Some interesting stories..

Marty_J

asininity wrote: »

Steve Balmer always has talked !!!! that old IP crap is well crap. Half of that doesn't make sense. And hes making stuff up out of his !!! as usual. It actually made me chuckle. They've not done a good job really of getting rid of it, its still here and more and more people know about it. It doesn't matter that ms have xp on the majority of netbooks. And they'll never rid the server industry of it.

Steve Ballmer is a rather boorish individual, and he's hardly a visionary in the tech industry, so I wouldn't let what he says worry you.

I was just pointing out that he doesn't really respect Linux as a rival. Still, this is the man who laughed at the iPhone and said "there's no chance [it] is going to get any significant market share", and now two years later Apple is the most profitable mobile phone maker with 32% of all handset profits.

I don't think he's laughing any more.

And I dont think the excuse that just because no one bothered to exploit the security flaw apple can take their time. Banking on it not being exploited sounds a bit silly.

Oh, I agree, and it would be nice if Apple immediately released fixes for things. But if apple determined that it wasn't urgent, and it turns out it wasn't urgent, it is what it is I guess.

patman99

Where Linux wins over windows is in the embedded OS market.
Sony use a version in there PS3, almost all set-top boxes such as Sky HD use a Linux OS. Why?, because its free, and they can tailor-it to suite each individual need without violating any copyrights.
Anyway, Linux devices are in almost as many homes as Windows devices. Connect to the web via a router?, if its by Linksys, netgear, Belkin or BT then it also runs Linux.

Thats not bad going considering Linux was never intended to be a mainstream OS, it was originally developed to mimic Unix as this was very expensive to purchase, but was needed if you were doing any kind on course in IT back in the '80s.

Ror a group of individuals to develope frontends such as KDE and gnome for absolutley no financial gain shows just how much interest people have in it.
Thanks to Linux, we Windows users have 'The GIMP', 'Scribus', 'Openoffice', 'Blender' and many other ported apps to play with.

Unix was developed as a secure networkable OS, so Linux followed suite, which is why alterations to system critical programs and files (basically anything not installable as a 'user') require root passwords.

Windows was never envisaged to run across a network (until ver 3.11 for networks appearred), that means every install runs in 'administrator mode', thus making it easy for virus writers to gain unhindered access to the core programs that make-up Windows.

With Windows 7, MS once again missed the chance to create a virus-resistant O/S. The day they start doing a linux and requiring a user to set-up an admin password as part of the first-run boot set-up will be the day we can all sleep a bit easier.

It is also worth noting that had ASUS chosen a decent Linux distro for their netbooks, then people would not have found them tricky to use.
And finally......

Bothe Activision & EA make their games fully compatable with TransGamings 'Cedega', thus meaning that you can play anything they produced in the last 5 years on a Linux box. Crysis, when launched, had a version for Linux which you had to download prior to inserting the game CD, the download contained some extra maps that never made it across to Windows.

Leopard

No, Marty J, with your ever-disarming charm you are being far too kind.

Steve Ballmer is an extremely boorish (and vulgar) individual and my kitchen kettle is more visionary than he.

But please don't rock his boat: he's Apple's and Linux's greatest blessing. The longer Steve Ballmer is running Microsoft, the greater the damage it will suffer. He's leading it into serious decline. Not that leading is really the right word to use.

I wonder how he explains all the people (and there are now a lot of us) who resented having to buy bloody Windows in order to obtain the netbook of our choice and then promptly bin it in favour of Mac OS X. He probably regards us as happy customers who have demonstrated our desire to use his wretched operating system. He's in denial.

I was looking round Staples yesterday afternoon and a bored young salesman spent quarter of an hour telling me all about how he had hacked Mac OS X on to his 17" Toshiba laptop. He, no doubt, is another person whom Ballmer believes is a happy Windows customer.

What does amaze me is that he was ever allowed to attain such an important position within Microsoft at all - that was a serious management error.

Still, we're talking about a country that twice elected Wally Bush to its supreme office...

(Well, once, to be strictly correct but this isn't the place to pursue that one. :cool: )

superscaper

patman99 wrote: »

Thanks to Linux, we Windows users have 'The GIMP', 'Scribus', 'Openoffice', 'Blender' and many other ported apps to play with.

I think that's a bit misleading and at best you could use the argument "thanks to unix" but I don't really see how linux specifically fits in and is any more responsible for those programs development history than windows was. Especially since pretty much all of those were available for windows as long as they've been available for linux.

[Deleted User]

patman99 wrote: »

Where Linux wins over windows is in the embedded OS market.
Sony use a version in there PS3, almost all set-top boxes such as Sky HD use a Linux OS. Why?, because its free, and they can tailor-it to suite each individual need without violating any copyrights.
Anyway, Linux devices are in almost as many homes as Windows devices. Connect to the web via a router?, if its by Linksys, netgear, Belkin or BT then it also runs Linux.

I disagree, Windows CE/XPe are both massive in the embedded devices field. CE offers massive amounts of flexibility free from restrictions for bespoke devices, both are extremely secure and stable. CE is also extremely cheap to license, which is why you see so much of it implemented in pretty much every sector.

Marty_J

We have AT&T U-verse, and the set top boxes run on Windows CE.

Lots of people are having problems with them crashing and getting the BSOD while watching TV. Having to frequently reboot your set top box (which takes a few minutes) must be very annoying, but we've only had a few crashes so far, so fingers crossed.

Still, its certainly the most problematic set top box I've ever had.

On the subject of whether Linux wins over Windows in the embedded OS market, a survey in 2006 found that most developers were using a commercial OS rather than an open source one. I don't know if that trend has changed in the past few years, but it's worth noting that the usage of Linux had fallen since they conducted the survey the year before.

asininity

Marty we'll as usual have to agree to disagree, Apple would say its not that bad wouldn't they, they've built part of their customer base stating its more secure/no viruses for it. Security experts and hackers are saying some of the security holes are bad. 6 of 1 hald a dozen of the other.

And shock of shock I agree with Leopard (I'm not sure I think its for the first time). I'm probably considered a happy windows customer even though I've put linux on the laptop I've just bought and can't be arsed trying to get the money back for the preinstalled vista that came with it. Sure some vendors cacked their panties with the PI FUD (shame on you SUSE), but you cant beat something like linux with boorish tactics like that, look at P2P, and linux is properly free.

Linux will never go away, its a hobby that people do for free. Sure businesses are built around it but the main business for the big vendors is server based. Besides with google using linux as a start point maybe we'll see more of it.

Leopard

When I attached a 1TB USB external hard drive to our Humax FoxSat-HDR box, it had to be formatted to a Linux spec using my companion's office Dell laptop booted with a CD containing a lean version of Linux that we downloaded from a website.

No idea what it uses for its internal hard drive, though: you just put a bare drive into it and it formats the thing itself. We upped that one to 1TB, too.

They seem to be different formats though: on the external drive it can nest folders to several layers but on the internal drive it only permits one level of nesting.

Totally fault-free, though, and has never crashed.


This, by the way, is of pertinence to the original posting.

patman99

Humax use a lite Linux on their boxes, hence the need to format the external drive to Linux ext3. normally, Linux distros can read/write to drives formated to fat32 and ntfs.
I wonder if it is poss. to attach a USB DVD-burner to the Humax in order to burn your saved progs to disc.

BTW, if you have a mini-Mac, you can build a cracking media centre pc out of it.