtualization: VMWare Workstation/Player $190/$0 + M$Windows XP Home/XP Pro/Vista $100/$200/$250. (*) The modern full featured offering (VMWare Wrkst + Vista) would set you off for $190+$250=$430.
Can anybody explain me advantages of virtualization? You get indecent performance for heavy bill. So what the deal breaker???
(*) Linux option is removed since VMware constantly breaks Linux guest support. And vmware-tools are broken too.
M$ likes to create confusion in market place. Similar story was with their recent "C++" which turned out to be "C++/CLI".
And Mono folks are obviously already deep inside of M$ [censored] and of course are confused as much as anybody else who deals with M$ on regular basis.
1 Since MS was silent in the technical stage of the ODF standards process, it would have been far too obvious what they were doing if they, at the last minute, piped up with complaints about ODF that they'd been sitting on for the duration of the whole process.
That's why process in the place: so people can submit complains. And process procedures are pretty strict so that (i) single company does have problem torpedoing standard (though M$ has resources to hire cronies) and (ii) complains are taken on technical merits and often deferred to next minor revision of standard. M$ was most welcome to complain/pile up issues - it would have just made ODF immune to future such complains. But M$ played that card incorrectly, because they have actually withdrew themselves from OASIS more or less completely: for good play they had to have pile submitted but rejected. In that case, they would have had valid point: "we tried to get features we need in ODF but OASIS/ISO/etc had rejected them."
2 If MS had suddenly piped up with (real or imaginary) complaints about ODF, then it would have been open season on OXML -- and OXML has way less to protect itself from any serious complaints.
You seem to try to draw poor analogy. First nobody in EOOXML case were piling up complains against M$ to sink their proposal. M$ had chose the time all by itself and noway the complains to EOOXML wouldn't have looked like piled up - since they were all gathered in matter of days/weeks with literally no time for anybody else to comment. That's stinking 6000 pages - folks wake up - and for technical documentation that's just deadly mark "irrelevant" (If something took that much to explain, it most likely explained poorly and inconsistently. Personal experience.)
Second. No "if"s please. ODF is standard. EOOXML is proposal. If somebody's late to market - s/he has to listen to what others say and check what others are using. M$ has to correlate properly with ODF with it was standardized first. And also, you would notice that most of the complains to EOOXML are not "overlaps with ODF", but (1) inconsistencies in the proposal and (2) contradictions/incompatibilities with other standards.
Do not tell me that f*ck up leap year calculation is "required". Or that EOOXML's inconsistency on measure units also is "shall have feature". That's just shows level of irresponsibility of M$ what further damages value of (and whole point of) standardized file format.
It is just first time industry has standard for documents and IBM *can* support it fully, since standard is there and open.
Even if only handful of customers would use it - it is still improvement for consumers. Especially since Lotus never boasted good interoperability with anything else in industry (at least that was my experience and (disclaimer?) my friends working at IBM). Frankly, provided there would be no problems on OO.o/KOffice side, I think customers would love the feature.
P.S. Though, honestly, I have expected IBM to brag about ODF support in your enterprise documentation management stack.
Seems like M$ have hired better PR people who can say that with straight face.
Even skin deep analysis identifies the RTFA as "personal attack" (person == IBM) and thus dismisses it as "FUD".
Personal attacks are just confirmation M$ this time has no technical arguments against ODF. All they have left is to resort to underhanded tactics like that.
Is there something about ECMA International" that prohibits competing standards? Honest question, I don't really know.
Check EOOXML objections and look for "Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade".
ISO has policy of one standard for one purpose. ISO works like a platform and specifically prohibits duplications or overlaps, since that would result in incompatibility of standard-compliant components with each other, thus raising "technical barrier to trade".
The whole point of having a standard is to create or level market - for sake of consumers, NOT vendors.
[...] and considering that ODF does not support a good chunk of features in Office 2007 [...]
Bullshit. First: ODF is format and M$O2007 is (unreleased) product. Feel the difference.
Second. Guess why StarOffice file format (SXW, tried and proven in real product) spent that much time in OASIS/ISO until finally reaching stamp of approval. You seems to have missed that completely. The main difference between SXW and ODF is support for extensions: SXW is vendor specific XML schema, while ODF does support all kind of extensions on all levels - to be truly vendor neutral and allow proprietary extensions.
M$ intentionally kept silence during ODF development to claim now that ODF can't support all what they need from it. The whole argument that they were silent during ODF since they didn't wanted to intervene with its progress is totally BOGUS. Standardization process isn't place for political games "take and give" - it is place for finding common ground. M$ didn't wanted finding common with rest of industry - and now they try to turn tables around and paint IBM (who raised valid technical point) as bad guys.
Without copyright you'll never see a show made without it being bought and paid for before production. Who knows what you'll get?
Pile of B.S. Especially in anime/manga context. Anime/manga are precisely so perversive that most of projects are made on cheap that they are paid completely off advertisement. One episode of low profile anime (as I have heard) costs to produce $2500-3500. And that's precisely price of TV advertisement for 15/20 minute block. Show might get sponsors - but not all artists are so lucky. If it gets popular - it would of course attract more money, since prices on ad time will soar. With manga it is even simpler: manga production could be paid completely out of artist's own pocket. And that's what happens most of the time. And the market for amateur's manga - doujin - is good as ever.
Also, as sidenote, you have to remember that anime/manga are precisely blooming, because of "piracy" - in sense western legal right. While Disney's "Micky Mouse" (tm)(r)(c) remained unchanged for ~75(?) years now, thanks to free exchange of ideas in Asia (Japan in particular) drown art had made mile steps in years of computers and internet. You can make a parody manga for some high profile expensive anime - and try to guess it - you will NOT be sued to death by studio for selling it. Try to make a parody on Micky Mouse, put it on net and start counting before Disney Inc. lawyers will send you cease & desist letter. You will not need count for too long. Feel the difference.
a market which was NOTHING until "piracy" saved it and brought Anime interest in the market. Do you think that Anime/Manga would exist if not for the huge black market in the US for the first few years? Now there is a growing market that exists WITHOUT big distributors enabling it to exist and blossom -- fans pay for what fans want to see more of.
I've heard this argument before and I still think it's a load of crap. The people who download anime freely are most often those who are least likely to buy it. People forget that there was huge, HUGE interest generated after Bandai and Pioneer (now Geneon) on Cartoon Network.
As anime fan, I can only say that you "least likely to buy it" remark isn't true. The real problem is that people in industry lost their touch with audience. And US' (as well as UE's) anime fandoms are such examples.
First - quality of translation. Most of official dubbings are total crap. They kill redundantly characters turning funny and entertaining anime into boring freak show. Fansubs are several magnitudes better.
Second. In Japan you can buy DVD for less than $10 - probably not new, but yet official DVD. In US you can buy for $15-20. And finally my beloved EU - 25-30€. Decent anime series runs for say 26 episodes. 4-5 eps on disk - that makes on average 8 DVD. In Japan you can buy them often when series are still running - even if it's new it is something like $20 per month. In USA/EU, DVDs are released in *bulk* - and if you want to get all of them you need to buy them all at one time, because later chances finding particular DVD of particular series are diminishing. 8 DVDs at price of $20 is $160. How many kids can afford that?? Well, prices go down - and you can in US snatch such bulk DVD series for about $100 what's more affordable. Here in EU prices have habit to remain high for *very* long time.
I wanted to buy DVDs of one particular anime, but at price tag 30€ * 8 = 240€ - even on payroll - I can hardly afford it. And two years later there were no complete series available and several e-tailers had listes several (not all) of the DVDs. At the same frigging price of 30€.
I came up with somewhat short of two terabytes to hold a typical feature film, with one soundtrack at 48-96kHz with six channels.
They are definitely off. But that holds true conceptually. I have seen somewhere comparison of digital and analogue imagery, and stated "resolution" of analogue film was going thru the roof. It is not unlimited - light sensitive coating has grains, dirt and other similar defects. Some where saying that digital 16MP (~5000x3000) would indistinguishable from analogue film. Yet photos made on film look to me more realistically, while digital photos still suffer from smoothed texturing.
I think the same goes for HD content. 1920x1020 is definitely progress, but as many have said, it didn't add much to movies: it is just our imagination has to do little bit less work.
This is precisely why I hate the game console's infamous notion of "boss fights": most of the time you die fast and for no apparent reason. Some stupid game might require you to redo whole level if you die there, since the console' games has only rudimentary notion of "same game".
For the reason, I avoid sequel games coming from consoles: they often flush on your all their new and improved (as seen by old timers) coolness, and if you haven't played previous versions of the game it does only frustrate you with obscure quests and weird feats.
And I hate platformers - in particular New Super Mario DS. It boring and sucks. There are some places w/o any clues how to pass them. All in all, wasted money and -worst- wasted weeks in one place on map 2-2 I haven't managed to pass. "Mario Sucks" (c) me.
Same's thing here. [ Well, "was" - until I lost my iBook:-((( ]
Honestly, I was afraid of Macs and the "hardware lock". But seeing how Intel/AMD force everybody to upgrade completely every two years - the issue became moot.
Another barrier for me was keyboard navigation. As Linux addict, being able configure to everything to my needs became a requirement. With Windows it is plain impossible to configure all on shortcuts - for some unknown reason Windows (or Explorer.exe) often like to hang for several seconds when shortcut is invoked. I was afraid that Mac OS wouldn't be as convenient as Linux can be or it would expose some sort of problems Windows always does. But already after two weeks, I have noticed that GUI of Mac OS is made very simply yet provide all functions to you in easily accessible manner. I LOVED single button mouse. Really. I HATE right-click pop-up menus Windows GUI is plagued with. [ In Linux the question doesn't exists since I have everything on keyboard shortcuts;-) ]
Overall, for me - a decade long PC user - Mac OS was a "breath of fresh air". Just like long time ago (after several years of Windows NT 4.0) Linux was a "revelation". I was really surprised that single company - magnitudes smaller than M$ - could have made such great and slick product.
P.S. Kudos to Jobs: as long as you are with Apple, I would be buying Macs.
The only useful you find in RTFA - is the list of Mac OS X software. Rest - is mundane routine.
IOW, for me the article is pointless. I'd rated highly an article on topic "100 and one annoyances M$ pushed last minute into Vista - and how to disable them." Most of us would end up using Vista anyway and saying that Mac (or Linux) is better is plain stupid. As if we - IT-drones - had any choice...
At home I can use whatever I like - Windows for games, rest under Linux - but in office all of us are confined to the Redmond's crap.
Slashdot Mirror
F*ck you. Who is responsible for state of gaming PC market??? Serious games??? Give me a break, moron.
Games must be ... games, not some twisted brain fuck. And you can go to hell with all the elitist' "seriousness" crap for "hard core gamers" of yours.
I want to have something just to forget about all the "dog food" I have to eat every day 8 to 5. No, I do not need your "serious" sh*t - I need games I can take half hour for a ride just forget the office' stench.
Banana Blitz - is cool. Nintendo's WiiPlay & WiiSports - best what happened in gaming in last five years.
I use review quite simply: I'm looking for reviews of games I know and like - and choose people/sites who have rated games I like highly. And then check what else they have rated highly. That way I have found PC's "Rise of Nation", "Heroes of Annihilated Empires" and "City Life World Edition" - IMHO great games I enjoy and play, but most of high profile review sites have given them crappy/misplaced ratings.
E.g. http://wii.ign.com/ fits me perfectly. But on other side http://ds.ign.com/ - is U-turn in the respect: they gave lots of near-perferct marks to IMHO shit games (e.g. Mario, Partners in time) and underrated lots of games I have liked (e.g. Lost Magic). Reviews on ds.ign.com marked as "UK" are pretty O.K. and mostly fit me.
This is not about law. This is about how executive branch does things internally. IOW, in democracy you shouldn't be forced to buy M$Word/et just to check what/how your government does with tax payers dollars .
This is internal regulation on how bureaucracy does things - not any kind of law. For added transparency, U.S. government has policy to use existing standards. There is a standard - ODF - and during policy review they have to state why they use/do not use (underline matching) existing international standard for their internal paper work. It doesn't prescribe implementation must be open/free/open source - only resulting documents.
P.S. Reality actually looks really bleak: people are flocking to SO/OO.o solely because of its price. Higher ranks of government never really experience lack of fundings. But lower branches - like municipalities/counties - never really have chance to pile up money to buy Windows licenses and/or M$Office boxes. Nor do they have now money to upgrade themselves to Vista/Office2k7.
When I see that happen than I would believe it. But basically it is same case as with kernel: ground of conflict of different vendors. Balance of proper support of standards and compatibility with existing HTML base is tricky thing.
At moment two open source toolkits exist - kHTML & Mozilla Gecko - and they are both (L)GPLd. Again supporting my original (great grand parent) post: for the situations (L)GPL is better.
Tremor is for "low-end" hardware - DSPs & FPGAs. libvorbis itself is used by many embedded systems. There, vorbis isn't considered software - it is part of firmware and thus part of hardware. You speak anathema. No way I would believe that elitist "core" of *BSD have given up on their sole support for elitism: cvs commit rights.People who need such protection all encrypt whole file system and do not bother with only password/key storage. Linux/UNIX does that for all time I know (Crypto Loop patches is probably oldest patch set for Linux). Windows/Vista I heard can this now. MacOS X allows only to encrypt user home directory what is sufficient in most situations - since keys belonging to user are always saved in user's home directory.
That protection was needed by Windows XP and earlier since it didn't supported FS encryption. And even then people were selling special solutions with transparent hard drive encryption: BIOS asks for password and gives it to the hard drive and Windows goes on booting as usual.
That was different situation. Let look at it from other angle: who gained more from who? kHTML people proved the important point: HTML/DOM/CSS/JavaScript are no rocket science and can be implemented from ground up with some effort applied. What gained Apple? It has probably saved couple of years of works for several engineers. What gained KDE? It had become known in MacOS (and Wintel PC) world as providers of good quality software. End result, is that KDE gained more from Apple, than Apple gained from KDE.
Second point is that it was precisely problem of differently licensed code: Safari vs. Konqueror. Linux made some sacrifices on manageability to allow big vendors to work more efficiently on particular bits of software. (e.g. some archs/subarchs are supported and managed solely by vendors and often are out of line of general kernel rules (s390 supported (and used) solely by IBM).) kHTML people didn't wanted to allow Safari people commit their changes directly - nor didn't wanted to compromise and give them some sandbox to post/test their changes with Konqueror more effectively. But thanks to all the bad publicity, Apple did precisely that for KDE people. Story was covered many times on Slashdot.
Yare yare. You guy completely miss the point. Go back to RTFA and check again: number of people who have committed patches and number of patches. THOUSANDS. PER MONTH. from HUNDREDS of contributors.
The kernel is conflict ground: it has to support many different architectures and many different workloads. Everybody wants now something from Linux. It is totally different from protocol/file format implementation: it could be done once properly and it would work O.K. for next decade. Check number of patches for telnet or ftp. You would find months where no single change was made: all users are happy and that's perfectly fine to not to touch well working system.
And Xiph.org case stands out completely (and not that anybody needed RMS' blessing to do their work). Vorbis is intended to be implemented in hardware: attaching any kind of license is hurdle. And BSD 3-clause one is well established standard for "no license code", or more precisely "no restrictions on code" while protecting original authors and their copyrights. It is BSD licensed not for software case - but for hardware.
And how many vendors can commit??? End of the non-story.
It is just confirmation of old statement that GPL(v2) provides better (at moment best) ground for cooperation between vendors.
Many companies are willing to control what OS does with their software and hardware - and Linux gives them that chance on cheap. But even more so, GPL allows Linux to "merge" back possible code base "forks". That's next to impossible with BSD licensed code most tend to keep closed.
Let's just hope Linux would be able to go on surviving the "snowball" effect of the merges.
Mod me down, but UAC is another excuse M$ came up with to be able to say "Users are lame: we have warned them but they still clicked confirm."
No security system works that way. That's why impersonation was introduced into OSs (NT included) long time ago. Accounts are setup for particular tasks with limited set of privileges. Depending on the work user does, he log-ins under different account. This is not perfect, but best what people came up with.
And that works for Unix and MacOSX - and nobody's complaining. But M$... It seems to me priority of M$ is not to make system people can use and feel safe (if they do nothing extraordinary), but to create a better platform fitting to ActiveX. UAC serves no other purpose and achieves nothing else.
M$ did take user's complain literally: before in Win9x/NT times ActiveX might have worked in background w/o user knowing that something was brewing up. Now users are notified with nice UAC dialogs that something is happening - and what is happening identified with 32 digit GUID... Very user friendly, I'd say.
Off-topic. I have whole department sitting one floor below who would call you "luck bastard." Hint: they work with Java tools all the day.
Windows programming might be pleasant - if requirement are set well and fit into general M$Windows concepts. I had experience were people tried to best themselves with every new release and Windows was - to put it politely - "inadequate". e.g. for how long standard functions exist to open jpeg image in Windows? or png? or simple grids? or pdf? or ogg? You have to code it all by yourself. For one application - it is still O.K. For two, three - somewhat O.K. But for more it become PITA. Windows program are like snowballs of libraries: covering all what Windows didn't supported since Win9x era. Under Linux at least you do not have snowball effect and all trivial functions are in one way or another can be found in system. Though you still get all the pleasantries of multiple versions of different APIs.
I can only hope that's funny.
This is [censored] reality. Nobody program for Windows because he likes to program for Windows: people do that mainly for money. "Work" they say.
Whatever you appear to like in competing implementations is irrelevant: M$ and corporate decision makers leaves you no choice.
And there are really only two choices: (1) you go insane and start loving whatever management tells you to love or (2) you search for another job. Since the guy is with Intel, he's likely to have good payroll and option (2) doesn't ring any bells.
[ I hope you have noticed that "I love POSIX" post is from year 2003 - and "I love Windows" from 2006. But honestly it all looks more like joke. ]
I'd say from personal experience, that threading in Windows is total mess. POSIX threads might look limiting - but on other side you need to resort to threads in *nix ... well you do not have to resort to threads all. It is your own programmer's choosing: to use threads or to use state machines and async I/O. Under Windows bugs plagued/plague/will plague async I/O and programmers have no choice other then to use threads for sockets and file I/O. So under Windows you use threads for everything (except GUI which is restricted to "main thread"), while in *nix it is norm to see threads only in applications which want to take advantage of multi-processor systems for heavy computational tasks: math, code cracking, video encoding, etc. Heavy I/O tasks in *nix are all single threaded: Apache, Squid, MySQL, PostgreSQL, postfix/sendmail/exim, etc. (Though most now support optional multi-threading too - for really busy servers.)
I had experience only on "stress testing" side.
I was helping my friend to test piece of monstrous hardware/software (with something like 128 CPU cores). Linux was very very bad on the system - both as guest and as host. (IIRC, configuration was 64 VMs 2x systems.) Windows was piece of cake to install - just to discover that beside easy installation the cluster wasn't being able to perform a single task decently. Some tests which took several hours under Linux went to days under Windows.
Worst part was that overall performance (the number as measured by my friend) we really really terrible: on average Linux performed about two times slower compared to theoretical limit (== performance of standalone dual core box multiplied by 128) and Windows performed about four times slower. (It seemed Windows implementation of software required more memory and thus required heavier compared to Linux swapping. Thus drop of performance.) (*)
That wasn't any kind of scientific test - the question was "is it possible at all?". Yes, it is. Is it usable for anything? Probably. In such systems, everything - I/O, RAID, RAM - becomes bottleneck. IOW, choose your tasks wisely.
(*) But again, if hardware management costs (NOT hardware costs) are prime factor, then installing two/four such systems might be an answer. It is still two/four blade racks compared to N racks of 1/2Us+ required for real hosts (with all extra infrastructure required).
Get back to us when you have really managed 100s of VMs.
Actual state of management software is ... poor. On other side, the people who have developed their own management for cheap (e.g. blade) hosts farms - feel least urge to switch to VMs from real hosts. For well managed environment with redundant hardware it is really waste to burn CPU cycles of emulation. (*)
VMs solve no particular problem, but just propagate problem of poor OS management to another level - hardware/emulated hardware.
Needless to add, people did the same under Linux for ages with User-Mode-Linux and (what now is called) Xen. But again, the solutions to be manageable heavily rely on the fact that guest and host systems are the very same Linux (with little differences on kernel side).
In the end, when box is plain hardware you can always pull the plug. Try to emulate that with compromised/erroneous VM which started hogging all system resources from other VMs - and management interface too.
(*) Okay, I know the post is pointless, since CPU cycles are now the cheapest resource. But yet, even to my surprise, there are people who care about how fit their systems are and do not tolerate another layer which in hardware/software solves OSs problems.
On other news, I have just assembled myself VIA'a Mini-ITX system for whooping 325€ and installed Linux on it.
Let's compare. Real mini PC + Linux at price of 325€: small, noiseless so it can be put on book shelf and be forgotten about.
Now VMWare/Windows virtualization: VMWare Workstation/Player $190/$0 + M$Windows XP Home/XP Pro/Vista $100/$200/$250. (*) The modern full featured offering (VMWare Wrkst + Vista) would set you off for $190+$250=$430.
Can anybody explain me advantages of virtualization? You get indecent performance for heavy bill. So what the deal breaker???
(*) Linux option is removed since VMware constantly breaks Linux guest support. And vmware-tools are broken too.
M$ likes to create confusion in market place. Similar story was with their recent "C++" which turned out to be "C++/CLI".
And Mono folks are obviously already deep inside of M$ [censored] and of course are confused as much as anybody else who deals with M$ on regular basis.
That's why process in the place: so people can submit complains. And process procedures are pretty strict so that (i) single company does have problem torpedoing standard (though M$ has resources to hire cronies) and (ii) complains are taken on technical merits and often deferred to next minor revision of standard. M$ was most welcome to complain/pile up issues - it would have just made ODF immune to future such complains. But M$ played that card incorrectly, because they have actually withdrew themselves from OASIS more or less completely: for good play they had to have pile submitted but rejected. In that case, they would have had valid point: "we tried to get features we need in ODF but OASIS/ISO/etc had rejected them."
You seem to try to draw poor analogy. First nobody in EOOXML case were piling up complains against M$ to sink their proposal. M$ had chose the time all by itself and noway the complains to EOOXML wouldn't have looked like piled up - since they were all gathered in matter of days/weeks with literally no time for anybody else to comment. That's stinking 6000 pages - folks wake up - and for technical documentation that's just deadly mark "irrelevant" (If something took that much to explain, it most likely explained poorly and inconsistently. Personal experience.)
Second. No "if"s please. ODF is standard. EOOXML is proposal. If somebody's late to market - s/he has to listen to what others say and check what others are using. M$ has to correlate properly with ODF with it was standardized first. And also, you would notice that most of the complains to EOOXML are not "overlaps with ODF", but (1) inconsistencies in the proposal and (2) contradictions/incompatibilities with other standards.
Do not tell me that f*ck up leap year calculation is "required". Or that EOOXML's inconsistency on measure units also is "shall have feature". That's just shows level of irresponsibility of M$ what further damages value of (and whole point of) standardized file format.
And not that customers demand the ODF support.
It is just first time industry has standard for documents and IBM *can* support it fully, since standard is there and open.
Even if only handful of customers would use it - it is still improvement for consumers. Especially since Lotus never boasted good interoperability with anything else in industry (at least that was my experience and (disclaimer?) my friends working at IBM). Frankly, provided there would be no problems on OO.o/KOffice side, I think customers would love the feature.
P.S. Though, honestly, I have expected IBM to brag about ODF support in your enterprise documentation management stack.
Seems like M$ have hired better PR people who can say that with straight face.
Even skin deep analysis identifies the RTFA as "personal attack" (person == IBM) and thus dismisses it as "FUD".
Personal attacks are just confirmation M$ this time has no technical arguments against ODF. All they have left is to resort to underhanded tactics like that.
Check EOOXML objections and look for "Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade".
ISO has policy of one standard for one purpose. ISO works like a platform and specifically prohibits duplications or overlaps, since that would result in incompatibility of standard-compliant components with each other, thus raising "technical barrier to trade".
The whole point of having a standard is to create or level market - for sake of consumers, NOT vendors.
Bullshit. First: ODF is format and M$O2007 is (unreleased) product. Feel the difference.
Second. Guess why StarOffice file format (SXW, tried and proven in real product) spent that much time in OASIS/ISO until finally reaching stamp of approval. You seems to have missed that completely. The main difference between SXW and ODF is support for extensions: SXW is vendor specific XML schema, while ODF does support all kind of extensions on all levels - to be truly vendor neutral and allow proprietary extensions.
M$ intentionally kept silence during ODF development to claim now that ODF can't support all what they need from it. The whole argument that they were silent during ODF since they didn't wanted to intervene with its progress is totally BOGUS. Standardization process isn't place for political games "take and give" - it is place for finding common ground. M$ didn't wanted finding common with rest of industry - and now they try to turn tables around and paint IBM (who raised valid technical point) as bad guys.
Pile of B.S. Especially in anime/manga context. Anime/manga are precisely so perversive that most of projects are made on cheap that they are paid completely off advertisement. One episode of low profile anime (as I have heard) costs to produce $2500-3500. And that's precisely price of TV advertisement for 15/20 minute block. Show might get sponsors - but not all artists are so lucky. If it gets popular - it would of course attract more money, since prices on ad time will soar. With manga it is even simpler: manga production could be paid completely out of artist's own pocket. And that's what happens most of the time. And the market for amateur's manga - doujin - is good as ever.
Also, as sidenote, you have to remember that anime/manga are precisely blooming, because of "piracy" - in sense western legal right. While Disney's "Micky Mouse" (tm)(r)(c) remained unchanged for ~75(?) years now, thanks to free exchange of ideas in Asia (Japan in particular) drown art had made mile steps in years of computers and internet. You can make a parody manga for some high profile expensive anime - and try to guess it - you will NOT be sued to death by studio for selling it. Try to make a parody on Micky Mouse, put it on net and start counting before Disney Inc. lawyers will send you cease & desist letter. You will not need count for too long. Feel the difference.
As anime fan, I can only say that you "least likely to buy it" remark isn't true. The real problem is that people in industry lost their touch with audience. And US' (as well as UE's) anime fandoms are such examples. First - quality of translation. Most of official dubbings are total crap. They kill redundantly characters turning funny and entertaining anime into boring freak show. Fansubs are several magnitudes better. Second. In Japan you can buy DVD for less than $10 - probably not new, but yet official DVD. In US you can buy for $15-20. And finally my beloved EU - 25-30€. Decent anime series runs for say 26 episodes. 4-5 eps on disk - that makes on average 8 DVD. In Japan you can buy them often when series are still running - even if it's new it is something like $20 per month. In USA/EU, DVDs are released in *bulk* - and if you want to get all of them you need to buy them all at one time, because later chances finding particular DVD of particular series are diminishing. 8 DVDs at price of $20 is $160. How many kids can afford that?? Well, prices go down - and you can in US snatch such bulk DVD series for about $100 what's more affordable. Here in EU prices have habit to remain high for *very* long time. I wanted to buy DVDs of one particular anime, but at price tag 30€ * 8 = 240€ - even on payroll - I can hardly afford it. And two years later there were no complete series available and several e-tailers had listes several (not all) of the DVDs. At the same frigging price of 30€.They are definitely off. But that holds true conceptually. I have seen somewhere comparison of digital and analogue imagery, and stated "resolution" of analogue film was going thru the roof. It is not unlimited - light sensitive coating has grains, dirt and other similar defects. Some where saying that digital 16MP (~5000x3000) would indistinguishable from analogue film. Yet photos made on film look to me more realistically, while digital photos still suffer from smoothed texturing.
I think the same goes for HD content. 1920x1020 is definitely progress, but as many have said, it didn't add much to movies: it is just our imagination has to do little bit less work.
This is precisely why I hate the game console's infamous notion of "boss fights": most of the time you die fast and for no apparent reason. Some stupid game might require you to redo whole level if you die there, since the console' games has only rudimentary notion of "same game".
For the reason, I avoid sequel games coming from consoles: they often flush on your all their new and improved (as seen by old timers) coolness, and if you haven't played previous versions of the game it does only frustrate you with obscure quests and weird feats.
And I hate platformers - in particular New Super Mario DS. It boring and sucks. There are some places w/o any clues how to pass them. All in all, wasted money and -worst- wasted weeks in one place on map 2-2 I haven't managed to pass. "Mario Sucks" (c) me.
$subject. It doesn't exits. It is just another "product" of "democracy".
Every society has taboo topics - and existence of "free speech" didn't changed that.
Same's thing here. [ Well, "was" - until I lost my iBook :-((( ]
Honestly, I was afraid of Macs and the "hardware lock". But seeing how Intel/AMD force everybody to upgrade completely every two years - the issue became moot.
Another barrier for me was keyboard navigation. As Linux addict, being able configure to everything to my needs became a requirement. With Windows it is plain impossible to configure all on shortcuts - for some unknown reason Windows (or Explorer.exe) often like to hang for several seconds when shortcut is invoked. I was afraid that Mac OS wouldn't be as convenient as Linux can be or it would expose some sort of problems Windows always does. But already after two weeks, I have noticed that GUI of Mac OS is made very simply yet provide all functions to you in easily accessible manner. I LOVED single button mouse. Really. I HATE right-click pop-up menus Windows GUI is plagued with. [ In Linux the question doesn't exists since I have everything on keyboard shortcuts ;-) ]
Overall, for me - a decade long PC user - Mac OS was a "breath of fresh air". Just like long time ago (after several years of Windows NT 4.0) Linux was a "revelation". I was really surprised that single company - magnitudes smaller than M$ - could have made such great and slick product.
P.S. Kudos to Jobs: as long as you are with Apple, I would be buying Macs.
The only useful you find in RTFA - is the list of Mac OS X software. Rest - is mundane routine.
IOW, for me the article is pointless. I'd rated highly an article on topic "100 and one annoyances M$ pushed last minute into Vista - and how to disable them." Most of us would end up using Vista anyway and saying that Mac (or Linux) is better is plain stupid. As if we - IT-drones - had any choice...
At home I can use whatever I like - Windows for games, rest under Linux - but in office all of us are confined to the Redmond's crap.