Ironically, your mention of MSN (Live) messenger is one of the reasons you're wrong. Beleive it or not, people do actually use those features of Live Messenger that Pidgin et. al simply don't support. I'm not one of those people, but I do occasionally get a message on Pidgin telling me that my client doesn't support *random thing the other person just tried to do* and that I should download the latest Live Messanger.
To the average user, I'd say Windows' configurability is actually a *lot* better than Linux's. My touchpad has way more options exposed in the control panel GUI on Windows than any of the multiple Linux tools for mouse configuration - including manual editing of xorg.conf - that I've seen. Installing things like a TV tuner driver on Windows is a lot more straightforward than on Linux, if it's not in the repos. Linux is certainly more configurable to the serious power user, if for no other reason than because you can change the source and re-compile, but getting a Windows box set up completely is actually easier in my experience (YMMV). One reason I like openSuse is because Yast is almost as powerful as Control Panel + Management Console, and is all in one place.
Nobody seriously suggests that Ubuntu's strength is games, but a lot of people don't even realize it has games. That said, they're not far wrong from the perspective of anything but the most casual gamers. I'm not sure I'd have gone for that as a screenshot, but if you're trying to lure the kind of person who would never play a game that actually casts money to buy, seeing that image might push some toward Linux.
KDE is reasonably close to Windows in terms of interface, but I'd hardly call it a "tiny learning curve" at all. Simple things, like dragging icons areound the taskbar (excuse me, "Kicker") don't work (on KDE4) unless you know where to click to make that work. The menu organization is sometimes good (for finding an app that you don't know what it's called, but know what it does) but it definitely takes longer for me to reach my more common tasks (part of this being because the WinKey doesn't work as I'm used to; I've been told this is fixable but it sure isn't easy). Having all three of Konqueror, Dolphin, and Firefox installed gets a bit weird; Konq makes both a pretty good file manager and web brower, but doesn't behave quite like other applications of either type. Dolphin is miles behind Explorer *or* Konqueror in functionality, but looks better and has a more intuitive interface than Konq... meaning I almost never use it, but regularly get annoyed by Konqueror things like its primitive navigation tree view. Plasma was a cool idea, but I've yet to see it show off its real power in any useful way, and meanwhile the new way of doing desktop icons is another hassle. Kmail/Kontact is a powerful email client, but takes *way* more configuration, especially to get IMAP working nicely (never have gotten it to handle my CS department's Linux-hosted IMAP server *quite* properly, in fact) than Windows Mail or Outlook.
I can't run Linux programs on Windows at all, you say? Shit, I'd better close this bash shell that is ssh'd into my school server, and this other one where I was running./configure && make on source code for a new GTK+ build that I pulled in from the web and unpacked with tar... Seriously, you can run about as much Windows code on Linux as you can vice-versa, and in most cases you don't need to recompile actually (never mind that Windows IDEs, let alone compilers, are available for free anyhow). OK, Windows doesn't come with an X11 server, but this isn't actually hard to remedy.
There have been games on the TI-83 graphing calculator for a long time too, but that doesn't mean you can compare the quality or selection with those on Windows. Linux has some good games (which happen to be among the set of Linux apps also playable on Windows) but it doesn't have many good games compared to Windows (or even Mac), it has very few great games, and even with a supposedly platinum app in Wine, it's a bit of a crapshoot whether it will work correctly all the time. As for what "most people run" I've never yet personally seen a Linux convert that didn't need Wine for at least one program.
Speaking of Linux apps vs. Windows apps, alternatives does not mean equivalents. Pidgin is great, but is *not* equivalent to Live messenger for those who use features besides basic chatting. OpenOffice is great, but it is *not* equivalent to MS Office for those who need to ensure they can open and save a file from anybody correctly, that need to handle macros in their documents, that need to handle Protected (DRMed) documents, that are familiar with the locations, appearance, and functionality of features in any version of MS office (some of us actually really like the ribbon, FYI), want a program that does more than the barest hint of OneNote's functionality, or so forth. For some languages, there are no IDEs that will run on Linux and are as good as Visual Studio. I don't like the DRM bullshit around BluRay movies, but they will play very happily on Windows. Windows Media Center is far easier to set up than MythTV, although I'll grant that for the dedicated user who has a compatible TV tuner, MythTV is pretty sweet. I could go on a lot longer here... there are actually fairly few non-trivial Windows apps that have a Linux app which can completely replace them.
Your disparagement of IE and WoW shows just how out of touch with the real world you are. Leaving aside the people who actually like IE (I use Accelerators occasionally at work, and some people must
My family have cruised for 9 years now, using Winlink the whole time. It's really awesome being able to get and send email out in the middle of a 3-week passage without any land or other vessels even in VHF (line-of-sight) range. It's undeniably slow (spring the cash for the Pactor-3 modem; it helps substantially), with speeds typically in the neighborhood of 1 kbps (can be a couple multiples better or worse depending on distance, propagation conditions, interference from other users, and the quality of your radio/antenna). You're limited to plain text emails, but attachments are supported (GRIB files are compact meteorological reports that can fit decent levels of detail and coverage in 30 KB and are great for purposes of planning a route; we usually pull one or two a day).
It *IS* a HAM radio operation, with the limitations that imposes. There's no particular security or privacy, you're not allowed to discuss business matters, there's no guarantee of service, and you must have a General-class (or higher) HAM radio license (your email is callsign@winlink.org, for example on the boat we use KD7NDG {at} winlink {dot} org). On the other hand, the service is provided free of charge (although the equipment isn't cheap, it's better than a satellite phone except possibly over the very short term). They don't provide true Internet access - you don't get an IP address, you can't browse the web or run SSH over it, and it's dependent upon the base station operator having their computer online and connected to their radio (there are usually a few stations reachable at some time of day or another from anywhere though, so even if one goes offline for a bit there's a chance to connect).
As an alternative to Winlink, there's also a commercial service called Sailmail that uses the same modems and protocols, but operates on the maritime HF bands (rather than the amateur bands). The cost is pretty low, and there's no restriction against commercial use that I know of, but the other limitations (especially lack of privacy) are mostly still there. There are also other restrictions imposed by the (corporate) operators of the base stations. That said, a lot of our cruising friends use it happily enough. http://sailmail.com/
Both Winlink 2000 and Sailmail use a client called Airmail, which is a basic but functional email client (I'd have called it good back in 2001 when there were still mainstream clients without the ability to spell check as you typed, but it hasn't improved as much as might have been expected during that time). One nice feature of Airmail is that, while it is designed to call over the Pactor modem, it also offers a telnet connection mode for when you have an actual Internet connection; even a dial-up link will be much faster than the radio link, and isn't vulnerable to interference.
Microsoft uses the term "milestone" to denote steps along a product's development. They have various names - some actually have the word 'milestone', such as Milestone Quality, Milestone 1 (M1), etc. - but CTPs (Community Tech Previews, essentially early non-public betas), public beta, RC, RTM, and the various post-release maintenance and service packs are all milestones (SPs often have multiple milestones of their own). Unlike "traditional" milestones, the distance (either in time or changes) between milstones varies widely, but conceptually they are just markers for the current stage within a product's development.
WinPhone7 just hit the CTP milestone, meaning that it's now close enough to complete that MS is willing to show it to people outside the company. This is a pretty big deal to the company, though the general public won't see anything new except for hands-on reviews (of which there are plenty). Release (and, if a lot has to be changed at the last minute, RC) are bigger milestones, but the first CTP is always a big step anyhow.
No, he's still wrong. To quote, "... maybe every other source game..."
As in, 50% of Source-engine games (my personal experience is that it's more than 50%, but still not perfect).
Admittedly, that kind of misinterpretation is quite possible given the poor grammar and sentence structure of the OP. CounterStrike (at least, one version of it) is a Source game (to which one does not actually get the source code), which does imply the possibility that he was lumping WoW in with a group of Source games. Additionally, his failure to put a comma before the last item in the list doesn't help, especially since it's only a three-element (and therefore one-comma) list.
Completely incorrect. Wine has had its own implementation of.NET 1.1 for years, and you could install 2.0. These days, I believe 2.0 is supported out of the box, and you can install the newer versions.
For pure C# (or other.NET language) apps, Mono will do better. However, running Wine will let your.NET apps call native Windows functions (as all too many do), which is the main reason for.NET apps failing on Mono in my experience.
My computer seems to have two options for audio: either a driver from WU that works only in stereo (I have 4.1 speakers) or being forced to taskkill audiodg a few times a week. It restarts automatically, but it's annoying, especially because there's no warning that it broke (I suppose if there was, it would auto-restart). Some apps just stop playing sound, but others will actually hang (Skype, Google Talk, I'm looking at you...) and appear to be frozen until it is reset.
XMLHttpRequest, for one. You know, the thing that made AJAX work (invented by MS to provide the real-time nature of Outlook Web Access). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
Depending on how pedantic you want to get, MS had precursors of the dock before Apple or NeXT, although I'm not sure they were the first. The Start menu paradigm has been copied by a number of other GUI environments; it's not the first time there was a globally-accessible go-to menu for running programs, but it introduced the concept that you do *everything* from one menu (and its submenus, if you're still feeling pedantic), from starting a program to changing the desktop background to installing a driver to turning off the computer.
Most of Microsoft's major advances have been business/enterprise targeted. Exchange+Outlook, as a fully-integrated groupware solution, had no serious competition for a long time. The degree and ease of control that Group Policy gives domain controllers is still a major reason that companies choose Windows.
Hell, as much heat as they caught for it, the very concept that an OS always comes with a web browser can be attributed to MS. You don't have to use it, and there's a number of people who don't except to, just once, download another browser... but they can do that. No needing to get an install disk, or mess with command-line FTP, or anything of that nature.
Don't forget that Yast offers multiple different user interfaces, depending on what you're using. QT3, QT4, GTK, and ncurses (handy if you don't have X, if it's not working, or if you're on SSH). It looks and functions almost identically on each, but always feels "native" and doesn't require that you install the libraries for something you're not using.
Your "minimum 1GHz processor" argument is complete bullshit. The N800 had a 400 MHz processor (ARM-based, like iToPhoPad) and could run full Flash 9 just fine (it came with the device). This was three years ago, in the relatively early days of the iPhone, which actually had a more powerful CPU IIRC. Yes, hover was tricky, and yes, it used battery life more quickly, but it *worked* just fine.
There is not, and never was, a legitimate technical reason for lack of Flash on Apple's mobiles. Linux and OS X aren't identical, of course, but but don't try to tell me that Nokia could get Adobe to port Flash to Linux on ARM but Apple couldn't get them to port it to OS X on ARM. Even if that ever was the case, you can be damn sure Adobe would have been willing to do it in the intervening years, seeing Apple's sales numbers (the N800 and N810 were better devices from a nerd's technical perspective, but didn't have the mass-market appeal).
It's not always that bad, but... yeah, the US public school system is generally poor quality. I had a better vocabulary than my third-grade teacher, who could not understand why I wanted normal lined paper (rather than the typical 8" by 5" sheets with a 4" box for a picture at the top, and 5 lines filling the bottom 4 inches) for writing assignments. I'm not sure if she was opposed to the practice of writing itself (and therefore would never write a thousand words when a hundred or so would fill the required number of her preferred "pages"), or just couldn't imagine a third-grader with better than what the US laughably considers a third-grade writing level. Hell, we were tested on whether we could count to 100 without skipping or repeating anything or going out of order, as if this were a major accomplishment.
It's not always the teachers, though. In fact, sometimes the teachers are great, but the administrators suck. I started taking tenth grade math while in eighth grade, and the math teacher suggested that I was good enough at the material that I could probably pass the class in just one semester (rather than the typical full year). I did so, then made it two-thirds of the way through 11th grade math the second semester before the head of math at that high school discovered what I was doing and put an end to it (apparently two grade levels above was acceptable, but three above was not, for reasons completely alien to me). I spent the last six weeks or so of fifth period (math) doing nothing (reading for pleasure, until I got bored, bypassed the school's Internet filters, and spent the rest of the time online), and had to re-take the entire eleventh-grade math class (at normal speed) the next year.
Of course, the school administration is responsible for ensuring the quality of their employees (the teachers), so in the end, this "education official" is no better suited to her job than the incompetent teachers she is protecting. The students get screwed either way though, and it's a lot harder to avoid an incompetent official with control over your local school or school district than it is to avoid one particular teacher.
No, we aren't at version 4. We're at less-that-three-weeks of a new product that happens to have a 4 in its name. The fact that it bears some resemblance and has many similar features to other products with things like "3Gs" in their name does not mean it's the fourth version of a product.
Buying *anything* this close to its release is early adoption. To some of us, and for some products, the risks are worth it - for example, I regularly upgrade my Linux install within days of a new version coming out, and sometimes beforehand. On the other hand, if it doesn't work right I'm out nothing but some time; I didn't pay any money, didn't lose any data, didn't commit to any contracts, and because it's software, the problems will probably be fixed in a patch.
On the other hand, I don't buy new phones or cameras or cars or anything else big and expensive and not easily returnable without a chance to make sure it's worth the cost first. At a cost of being slightly behind the bleeding edge of gadgetry, I avoid getting myself cut by things like an expensive and contract-tied phone with a critical antenna flaw.
PAE is already enabled on nearly all Windows boxes; it's required for hardware DEP. As I understand it, MS limits 32-bit lcient Windows to 4GB because some drivers explode if they see more than 4GB, not because they don't have PAE.
Server builds are less-likely to use bad drivers (wide pointers are a requirement for WHQL drivers, so most - but not all - drivers should be fine). On this assumption, and because servers need more RAM than most clients/workstations anyhow, Windows Server x86 can use the full potential of PAE.
Agreed. I actually thought take-home tests were among the best. Yes, there was potential for cheating, but aside from directly askign another student for the solution, we were *expected* to utilize the toosl we had. Reference books, websites, even (near-exact quote) "this is a tricky operation, so you might want to implement your solution on your circuit board to test it. You can start from the project 3 code if you want".
The reason I loved this type of "test" is that it is very much how the real world works. The professor knew we had access to tools that would allow us to answer the questions, but also knew that we didn't have the answers to most of them directly (the exact register settings needed to set up the clock in that way hadn't actually been discussed in class, and since he'd written the coding assignment the week before it was unlikely there'd be a solution online...). We had to combine what we'd learned in class about the general principles of an embedded system, plus the tools and references for our specific board, with the ability to use those tools and references (and posibly find more online).
We had a week to do probably about 4-5 hours of actual work, but only somebody who was already an expert on that system (and on the class material, since some of it was also textbook-type stuff) could have done in in that short a time. Instead, what we were tested on was whether we'd picked up the skills needd to become (enough of) an expert in a week to solve a problem that was essentially another 3-4 hour lab assignment, without the instructions containing a basic framework for solving the problem and a list fo the relevant references that had the details we'd need.
I recently recovered my old MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick (PC gaming joystick, not meant for console use). It's a wonderful joystick, but only offers a GamePort connection and the driver CD is 32-bit only.
Is it worth trying to get it working on a modern 64-bit Win7 laptop that doesn't have a GamePort? I know there are GamePort/USB adapters, but from what I've read the Sidewinder joysticks used both digital and analog signals, plus had to receive signals from the PC (for force feedback), and apparently most (all?) adapters can't support the full functionality. Are there any that are worth getting? Beyond that, drivers are of course a concern; if I can get enough driver support for flight sims that's fine, although the full analog control + lots of buttons + force feedback experience would be very nice, and ideally the configuration utility would be available (to account for the fact that a lot of games don't actually have direct support for joysticks anymore).
Thanks for your help, seriously. I'd love to get this thing working again, and I can't be the only person with a similar hardware/software situation.
You don't actually have to be running Linux at all, though you need something POSIX-y and the right libraries. The cross-compile toolchain could certainly stand to be easier to set up, though. I eventually said "screw this" and write/tested my code natively on a laptop, then copied it over (ran `svn up`, actually) to the N800 and just built it in place. Sure, the processor's build speed leaves something to be desired, but most of the time stuff that had worked correctly on desktop Linux worked fine on the N800 as well, so it's not like I had to be constantly re-building on the handheld.
It's unfortunate how locked-down the Zune is. I actually, honestly and truthfully, know at least two Linux users that would use Zunes if they weren't locked down so much that even getting the software to run in wine is near-impossible. As for the hardware... you've got a great little device with a large color screen, innovative and useful input scheme (on the gen2+ models), lots of local storage, a general-purpose CPU (slow, but usable), microphone, FM receiver, and WiFi. In other words, the hardware is great. Unfortunately, when MS released dev tools for the Zune, said tools were badly locked down - among other things, no Internet access even though the Zune is perfectly capable of connecting to the Internet via WiFi.
There are actually a couple of developers who made some pretty neat games for the Zune, and release them free of charge. However, even on the ZuneHD (which has superb hardware and is slightly less locked-down; it was intended from the start to support third-party apps) there's a lot of "must do this, can't do that" and it has an unfortunate effect on the development community. The only major advantage over the iPad Nano is that MS doesn't prohibit certain apps on an ideological basis; if you can write it with the tools they provide, you can distribute it.
There's also the problem of market share. Leaving aside the issue of device capabilities or development community, the combination of superior marketing and being the first company to provide a really superior (at the time) music player meant the iPod got a huge head start, and Apple's technique of bundling an iPad Nano into their computers' price markup (and telling customers it was "free" which is always a good laugh) helped those get good market penetration as well. Without market share, you don't get the kidn of ecosystem that has grown up around Apple's handhelds, and without that it's hard to get marketshare (against a competitor which does have said ecosystem).
First of all, DEP is technically a kernel feature, or at least parts of it require kernel support. MS even wrote a completely software-based feature that tries to implement DEP on systems without the NX bit (it's not perfect, but it helps a bit).
Windows has 4 settings for DEP enforcement:
* Turn it all off (generally not used, unless you have a misbehaving driver). This option is only available if you know where to look; it's not in the UI
* Turn it on if a program opts in (most MS software does, and some third-party code as well). This is the default on client versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 7)
* Turn it on unless a program specifically opts out or an Admin added an exemption (a few apps currently opt out, a few others will crash unless you add the exemption). This is the default on server versions of Windows (2003, 2008, 2008 R2)
* Turn it on for everything, regardless of what the program wants (some software will crash, not much you can do except not run that software). This option is only available if you know where to look; it's not in the UI
I recommend changing the setting on your box to the third option. Computer Properties -> Advanced -> Performance -> Data Execution Prevention -> Turn on DEP for all...
16-bit Windows apps generally won't work in DOSBox, in my experience. In any case, emulating another OS on top of your current OS does not actually mean that your software will run on your current OS. It's annoying, but the simple truth is that due to the design of the processor, you can not natively run 16-bit software on 64-bit Windows.
Actually, it's not (and hasn't been for years). Opening a drive's boot sector (or loading kernel drivers) requires administrative privileges, and starting with Vista the default configuration is that your apps don't *have* admin privileges (I configured XP this way too, but it didn't have a nice mechanism like UAC or sudo for those times when Admin is needed - runas is a pain by comparison). NT has a very powerful security model... it's just that most users say "Give me and everything I run full permissions, don't bug me with this security crap" and make said security model somewhat useless.
None, really. ASLR doesn't mean that every single instruction winds up somewhere random, it just means that when loading a file of executable code - either a program or a library - it places the in-memory representation at a random address. This means you can't, for example, do a return-to-libC attack by simply figuring out the address that your target platform places its C runtime at; it will instead be different on every system and every day. However, within any given binary, the relative locations of instructions are unaffected. Net result: code locality is almost entirely preserved, but exploits get a lot harder.
Defeating DEP in and of itself is trivial. That's what ASLR is for. It's still technically possible to exploit an application that uses both, but it's much, much harder, and generally speaking you can't get a guarantee of success like you can with a return-to-shellcode or return-to-libc attack - the first of which DEP prevents and the second of which ASLR prevents.
DEP isn't really similar to that at all. That was a case of misusing a memory manager, which is bad behavior and can cause security holes, but doesn't really count as failing to use a security feature. DEP - Data Execute Protection - does just what it sounds like: it prevents the data (stack and heap) of a program's memory representation from being executed. More specifically, if the instruction pointer tries to move to a page of memory that has the NX (No eXecute) bit set, it throws a hardware interrupt and the OS kills the program (and pops up a warning). The idea is to prevent somebody from injecting binary instructions - a shellcode - into a memory buffer and then overwriting a return address or similar to execute those instructions. The overwrite can still work, but because the instructions are in a data page, not a code page, the exploit will fail.
The problem is, a lot of programs - especially those that execute any kind of code, such a JavaScript in Foxit or ActionScript in Flash - use executable code in data pages legitimately, and intentionally call into it. The CPU doesn't know the difference, so those programs get killed too. The OS *can* know the difference - you can set exemptions for specific apps in Windows - but adding such an exemption just turns of DEP for that program entirely.
Side note: if you're willing to deal with figuring out which of your apps are DEP-compatible but don't have the flag for it set, you can change Windows default behavior to use DEP unless instructed not to. In fact, you can tell it to use DEP on everything, regardless of exemptions, but this is likely to make some apps get killed by the OS. I run with DEP set on opt-out, and aside from a couple of apps (StarCraft, for example... not sure why) that were incompatible but too old to include the flag saying so, it's worked out well.
Quick note: while ABP as such hasn't been ported, IE does have a number of extensions, including ad blocking. The one I use most is actually a sort of meta-extension - it includes everything from ad blocking to mouse gestures to a download manager - but it does the job really well, and is still under development (last release was a month ago). Don't be fooled by the name; it works on anything IE6 to IE8 (although some of the features won't work on 6 or are redundant on 8). http://ie7pro.com/
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Ironically, your mention of MSN (Live) messenger is one of the reasons you're wrong. Beleive it or not, people do actually use those features of Live Messenger that Pidgin et. al simply don't support. I'm not one of those people, but I do occasionally get a message on Pidgin telling me that my client doesn't support *random thing the other person just tried to do* and that I should download the latest Live Messanger.
To the average user, I'd say Windows' configurability is actually a *lot* better than Linux's. My touchpad has way more options exposed in the control panel GUI on Windows than any of the multiple Linux tools for mouse configuration - including manual editing of xorg.conf - that I've seen. Installing things like a TV tuner driver on Windows is a lot more straightforward than on Linux, if it's not in the repos. Linux is certainly more configurable to the serious power user, if for no other reason than because you can change the source and re-compile, but getting a Windows box set up completely is actually easier in my experience (YMMV). One reason I like openSuse is because Yast is almost as powerful as Control Panel + Management Console, and is all in one place.
Nobody seriously suggests that Ubuntu's strength is games, but a lot of people don't even realize it has games. That said, they're not far wrong from the perspective of anything but the most casual gamers. I'm not sure I'd have gone for that as a screenshot, but if you're trying to lure the kind of person who would never play a game that actually casts money to buy, seeing that image might push some toward Linux.
So many things wrong here...
KDE is reasonably close to Windows in terms of interface, but I'd hardly call it a "tiny learning curve" at all. Simple things, like dragging icons areound the taskbar (excuse me, "Kicker") don't work (on KDE4) unless you know where to click to make that work. The menu organization is sometimes good (for finding an app that you don't know what it's called, but know what it does) but it definitely takes longer for me to reach my more common tasks (part of this being because the WinKey doesn't work as I'm used to; I've been told this is fixable but it sure isn't easy). Having all three of Konqueror, Dolphin, and Firefox installed gets a bit weird; Konq makes both a pretty good file manager and web brower, but doesn't behave quite like other applications of either type. Dolphin is miles behind Explorer *or* Konqueror in functionality, but looks better and has a more intuitive interface than Konq... meaning I almost never use it, but regularly get annoyed by Konqueror things like its primitive navigation tree view. Plasma was a cool idea, but I've yet to see it show off its real power in any useful way, and meanwhile the new way of doing desktop icons is another hassle. Kmail/Kontact is a powerful email client, but takes *way* more configuration, especially to get IMAP working nicely (never have gotten it to handle my CS department's Linux-hosted IMAP server *quite* properly, in fact) than Windows Mail or Outlook.
I can't run Linux programs on Windows at all, you say? Shit, I'd better close this bash shell that is ssh'd into my school server, and this other one where I was running ./configure && make on source code for a new GTK+ build that I pulled in from the web and unpacked with tar... Seriously, you can run about as much Windows code on Linux as you can vice-versa, and in most cases you don't need to recompile actually (never mind that Windows IDEs, let alone compilers, are available for free anyhow). OK, Windows doesn't come with an X11 server, but this isn't actually hard to remedy.
There have been games on the TI-83 graphing calculator for a long time too, but that doesn't mean you can compare the quality or selection with those on Windows. Linux has some good games (which happen to be among the set of Linux apps also playable on Windows) but it doesn't have many good games compared to Windows (or even Mac), it has very few great games, and even with a supposedly platinum app in Wine, it's a bit of a crapshoot whether it will work correctly all the time. As for what "most people run" I've never yet personally seen a Linux convert that didn't need Wine for at least one program.
Speaking of Linux apps vs. Windows apps, alternatives does not mean equivalents. Pidgin is great, but is *not* equivalent to Live messenger for those who use features besides basic chatting. OpenOffice is great, but it is *not* equivalent to MS Office for those who need to ensure they can open and save a file from anybody correctly, that need to handle macros in their documents, that need to handle Protected (DRMed) documents, that are familiar with the locations, appearance, and functionality of features in any version of MS office (some of us actually really like the ribbon, FYI), want a program that does more than the barest hint of OneNote's functionality, or so forth. For some languages, there are no IDEs that will run on Linux and are as good as Visual Studio. I don't like the DRM bullshit around BluRay movies, but they will play very happily on Windows. Windows Media Center is far easier to set up than MythTV, although I'll grant that for the dedicated user who has a compatible TV tuner, MythTV is pretty sweet. I could go on a lot longer here... there are actually fairly few non-trivial Windows apps that have a Linux app which can completely replace them.
Your disparagement of IE and WoW shows just how out of touch with the real world you are. Leaving aside the people who actually like IE (I use Accelerators occasionally at work, and some people must
My family have cruised for 9 years now, using Winlink the whole time. It's really awesome being able to get and send email out in the middle of a 3-week passage without any land or other vessels even in VHF (line-of-sight) range. It's undeniably slow (spring the cash for the Pactor-3 modem; it helps substantially), with speeds typically in the neighborhood of 1 kbps (can be a couple multiples better or worse depending on distance, propagation conditions, interference from other users, and the quality of your radio/antenna). You're limited to plain text emails, but attachments are supported (GRIB files are compact meteorological reports that can fit decent levels of detail and coverage in 30 KB and are great for purposes of planning a route; we usually pull one or two a day).
It *IS* a HAM radio operation, with the limitations that imposes. There's no particular security or privacy, you're not allowed to discuss business matters, there's no guarantee of service, and you must have a General-class (or higher) HAM radio license (your email is callsign@winlink.org, for example on the boat we use KD7NDG {at} winlink {dot} org). On the other hand, the service is provided free of charge (although the equipment isn't cheap, it's better than a satellite phone except possibly over the very short term). They don't provide true Internet access - you don't get an IP address, you can't browse the web or run SSH over it, and it's dependent upon the base station operator having their computer online and connected to their radio (there are usually a few stations reachable at some time of day or another from anywhere though, so even if one goes offline for a bit there's a chance to connect).
As an alternative to Winlink, there's also a commercial service called Sailmail that uses the same modems and protocols, but operates on the maritime HF bands (rather than the amateur bands). The cost is pretty low, and there's no restriction against commercial use that I know of, but the other limitations (especially lack of privacy) are mostly still there. There are also other restrictions imposed by the (corporate) operators of the base stations. That said, a lot of our cruising friends use it happily enough. http://sailmail.com/
Both Winlink 2000 and Sailmail use a client called Airmail, which is a basic but functional email client (I'd have called it good back in 2001 when there were still mainstream clients without the ability to spell check as you typed, but it hasn't improved as much as might have been expected during that time). One nice feature of Airmail is that, while it is designed to call over the Pactor modem, it also offers a telnet connection mode for when you have an actual Internet connection; even a dial-up link will be much faster than the radio link, and isn't vulnerable to interference.
Microsoft uses the term "milestone" to denote steps along a product's development. They have various names - some actually have the word 'milestone', such as Milestone Quality, Milestone 1 (M1), etc. - but CTPs (Community Tech Previews, essentially early non-public betas), public beta, RC, RTM, and the various post-release maintenance and service packs are all milestones (SPs often have multiple milestones of their own). Unlike "traditional" milestones, the distance (either in time or changes) between milstones varies widely, but conceptually they are just markers for the current stage within a product's development.
WinPhone7 just hit the CTP milestone, meaning that it's now close enough to complete that MS is willing to show it to people outside the company. This is a pretty big deal to the company, though the general public won't see anything new except for hands-on reviews (of which there are plenty). Release (and, if a lot has to be changed at the last minute, RC) are bigger milestones, but the first CTP is always a big step anyhow.
No, he's still wrong. To quote, "... maybe every other source game..."
As in, 50% of Source-engine games (my personal experience is that it's more than 50%, but still not perfect).
Admittedly, that kind of misinterpretation is quite possible given the poor grammar and sentence structure of the OP. CounterStrike (at least, one version of it) is a Source game (to which one does not actually get the source code), which does imply the possibility that he was lumping WoW in with a group of Source games. Additionally, his failure to put a comma before the last item in the list doesn't help, especially since it's only a three-element (and therefore one-comma) list.
Completely incorrect. Wine has had its own implementation of .NET 1.1 for years, and you could install 2.0. These days, I believe 2.0 is supported out of the box, and you can install the newer versions.
For pure C# (or other .NET language) apps, Mono will do better. However, running Wine will let your .NET apps call native Windows functions (as all too many do), which is the main reason for .NET apps failing on Mono in my experience.
My computer seems to have two options for audio: either a driver from WU that works only in stereo (I have 4.1 speakers) or being forced to taskkill audiodg a few times a week. It restarts automatically, but it's annoying, especially because there's no warning that it broke (I suppose if there was, it would auto-restart). Some apps just stop playing sound, but others will actually hang (Skype, Google Talk, I'm looking at you...) and appear to be frozen until it is reset.
XMLHttpRequest, for one. You know, the thing that made AJAX work (invented by MS to provide the real-time nature of Outlook Web Access). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest
Depending on how pedantic you want to get, MS had precursors of the dock before Apple or NeXT, although I'm not sure they were the first. The Start menu paradigm has been copied by a number of other GUI environments; it's not the first time there was a globally-accessible go-to menu for running programs, but it introduced the concept that you do *everything* from one menu (and its submenus, if you're still feeling pedantic), from starting a program to changing the desktop background to installing a driver to turning off the computer.
Most of Microsoft's major advances have been business/enterprise targeted. Exchange+Outlook, as a fully-integrated groupware solution, had no serious competition for a long time. The degree and ease of control that Group Policy gives domain controllers is still a major reason that companies choose Windows.
Hell, as much heat as they caught for it, the very concept that an OS always comes with a web browser can be attributed to MS. You don't have to use it, and there's a number of people who don't except to, just once, download another browser... but they can do that. No needing to get an install disk, or mess with command-line FTP, or anything of that nature.
Don't forget that Yast offers multiple different user interfaces, depending on what you're using. QT3, QT4, GTK, and ncurses (handy if you don't have X, if it's not working, or if you're on SSH). It looks and functions almost identically on each, but always feels "native" and doesn't require that you install the libraries for something you're not using.
Your "minimum 1GHz processor" argument is complete bullshit. The N800 had a 400 MHz processor (ARM-based, like iToPhoPad) and could run full Flash 9 just fine (it came with the device). This was three years ago, in the relatively early days of the iPhone, which actually had a more powerful CPU IIRC. Yes, hover was tricky, and yes, it used battery life more quickly, but it *worked* just fine.
There is not, and never was, a legitimate technical reason for lack of Flash on Apple's mobiles. Linux and OS X aren't identical, of course, but but don't try to tell me that Nokia could get Adobe to port Flash to Linux on ARM but Apple couldn't get them to port it to OS X on ARM. Even if that ever was the case, you can be damn sure Adobe would have been willing to do it in the intervening years, seeing Apple's sales numbers (the N800 and N810 were better devices from a nerd's technical perspective, but didn't have the mass-market appeal).
It's not always that bad, but... yeah, the US public school system is generally poor quality. I had a better vocabulary than my third-grade teacher, who could not understand why I wanted normal lined paper (rather than the typical 8" by 5" sheets with a 4" box for a picture at the top, and 5 lines filling the bottom 4 inches) for writing assignments. I'm not sure if she was opposed to the practice of writing itself (and therefore would never write a thousand words when a hundred or so would fill the required number of her preferred "pages"), or just couldn't imagine a third-grader with better than what the US laughably considers a third-grade writing level. Hell, we were tested on whether we could count to 100 without skipping or repeating anything or going out of order, as if this were a major accomplishment.
It's not always the teachers, though. In fact, sometimes the teachers are great, but the administrators suck. I started taking tenth grade math while in eighth grade, and the math teacher suggested that I was good enough at the material that I could probably pass the class in just one semester (rather than the typical full year). I did so, then made it two-thirds of the way through 11th grade math the second semester before the head of math at that high school discovered what I was doing and put an end to it (apparently two grade levels above was acceptable, but three above was not, for reasons completely alien to me). I spent the last six weeks or so of fifth period (math) doing nothing (reading for pleasure, until I got bored, bypassed the school's Internet filters, and spent the rest of the time online), and had to re-take the entire eleventh-grade math class (at normal speed) the next year.
Of course, the school administration is responsible for ensuring the quality of their employees (the teachers), so in the end, this "education official" is no better suited to her job than the incompetent teachers she is protecting. The students get screwed either way though, and it's a lot harder to avoid an incompetent official with control over your local school or school district than it is to avoid one particular teacher.
No, we aren't at version 4. We're at less-that-three-weeks of a new product that happens to have a 4 in its name. The fact that it bears some resemblance and has many similar features to other products with things like "3Gs" in their name does not mean it's the fourth version of a product.
Buying *anything* this close to its release is early adoption. To some of us, and for some products, the risks are worth it - for example, I regularly upgrade my Linux install within days of a new version coming out, and sometimes beforehand. On the other hand, if it doesn't work right I'm out nothing but some time; I didn't pay any money, didn't lose any data, didn't commit to any contracts, and because it's software, the problems will probably be fixed in a patch.
On the other hand, I don't buy new phones or cameras or cars or anything else big and expensive and not easily returnable without a chance to make sure it's worth the cost first. At a cost of being slightly behind the bleeding edge of gadgetry, I avoid getting myself cut by things like an expensive and contract-tied phone with a critical antenna flaw.
PAE is already enabled on nearly all Windows boxes; it's required for hardware DEP. As I understand it, MS limits 32-bit lcient Windows to 4GB because some drivers explode if they see more than 4GB, not because they don't have PAE.
Server builds are less-likely to use bad drivers (wide pointers are a requirement for WHQL drivers, so most - but not all - drivers should be fine). On this assumption, and because servers need more RAM than most clients/workstations anyhow, Windows Server x86 can use the full potential of PAE.
Agreed. I actually thought take-home tests were among the best. Yes, there was potential for cheating, but aside from directly askign another student for the solution, we were *expected* to utilize the toosl we had. Reference books, websites, even (near-exact quote) "this is a tricky operation, so you might want to implement your solution on your circuit board to test it. You can start from the project 3 code if you want".
The reason I loved this type of "test" is that it is very much how the real world works. The professor knew we had access to tools that would allow us to answer the questions, but also knew that we didn't have the answers to most of them directly (the exact register settings needed to set up the clock in that way hadn't actually been discussed in class, and since he'd written the coding assignment the week before it was unlikely there'd be a solution online...). We had to combine what we'd learned in class about the general principles of an embedded system, plus the tools and references for our specific board, with the ability to use those tools and references (and posibly find more online).
We had a week to do probably about 4-5 hours of actual work, but only somebody who was already an expert on that system (and on the class material, since some of it was also textbook-type stuff) could have done in in that short a time. Instead, what we were tested on was whether we'd picked up the skills needd to become (enough of) an expert in a week to solve a problem that was essentially another 3-4 hour lab assignment, without the instructions containing a basic framework for solving the problem and a list fo the relevant references that had the details we'd need.
Related, if perhaps not quite so retro:
I recently recovered my old MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick (PC gaming joystick, not meant for console use). It's a wonderful joystick, but only offers a GamePort connection and the driver CD is 32-bit only.
Is it worth trying to get it working on a modern 64-bit Win7 laptop that doesn't have a GamePort? I know there are GamePort/USB adapters, but from what I've read the Sidewinder joysticks used both digital and analog signals, plus had to receive signals from the PC (for force feedback), and apparently most (all?) adapters can't support the full functionality. Are there any that are worth getting? Beyond that, drivers are of course a concern; if I can get enough driver support for flight sims that's fine, although the full analog control + lots of buttons + force feedback experience would be very nice, and ideally the configuration utility would be available (to account for the fact that a lot of games don't actually have direct support for joysticks anymore).
Thanks for your help, seriously. I'd love to get this thing working again, and I can't be the only person with a similar hardware/software situation.
You don't actually have to be running Linux at all, though you need something POSIX-y and the right libraries. The cross-compile toolchain could certainly stand to be easier to set up, though. I eventually said "screw this" and write/tested my code natively on a laptop, then copied it over (ran `svn up`, actually) to the N800 and just built it in place. Sure, the processor's build speed leaves something to be desired, but most of the time stuff that had worked correctly on desktop Linux worked fine on the N800 as well, so it's not like I had to be constantly re-building on the handheld.
It's unfortunate how locked-down the Zune is. I actually, honestly and truthfully, know at least two Linux users that would use Zunes if they weren't locked down so much that even getting the software to run in wine is near-impossible. As for the hardware... you've got a great little device with a large color screen, innovative and useful input scheme (on the gen2+ models), lots of local storage, a general-purpose CPU (slow, but usable), microphone, FM receiver, and WiFi. In other words, the hardware is great. Unfortunately, when MS released dev tools for the Zune, said tools were badly locked down - among other things, no Internet access even though the Zune is perfectly capable of connecting to the Internet via WiFi.
There are actually a couple of developers who made some pretty neat games for the Zune, and release them free of charge. However, even on the ZuneHD (which has superb hardware and is slightly less locked-down; it was intended from the start to support third-party apps) there's a lot of "must do this, can't do that" and it has an unfortunate effect on the development community. The only major advantage over the iPad Nano is that MS doesn't prohibit certain apps on an ideological basis; if you can write it with the tools they provide, you can distribute it.
There's also the problem of market share. Leaving aside the issue of device capabilities or development community, the combination of superior marketing and being the first company to provide a really superior (at the time) music player meant the iPod got a huge head start, and Apple's technique of bundling an iPad Nano into their computers' price markup (and telling customers it was "free" which is always a good laugh) helped those get good market penetration as well. Without market share, you don't get the kidn of ecosystem that has grown up around Apple's handhelds, and without that it's hard to get marketshare (against a competitor which does have said ecosystem).
First of all, DEP is technically a kernel feature, or at least parts of it require kernel support. MS even wrote a completely software-based feature that tries to implement DEP on systems without the NX bit (it's not perfect, but it helps a bit).
Windows has 4 settings for DEP enforcement:
* Turn it all off (generally not used, unless you have a misbehaving driver). This option is only available if you know where to look; it's not in the UI
* Turn it on if a program opts in (most MS software does, and some third-party code as well). This is the default on client versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 7)
* Turn it on unless a program specifically opts out or an Admin added an exemption (a few apps currently opt out, a few others will crash unless you add the exemption). This is the default on server versions of Windows (2003, 2008, 2008 R2)
* Turn it on for everything, regardless of what the program wants (some software will crash, not much you can do except not run that software). This option is only available if you know where to look; it's not in the UI
I recommend changing the setting on your box to the third option. Computer Properties -> Advanced -> Performance -> Data Execution Prevention -> Turn on DEP for all...
16-bit Windows apps generally won't work in DOSBox, in my experience. In any case, emulating another OS on top of your current OS does not actually mean that your software will run on your current OS. It's annoying, but the simple truth is that due to the design of the processor, you can not natively run 16-bit software on 64-bit Windows.
Actually, it's not (and hasn't been for years). Opening a drive's boot sector (or loading kernel drivers) requires administrative privileges, and starting with Vista the default configuration is that your apps don't *have* admin privileges (I configured XP this way too, but it didn't have a nice mechanism like UAC or sudo for those times when Admin is needed - runas is a pain by comparison). NT has a very powerful security model... it's just that most users say "Give me and everything I run full permissions, don't bug me with this security crap" and make said security model somewhat useless.
None, really. ASLR doesn't mean that every single instruction winds up somewhere random, it just means that when loading a file of executable code - either a program or a library - it places the in-memory representation at a random address. This means you can't, for example, do a return-to-libC attack by simply figuring out the address that your target platform places its C runtime at; it will instead be different on every system and every day. However, within any given binary, the relative locations of instructions are unaffected. Net result: code locality is almost entirely preserved, but exploits get a lot harder.
Defeating DEP in and of itself is trivial. That's what ASLR is for. It's still technically possible to exploit an application that uses both, but it's much, much harder, and generally speaking you can't get a guarantee of success like you can with a return-to-shellcode or return-to-libc attack - the first of which DEP prevents and the second of which ASLR prevents.
DEP isn't really similar to that at all. That was a case of misusing a memory manager, which is bad behavior and can cause security holes, but doesn't really count as failing to use a security feature. DEP - Data Execute Protection - does just what it sounds like: it prevents the data (stack and heap) of a program's memory representation from being executed. More specifically, if the instruction pointer tries to move to a page of memory that has the NX (No eXecute) bit set, it throws a hardware interrupt and the OS kills the program (and pops up a warning). The idea is to prevent somebody from injecting binary instructions - a shellcode - into a memory buffer and then overwriting a return address or similar to execute those instructions. The overwrite can still work, but because the instructions are in a data page, not a code page, the exploit will fail.
The problem is, a lot of programs - especially those that execute any kind of code, such a JavaScript in Foxit or ActionScript in Flash - use executable code in data pages legitimately, and intentionally call into it. The CPU doesn't know the difference, so those programs get killed too. The OS *can* know the difference - you can set exemptions for specific apps in Windows - but adding such an exemption just turns of DEP for that program entirely.
Side note: if you're willing to deal with figuring out which of your apps are DEP-compatible but don't have the flag for it set, you can change Windows default behavior to use DEP unless instructed not to. In fact, you can tell it to use DEP on everything, regardless of exemptions, but this is likely to make some apps get killed by the OS. I run with DEP set on opt-out, and aside from a couple of apps (StarCraft, for example... not sure why) that were incompatible but too old to include the flag saying so, it's worked out well.
Quick note: while ABP as such hasn't been ported, IE does have a number of extensions, including ad blocking. The one I use most is actually a sort of meta-extension - it includes everything from ad blocking to mouse gestures to a download manager - but it does the job really well, and is still under development (last release was a month ago). Don't be fooled by the name; it works on anything IE6 to IE8 (although some of the features won't work on 6 or are redundant on 8). http://ie7pro.com/