Why does everyone in the "blind faith for open source" camp always assume it will be OO and OO alone that will replace Microsoft Office? Gnumeric is much, much closer to being a full-featured replacement for Excel, for example.
Not only is OOo ready to replace Microsoft Office, it's already a better program. Sure, die-hard Microsoft Office users won't touch it because, gosh, they might have to learn something new, but those people can't be helped anywah.
And this is the attitude of a small, vocal few that insures that open-source software will never be taken very seriously by a large portion of the user community.
By and large people would love to switch to OO. It's free. People in this country shit themselves over stuff that's free, they love it that much. Personally I really want to like OO, first because it's open source and second because it's free.
The problem is that anyone who has done much with Office can sit down with OO and determine in just a few short minutes that they are getting something inferior. Okay, maybe that's not a problem for a lot of people, if they don't miss the features they are losing and they want to save a little money.
So great, they've built a program that appeals to casual users. Some of us need to do stuff, thanks.
Open Office works just fine for 99% of the tasks that 100% of M$ Office users perform.
If you had said "most of the tasks" I wouldn't object, but 99% is far too generous. I'm not an "Office power user" by any stretch of the imagination, but I've missed features every time I used OO. It's also slow and clunky-looking (not problems that will necessarily alienate habitual Linux users, I admit).
Most features in MS Office are never really used by by the average user.
That's an interesting point. I'm pretty sure I read an article by a Microsoft software engineer on this point (linked to by slashdot), and he would agree with you. He would also add that the problem, and the reason why a program needs to be incredibly feature-rich, is that not everyone uses exactly the same fraction of features offered by the software.
So you can build separate Office suites for all those people, or just build one office suite with a lot of features that accomodates them all. The first option is a lot less practical.
"No, it's impossible to build a replacement for Microsoft Office. Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours went into this software?"
But there you go, Open Office is doing pretty well.
Talk about "false logic." Open Office is doing pretty well because it has had a huge amount of time and money put into it over the years. By the way, it existed for many years as closed source before it became open source, even before Sun bought it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
And it's not anywhere near being ready to replace Microsoft Office, but I guess they've only had 10 years...
I've seen it mentioned here that the Intel stuff has SSE3 and Hyperthreading, and AMD has Hypertransport and pretty good I/O in general. What nobody seems to have mentioned is that Intel was planning on leaving out support for the "page table NXE bit" which enables some nifty security features, on OpenBSD anyhow:
http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html
Does anyone know if or when Intel will remedy this? I seem to remember reading that it wasn't a permanent problem, and eventually they would add the feature or something.
Yes, I'm aware of that clause... however it used to mean "we can withdraw support from a product at any time and you can't do anything about it".
No, it didn't. It's legal meaning has always been that the contract can be ended at any time, and you could lose your "right to use" for the software. It's not a well tested clause, of course...
that is the foundation of contract law: two parties reaching an agreement
Well, yes, and that's one reason why EULAs are such a joke anyhow.
It will be interesting once a case actually reaches the courts where many consumers are jacked by the untimely death of a company. Something of the magnatude of Intuit going under suddenly leaving all those with Quicken locked out of their financial data. Somehow I don't see the courts buying "we can just up and lock people out" even if the EULA says they can.
Yes, it will be interesting. But what recourse do you have against a dead company in any case? In that regard I agree with those who are skeptical about Steam. The difference is that I'm willing to take the risk. I don't deny that it's a risk.
Things like right of first sale [wikipedia.org] are pretty much gone. How can you sell your game?
I'm not too worried about this. I've found that selling games is pretty much a waste of time anyway. You just don't get much for them compared to what you paid. Of course, you shouldn't get much for them, since there is no way for the buyer to know whether or not you're selling them a banned CD key. That has been a problem for a while now.
I don't view this situation as a violation of my "rights." I suppose I would if I went into it with a different set of expectations. As this stage I'm cautiously optimistic because I view the benefit of Valve's ability to lock out cheaters as outweighing the risk that they'll lock me out, accidentally or out of malice. Time will tell.
Privacy is compromised as well...Even when you run the game in single player mode, Valve knows where and when it's happening, and for how long.
I'll wait until the inevitable reports on Steam's function come back from people using packet sniffers before I panic too much about that. Maybe there's some stuff on that out there right now...
Steam might just end up being my "half-life 2 launcher." I can live with that. I definitely view the whole thing as sort of an experiment at this point.
As far as a peition goes, I doubt Valve will change their business practices based on such a thing. As for me, I'm voting with my wallet.
I realized after I wrote that that it was a little silly - their forums are as close to a petition as they need. They seem to be pretty good about letting dissenting views be aired, from what I can tell.
But let's say you do something like run a No-CD fix on one of them. Guess what happens? Your Steam account gets disabled and you lose access to ALL of them.
I haven't been able to get through to any of the Steam forum postings so to me, this is still just innuendo to some degree.
To clarify: I don't agree with the nocd-crack banning policy. But I don't think it will be a big issue with Steam, since the "natural" way to get Steam stuff is to buy it online. It seems to me that the second most desireable way to package a Steam game would be to make a CD with a small installer and the Steam cache files. Making it the way Vivendi did, with a requirement to have the CD in the drive, was completely illogical.
VU and Valve brought this controversy on themselves, in that sense: if it weren't for that stupid requirement, they would still have a perfectly valid way to determine if a user was authorized to use the game, and they could have legitimately cracked down on those people without mixing in the nocd-crack people, some of whom are probably paying customers. But I still wonder how many of the people banned actually were paying customers, and how many were just people running a cracked game on a machine that happened to have Steam running, or what.
The problem I have is that Valve can pretty much decide arbitrarily who they want to whack. Maybe someone didn't like what you had to say in a forum and you were "accidentally" added to the hit list of license violators. You will have no recourse.
I doubt that will be a problem, honestly. My past experience with competitive gaming suggests that bans for cheating will be much more controversial and error prone. The whole topic is worrying, yes.
I think Valve has made a big mistake trying to shift this much power to themselves. But that's me. I, for one, will not continue to be their customer.
I'm not happy about it, but I'll probably keep buying their stuff. I'm suspending judgement until it's clear how they handle the reaction to this latest controversy. I think Steam is a great idea in general. My big hope is that this incident teaches Valve some lessons. It's a pretty big test, right up there with the code theft, and when they probably all wanted to take a vacation...
Does anyone have any online petitions going over this?
If somebody has a pirated version of the game, then they don't even have a Steam account to ban in the first place, because the cracked version bypasses Steam!
You're assuming that there aren't tens of thousands of people stupid enough to have installed and registered Steam at some point in the last two years, and then to have installed a cracked copy of Half Life 2. There's no reason to think that a running copy of Steam couldn't detect an illegitimate copy of Half Life 2 running on the same machine.
A sticker on the box of HL2 that says "you can play this game until: (we go out of business|decide you can't|want to force an upgraded version on you)" would make that a bit more clear.
"You can use this software until we say you can't" is actually a standard term in software EULAs, it's quite explicit. It is usually expressed along the lines of "either party may terminate this contract at any time."
The trouble with product activation is that it's implemented in such a painless and convenient way (in the majority of cases, where it works properly) that people fail to see this process for what it actually is: repeatedly asking permission from the manufacturer to use the product you purchased, after you purchased it.
"If only the users were as enlightened as I am, they'd rail against this horrible system!" That's a remarkably condescending position to take.
It also isn't supported by facts. Of course people realize they are "repeatedly asking permission" to use the software: one of the main features of the Steam system is that you can "ask permission" to use the games you've bought with Steam on any computer where Steam is installed. The process all the way from download to login is very explicit, and everyone understands that "logging in" is more or less the same as "asking permission."
The most important issue about activation is not whether it's convenient or inconvient, but the way it fundamentally changes the relationship between the customer and a company selling proprietary software.
That's true, in a way. But what you apparently don't understand about steam is that the convenience and the change in relationship are the draw, they are what makes the system more attractive to a lot of users.
Yes, with Steam you're "only renting" software. Two points about that. First, Steam only actualizes the reality which already exists in standard EULA boilerplate, that either party can break the "contract" between the parties at any time. It's absurd, but it's fairly well established absurdity which Steam is illustrating. But that's not really my point.
Second, "renting software" can be really fucking cool, and Steam illustrates that as well. The idea that any game you've paid for can be played on any machine where steam is installed is nice. The fact that they offer this flexibility to people, along with the high-speed service to grab the stuff (instead of farming everything out to oddball mirror servers, like every major game publisher feels justified in doing with all their downloads) could become a pretty popular distribution model. People aren't necessarily choosing this product out of ignorance of the consequences: it has some nice, convenient features.
The problem is that they also sold a CD. They (and I couldn't say if "they" is Valve, or VU Games, or what) confused the issue. People feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are getting a perpetually useful product when they buy that CD, which doesn't fit very well with Steam, and the notion that a game can be turned on and off depending on who is logged onto Steam.
Add into that the utterly worthless and annoying requirement for having the CD in the drive even though the game works fine running from the drive and copying the CD doesn't really get a pirate anything with the authetication system that Steam uses and you've got a situation that is designed to cause trouble. Of course single-player users are going to crack the game to turn off the stupid CD verification. Of course a central authentication authority is going to shut down hacked games, and view users who use those hacks as their adversary. The superstupid thing was putting the CD requirement in there in the first place.
I like halflife, but I kinda hope this doesn't catch on, or if it does become widespread, it gets shot down legally.
Since everyone who has been shut down by this was probably involved in violating the software's EULA, it's pretty hard to imagine what sort of basis they would have for suing Valve. Perhaps make a case based on the absurdity of click-through EULAs in general, I wonder if anyone has ever tried that.
I feel I haven't paid for jack, and that Valve controls when I can play the game which I shelled out this money for.
I had no idea how evil Steam was before I bought HL2, but you had better believe it will be the last game I buy or play that uses it or a similar activation scheme.
So, I suppose you'll be avoiding every multiplayer game in the world as well, since they almost all use authenticating master servers? This is the status quo now, Steam isn't the first.
The sad thing is I'm willing to bet that other software manufacturers will see how much money Valve is raking in because of it and adopt a similar scheme, or maybe even license Steam itself.
Valve are making money because hl2 is a great game. They might be making more money because of their copy protection, but I suspect they might make less.
For me, the solution is simple. They are offering an ephemeral product, not a tangible one.They are offering an ephemeral product, not a tangible one. Charge less. Around $10, I'd buy it, and not give a crap about any de-activation technology Valve wants to use. For ten bucks, it's no big deal. But for fifty bucks, I expect to be able to play the damn thing whenever and wherever I want, whether Valve still operates Steam or not, and whether I have a network connection, or not.
In order for this to be a consistent position, you'd have to only pay for software in source code form, since any binary you buy is going to be targeted to a specific (and "ephemeral") processor and operating system.
I think you've got the right idea, though. If a person doesn't like what they're getting for their money, they shouldn't buy the thing. I suppose there is a counterargument to be made against stuff like Windows XP's activation, since it's a crucial program and they have monopoly on the desktop OS. No such argument can be made for first person shooters...
The Linux kernel devs have no interest in a stable module API because they have no interest in backwards compatability. If they see a problem, they go in and fix it. Next kernel release all the open source modules in the kernel tree are using the new fixed api.
That's not really the issue. The problem for driver writers is that the binary interface into the kernel can change between minor versions of the kernel, or just with different sorts of kernel patches of the same kernel version.
I'd actually love to hear an explanation of why Linux doesn't offer a binary interface into the kernel for driver writers (which isn't total bullshit). It really seems as though they're too lazy to do it, or they just hate binary drivers. If it's the latter, criticizing the kernel developers a little isn't out of line.
Also, most of the meat of this deal are based on carbdon ton credits.
The ironic thing here, politically, is that Kyoto carbon credits are a stupid idea in much the same way the newest EPA clean air regulation's methodology for trading credits among cleaner and dirtier coal plants is a stupid idea.
I suppose Kyoto is technically a little less harmful, since it doesn't create the acute problem of allowing a dirty coal plant, which will have a negative health effect on its local population, to continue operation by virtue of trading. But it's based on the same wonky pseudoeconomics of enforced trading of something that isn't really a commodity.
Most RedHat support these days doesn't come from RedHat. It comes from Google, newsgroups, the software author's webpages, and that guy down in IT who really likes to play with neat stuff and sticks his nose into everything.
And in most cases that's a consequence of Redhat stuff not being used for the important stuff that Solaris and other commercial Unixes are used for.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does everyone in the "blind faith for open source" camp always assume it will be OO and OO alone that will replace Microsoft Office? Gnumeric is much, much closer to being a full-featured replacement for Excel, for example.
And this is the attitude of a small, vocal few that insures that open-source software will never be taken very seriously by a large portion of the user community.
By and large people would love to switch to OO. It's free. People in this country shit themselves over stuff that's free, they love it that much. Personally I really want to like OO, first because it's open source and second because it's free.
The problem is that anyone who has done much with Office can sit down with OO and determine in just a few short minutes that they are getting something inferior. Okay, maybe that's not a problem for a lot of people, if they don't miss the features they are losing and they want to save a little money.
So great, they've built a program that appeals to casual users. Some of us need to do stuff, thanks.
If you had said "most of the tasks" I wouldn't object, but 99% is far too generous. I'm not an "Office power user" by any stretch of the imagination, but I've missed features every time I used OO. It's also slow and clunky-looking (not problems that will necessarily alienate habitual Linux users, I admit).
That's an interesting point. I'm pretty sure I read an article by a Microsoft software engineer on this point (linked to by slashdot), and he would agree with you. He would also add that the problem, and the reason why a program needs to be incredibly feature-rich, is that not everyone uses exactly the same fraction of features offered by the software.
So you can build separate Office suites for all those people, or just build one office suite with a lot of features that accomodates them all. The first option is a lot less practical.
Talk about "false logic." Open Office is doing pretty well because it has had a huge amount of time and money put into it over the years. By the way, it existed for many years as closed source before it became open source, even before Sun bought it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
And it's not anywhere near being ready to replace Microsoft Office, but I guess they've only had 10 years...
Ahem... when you say "bestiality" to most people, "gametes" aren't exactly what spring to mind.
I've seen it mentioned here that the Intel stuff has SSE3 and Hyperthreading, and AMD has Hypertransport and pretty good I/O in general. What nobody seems to have mentioned is that Intel was planning on leaving out support for the "page table NXE bit" which enables some nifty security features, on OpenBSD anyhow:
http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html
Does anyone know if or when Intel will remedy this? I seem to remember reading that it wasn't a permanent problem, and eventually they would add the feature or something.
No, it didn't. It's legal meaning has always been that the contract can be ended at any time, and you could lose your "right to use" for the software. It's not a well tested clause, of course...
Well, yes, and that's one reason why EULAs are such a joke anyhow.
Yes, it will be interesting. But what recourse do you have against a dead company in any case? In that regard I agree with those who are skeptical about Steam. The difference is that I'm willing to take the risk. I don't deny that it's a risk.
I'm not too worried about this. I've found that selling games is pretty much a waste of time anyway. You just don't get much for them compared to what you paid. Of course, you shouldn't get much for them, since there is no way for the buyer to know whether or not you're selling them a banned CD key. That has been a problem for a while now.
I don't view this situation as a violation of my "rights." I suppose I would if I went into it with a different set of expectations. As this stage I'm cautiously optimistic because I view the benefit of Valve's ability to lock out cheaters as outweighing the risk that they'll lock me out, accidentally or out of malice. Time will tell.
I'll wait until the inevitable reports on Steam's function come back from people using packet sniffers before I panic too much about that. Maybe there's some stuff on that out there right now...
Steam might just end up being my "half-life 2 launcher." I can live with that. I definitely view the whole thing as sort of an experiment at this point.
I realized after I wrote that that it was a little silly - their forums are as close to a petition as they need. They seem to be pretty good about letting dissenting views be aired, from what I can tell.
I haven't been able to get through to any of the Steam forum postings so to me, this is still just innuendo to some degree.
To clarify: I don't agree with the nocd-crack banning policy. But I don't think it will be a big issue with Steam, since the "natural" way to get Steam stuff is to buy it online. It seems to me that the second most desireable way to package a Steam game would be to make a CD with a small installer and the Steam cache files. Making it the way Vivendi did, with a requirement to have the CD in the drive, was completely illogical.
VU and Valve brought this controversy on themselves, in that sense: if it weren't for that stupid requirement, they would still have a perfectly valid way to determine if a user was authorized to use the game, and they could have legitimately cracked down on those people without mixing in the nocd-crack people, some of whom are probably paying customers. But I still wonder how many of the people banned actually were paying customers, and how many were just people running a cracked game on a machine that happened to have Steam running, or what.
I doubt that will be a problem, honestly. My past experience with competitive gaming suggests that bans for cheating will be much more controversial and error prone. The whole topic is worrying, yes.
I'm not happy about it, but I'll probably keep buying their stuff. I'm suspending judgement until it's clear how they handle the reaction to this latest controversy. I think Steam is a great idea in general. My big hope is that this incident teaches Valve some lessons. It's a pretty big test, right up there with the code theft, and when they probably all wanted to take a vacation...
Does anyone have any online petitions going over this?
It's a lease with an option to buy. But only if you have it on layaway. Don't sublet!
You're assuming that there aren't tens of thousands of people stupid enough to have installed and registered Steam at some point in the last two years, and then to have installed a cracked copy of Half Life 2. There's no reason to think that a running copy of Steam couldn't detect an illegitimate copy of Half Life 2 running on the same machine.
"You can use this software until we say you can't" is actually a standard term in software EULAs, it's quite explicit. It is usually expressed along the lines of "either party may terminate this contract at any time."
"If only the users were as enlightened as I am, they'd rail against this horrible system!" That's a remarkably condescending position to take.
It also isn't supported by facts. Of course people realize they are "repeatedly asking permission" to use the software: one of the main features of the Steam system is that you can "ask permission" to use the games you've bought with Steam on any computer where Steam is installed. The process all the way from download to login is very explicit, and everyone understands that "logging in" is more or less the same as "asking permission."
That's true, in a way. But what you apparently don't understand about steam is that the convenience and the change in relationship are the draw, they are what makes the system more attractive to a lot of users.
Yes, with Steam you're "only renting" software. Two points about that. First, Steam only actualizes the reality which already exists in standard EULA boilerplate, that either party can break the "contract" between the parties at any time. It's absurd, but it's fairly well established absurdity which Steam is illustrating. But that's not really my point.
Second, "renting software" can be really fucking cool, and Steam illustrates that as well. The idea that any game you've paid for can be played on any machine where steam is installed is nice. The fact that they offer this flexibility to people, along with the high-speed service to grab the stuff (instead of farming everything out to oddball mirror servers, like every major game publisher feels justified in doing with all their downloads) could become a pretty popular distribution model. People aren't necessarily choosing this product out of ignorance of the consequences: it has some nice, convenient features.
The problem is that they also sold a CD. They (and I couldn't say if "they" is Valve, or VU Games, or what) confused the issue. People feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are getting a perpetually useful product when they buy that CD, which doesn't fit very well with Steam, and the notion that a game can be turned on and off depending on who is logged onto Steam.
Add into that the utterly worthless and annoying requirement for having the CD in the drive even though the game works fine running from the drive and copying the CD doesn't really get a pirate anything with the authetication system that Steam uses and you've got a situation that is designed to cause trouble. Of course single-player users are going to crack the game to turn off the stupid CD verification. Of course a central authentication authority is going to shut down hacked games, and view users who use those hacks as their adversary. The superstupid thing was putting the CD requirement in there in the first place.
Since everyone who has been shut down by this was probably involved in violating the software's EULA, it's pretty hard to imagine what sort of basis they would have for suing Valve. Perhaps make a case based on the absurdity of click-through EULAs in general, I wonder if anyone has ever tried that.
Particularly since there is a working crack for it, I'm sure.
So, I suppose you'll be avoiding every multiplayer game in the world as well, since they almost all use authenticating master servers? This is the status quo now, Steam isn't the first.
Valve are making money because hl2 is a great game. They might be making more money because of their copy protection, but I suspect they might make less.
In order for this to be a consistent position, you'd have to only pay for software in source code form, since any binary you buy is going to be targeted to a specific (and "ephemeral") processor and operating system.
I think you've got the right idea, though. If a person doesn't like what they're getting for their money, they shouldn't buy the thing. I suppose there is a counterargument to be made against stuff like Windows XP's activation, since it's a crucial program and they have monopoly on the desktop OS. No such argument can be made for first person shooters...
Coincidentally, I played all the way through Oni, and I think Bungie owes me 180 billion dollars.
How about enforcing existing labor law?
That's not really the issue. The problem for driver writers is that the binary interface into the kernel can change between minor versions of the kernel, or just with different sorts of kernel patches of the same kernel version.
I'd actually love to hear an explanation of why Linux doesn't offer a binary interface into the kernel for driver writers (which isn't total bullshit). It really seems as though they're too lazy to do it, or they just hate binary drivers. If it's the latter, criticizing the kernel developers a little isn't out of line.
The ironic thing here, politically, is that Kyoto carbon credits are a stupid idea in much the same way the newest EPA clean air regulation's methodology for trading credits among cleaner and dirtier coal plants is a stupid idea.
I suppose Kyoto is technically a little less harmful, since it doesn't create the acute problem of allowing a dirty coal plant, which will have a negative health effect on its local population, to continue operation by virtue of trading. But it's based on the same wonky pseudoeconomics of enforced trading of something that isn't really a commodity.
And in most cases that's a consequence of Redhat stuff not being used for the important stuff that Solaris and other commercial Unixes are used for.
Or learn the tools that come with the system. They aren't inferior, for the most part, but simply different.