4. Far cheaper(only compared against a mac, I build my own machines now and roll an old harddrive image over, so costs are level with linux) In many cases, that's not legal:-(. It's things like that that make me glad to use a license that I know won't come back to bite me. I know it's not likely that Microsoft will come sue you as a home user, but the fact that it's possible is just not fair or right. I can't let that slide.
As the target of XNA seems to be both the professional and the home-brew-market, can the Free Software camp beat this? The obvious OSS advantage is the choice of any language you want. As a professional software developer, C# does not impress me at all. It's all hype and features copied from other languages.
What is interesting is their idea of having various 'starter kits' for certain types of games (FPS, RTS, platform),... Is anyone aware of similar FOSS-projects? The Quake3 engine for FPS comes to mind. I don't know if there are any for RTS or platform because I haven't looked them up. Can anyone confirm the existence/nonexistence of them?
This may be a great development tool set, but you're going to be stuck with only supporting the PC and the XBOX 360. No linux, OSX, PS3, Wii, or any other kind of gaming platform.
Microsoft would never try to limit developers developers developers development to just their platforms. You're clearly mistaken.
I've overclocked an Opteron 240 from its stock 1.8 Ghz to 2.7 Ghz with no change in voltage. It boots Ubuntu 6.10 in 14 seconds from when I push the power button. I got it for $80. Pushed values, indeed... You are sadly misinformed.
Bugs reported != bugs that exist, genius. Just because less bugs were reported for IIS doesn't mean there aren't as many or more: just that there aren't as many that are known and being worked on. Obscurity != securty, and anyone who actually knows information assurance knows that.
Whether it's GWT's fault or KJS's fault, at least we can actually determine the problem much more quickly now that we can access the internals of both. Sweet.
...that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. I was referring to this. In this case we're talking about collective time spent by everyone, everywhere: meaning if every second of boot time was spent exercising that would be (collectively) 31 million jumping jacks per second of boot time in this analogy. Sounds like there was a miscommunication here.
If everyone did a few situps, pushups, jumping jacks, whatever while waiting for a shutdown + restart to happen, I wonder what the overall health impact would be? 1 second could turn into 1 jumping jack, which would be 113 * 365 (days in a year) * 24 (hours in a day) * 60 (minutes in an hour) * 60 (seconds in a minute) jumping jacks. 31536000 jumping jacks. How many lives would be so much more prolonged by that amount of jumping jacks? What impact could that make on the high obesity rates in America (guilty as charged...)?
Perhaps those lifetimes aren't wasted by necessity but by negligence, laziness, and choice.
Makes no money on support?!?!?! Do you have any idea how much Microsoft charges for tech support? It's off the charts! Honestly, the more people need to call Microsoft for support, the better. The only point at which it's a good idea for Microsoft to pull the plug on a product is when it's so vastly inferior and horrible that the money they make from customer support will be less than the money they lose in sales, and given their rates it takes a LOT of sales to make that happen.
It's my guess that this, not lack of ability or resources, is the primary reason that the Windows OS isn't the clear winner out there. Given an ungodly amount of resources which could hire the most brilliant minds, Microsoft still doesn't have the lead on a bunch of volunteers (Open Source) and a complete market underdog (Apple) technologically. Why? They make lots of money off of support.
I'm willing to bet the author's main motivation was sensationalism. Journalists tend to write articles with the goal of getting as many people to read them as possible: that seems to be the definition of success in today's media. Exposing and illuminating truth won't get you near as much attention as criticizing a public figure or organization and "exposing the shocking truth" about it, and often shocking "truths" need to be fabricated.
It's sad and it's selfish, but the author is certainly not the only one that does it. A few years ago I had a friend break his neck diving into a river. All of his friends present said "don't do it: you're crazy." All the local news articles said they dared him to do it.
I'll get modded troll or flamebait for this, as sure as water is wet, but let's think here: when has Microsoft ever made a sincere effort to encourage interoperability?
I can't guarantee that I know their strategy, but how easy would it be for them to introduce all sorts of fancy features to the next.NET iteration behind closed doors, then release it all at once and the competition has to play catch-up because of the year-long head start that Microsoft had? Voila! Look, everyone! Windows is now the superior choice for.NET! That must be because it's such a quality product. Does anyone honestly think it's Microsoft's intention for the Mac and Linux.NET VM's to be as good as the Windows version? I'd label that just plain foolish. It's just one more thing their marketing staff can use to say "look how innovative and ahead of the competition we are!"
... and that's just what I could think of: and I'm nowhere near as wiley and sneaky as them. Ask executives from Sun, 3Com, anyone that's ever "partnered" with Microsoft: cooperating with them is never a good idea.
I worked on a codebase of several hundred thousand lines over the summer, all on VS 2005. I was excited to see what all the buzz was about for myself. Intellisense constantly lied about which functions call others (example: it told me a function called itsself while I was looking at it - all 5 lines of it - and it clearly did not...). It constantly jumped to forward declarations when I asked where definitions were. The toolbar buttons would change their placement on occasion, and I would have to put them back. The program they provide for browsing the Windows API documentation frequently crashed (especially when left minimized for a half hour or so).
One of my favorite "features" was when I would tell Visual Studio to close and it would decide what I really meant was "update your intellisense then close". Great. With a project that size updating intellisense took about 2 minutes. I don't need intellisense updated right now, because I can't use it if you're closed. Just close.
The real clincher, though, was the "crash-on-debug" error that started plaguing the office. When you tell VS to "build and debug" it would build the program and then seg fault immediately. That's a serious pain with a large project because it takes a few minutes to load it again. To debug, you'd have to build the program then run it manually and then manually attach the process for debugging. This bug would strike staff at random, and the only solution was to do a complete rebuild of the entire project, non-distributed. This could take hours.
With the amount of talent in that office and the amount of frustration at that crash, we could have just fixed the bug ourselves and saved a lot of time if the product in question was open source, but it wasn't.
Visual Studio has cost that company a lot of money in wasted man hours.
True that. I mean, "click once and run" sure sounds a lot like Debian's repository system to me. I open synaptic, click the name of the program I want, hit "install", and the software I want is downloaded from a signed, trusted repository.
There's a reason this stuff is catching on, and it's not the marketing budget, that's for sure.
I'd definitely pay extra for lossy, so when I convert it to the non-drm'd format of my choice (usually vorbis) I don't have to take the quality hit of running it through 2 lossies.
I guess the difference in this case is that people don't have a reason to download Linux ISOs from random, untrusted sites. They can get it free at the official sites already. They have to pay to get Vista from the official source, so many will turn to unofficial (illegal) sources. The danger in this case is not introduced by technological difference, but difference in the motivations of the end user.
Oddly enough, a fair amount of BIOSes seem to do just that. The ZV6000 series laptops from HP don't even have an option in their boot order to boot from USB, but when I put in a USB disk that's bootable it favors it. Yes, it's a terrible idea on their part, but it still works sometimes.
Oh and on a side note they're great for anonymous use of computers that normally require you to authenticate, provided you have physical access to them. Most network admins don't think of the possibility of bootable USB volumes and thus don't disable it in BIOS. On top of that, most BIOS manufacturers don't think people need an option for disabling booting from a USB disk and don't provide it. Don't have a valid account in this lab but need to check your e-mail? Plug in your USB disk, power down the computer, boot into your USB Linux install, check your mail, and reboot back to normal operation.
Distrowatch is a great place to find forensics/recovery distrobutions. When I have to recover a system (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) I've found that pretty much any Linux liveCD or USB forensics distro will do the trick. From editing/fixing partitions to recovering data from a dead OS to fixing a botched install of an OS the tools are all there.
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Proof, proof, proof is just too against you.
What is interesting is their idea of having various 'starter kits' for certain types of games (FPS, RTS, platform),
I sure wish their Windows API reference didn't crash every 30 minutes, and didn't have screenshots from Windows 3.x era...
Microsoft would never try to limit developers developers developers development to just their platforms. You're clearly mistaken.
I've overclocked an Opteron 240 from its stock 1.8 Ghz to 2.7 Ghz with no change in voltage. It boots Ubuntu 6.10 in 14 seconds from when I push the power button. I got it for $80. Pushed values, indeed... You are sadly misinformed.
Bugs reported != bugs that exist, genius. Just because less bugs were reported for IIS doesn't mean there aren't as many or more: just that there aren't as many that are known and being worked on. Obscurity != securty, and anyone who actually knows information assurance knows that.
I'd love to justify your arguments by actually addressing them, but they just don't deserve it. Instead I'll just say that you, sir, are an idiot.
Whether it's GWT's fault or KJS's fault, at least we can actually determine the problem much more quickly now that we can access the internals of both. Sweet.
...that's equivelent to 113 years from the lives of Mac owners. I was referring to this. In this case we're talking about collective time spent by everyone, everywhere: meaning if every second of boot time was spent exercising that would be (collectively) 31 million jumping jacks per second of boot time in this analogy. Sounds like there was a miscommunication here.You win.
If everyone did a few situps, pushups, jumping jacks, whatever while waiting for a shutdown + restart to happen, I wonder what the overall health impact would be? 1 second could turn into 1 jumping jack, which would be 113 * 365 (days in a year) * 24 (hours in a day) * 60 (minutes in an hour) * 60 (seconds in a minute) jumping jacks. 31536000 jumping jacks. How many lives would be so much more prolonged by that amount of jumping jacks? What impact could that make on the high obesity rates in America (guilty as charged...)?
Perhaps those lifetimes aren't wasted by necessity but by negligence, laziness, and choice.
Makes no money on support?!?!?! Do you have any idea how much Microsoft charges for tech support? It's off the charts! Honestly, the more people need to call Microsoft for support, the better. The only point at which it's a good idea for Microsoft to pull the plug on a product is when it's so vastly inferior and horrible that the money they make from customer support will be less than the money they lose in sales, and given their rates it takes a LOT of sales to make that happen.
It's my guess that this, not lack of ability or resources, is the primary reason that the Windows OS isn't the clear winner out there. Given an ungodly amount of resources which could hire the most brilliant minds, Microsoft still doesn't have the lead on a bunch of volunteers (Open Source) and a complete market underdog (Apple) technologically. Why? They make lots of money off of support.
I'm willing to bet the author's main motivation was sensationalism. Journalists tend to write articles with the goal of getting as many people to read them as possible: that seems to be the definition of success in today's media. Exposing and illuminating truth won't get you near as much attention as criticizing a public figure or organization and "exposing the shocking truth" about it, and often shocking "truths" need to be fabricated.
It's sad and it's selfish, but the author is certainly not the only one that does it. A few years ago I had a friend break his neck diving into a river. All of his friends present said "don't do it: you're crazy." All the local news articles said they dared him to do it.
I'll get modded troll or flamebait for this, as sure as water is wet, but let's think here: when has Microsoft ever made a sincere effort to encourage interoperability?
I can't guarantee that I know their strategy, but how easy would it be for them to introduce all sorts of fancy features to the next .NET iteration behind closed doors, then release it all at once and the competition has to play catch-up because of the year-long head start that Microsoft had? Voila! Look, everyone! Windows is now the superior choice for .NET! That must be because it's such a quality product. Does anyone honestly think it's Microsoft's intention for the Mac and Linux .NET VM's to be as good as the Windows version? I'd label that just plain foolish. It's just one more thing their marketing staff can use to say "look how innovative and ahead of the competition we are!"
... and that's just what I could think of: and I'm nowhere near as wiley and sneaky as them. Ask executives from Sun, 3Com, anyone that's ever "partnered" with Microsoft: cooperating with them is never a good idea.
I worked on a codebase of several hundred thousand lines over the summer, all on VS 2005. I was excited to see what all the buzz was about for myself. Intellisense constantly lied about which functions call others (example: it told me a function called itsself while I was looking at it - all 5 lines of it - and it clearly did not...). It constantly jumped to forward declarations when I asked where definitions were. The toolbar buttons would change their placement on occasion, and I would have to put them back. The program they provide for browsing the Windows API documentation frequently crashed (especially when left minimized for a half hour or so).
One of my favorite "features" was when I would tell Visual Studio to close and it would decide what I really meant was "update your intellisense then close". Great. With a project that size updating intellisense took about 2 minutes. I don't need intellisense updated right now, because I can't use it if you're closed. Just close.
The real clincher, though, was the "crash-on-debug" error that started plaguing the office. When you tell VS to "build and debug" it would build the program and then seg fault immediately. That's a serious pain with a large project because it takes a few minutes to load it again. To debug, you'd have to build the program then run it manually and then manually attach the process for debugging. This bug would strike staff at random, and the only solution was to do a complete rebuild of the entire project, non-distributed. This could take hours.
With the amount of talent in that office and the amount of frustration at that crash, we could have just fixed the bug ourselves and saved a lot of time if the product in question was open source, but it wasn't.
Visual Studio has cost that company a lot of money in wasted man hours.
True that. I mean, "click once and run" sure sounds a lot like Debian's repository system to me. I open synaptic, click the name of the program I want, hit "install", and the software I want is downloaded from a signed, trusted repository.
There's a reason this stuff is catching on, and it's not the marketing budget, that's for sure.
I'd definitely pay extra for lossy, so when I convert it to the non-drm'd format of my choice (usually vorbis) I don't have to take the quality hit of running it through 2 lossies.
I guess the difference in this case is that people don't have a reason to download Linux ISOs from random, untrusted sites. They can get it free at the official sites already. They have to pay to get Vista from the official source, so many will turn to unofficial (illegal) sources. The danger in this case is not introduced by technological difference, but difference in the motivations of the end user.
No, but we may be amazed at the effects it has on the quality and timeliness of security updates for XP :(
Agreed, I'm calling mad BS on that. Even not counting clusters.
They've all got Ubuntu :-)
Oddly enough, a fair amount of BIOSes seem to do just that. The ZV6000 series laptops from HP don't even have an option in their boot order to boot from USB, but when I put in a USB disk that's bootable it favors it. Yes, it's a terrible idea on their part, but it still works sometimes.
Oh and on a side note they're great for anonymous use of computers that normally require you to authenticate, provided you have physical access to them. Most network admins don't think of the possibility of bootable USB volumes and thus don't disable it in BIOS. On top of that, most BIOS manufacturers don't think people need an option for disabling booting from a USB disk and don't provide it. Don't have a valid account in this lab but need to check your e-mail? Plug in your USB disk, power down the computer, boot into your USB Linux install, check your mail, and reboot back to normal operation.
Distrowatch is a great place to find forensics/recovery distrobutions. When I have to recover a system (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux) I've found that pretty much any Linux liveCD or USB forensics distro will do the trick. From editing/fixing partitions to recovering data from a dead OS to fixing a botched install of an OS the tools are all there.