There isn't a court-ordered requirement for them to test it. There's a market enforced requirement :-).

Go into Frys (or local Geek store). Look at all the NAS boxes on the shelf. That's all Samba. Every one.

Now imagine you're Microsoft. A new version of Windows comes out and it doesn't work against all the "home NAS media servers" people have. Ooops :-(.

They test against Samba *all the time*, as it's good for their business to do so.

They also go a little above and beyond by helping test the AD server part of Samba (which isn't in wide production use yet) - they do that in their interop labs up in Redmond.

They provide free food for the engineers working late up there. It's not as good as the free Google food (but then again, hey - what is ? :-) :-).

Jeremy.

Oh you mean corporations like IBM, EMC, Netgear, WDC,Google ? Yeah, the GPLv3 really scared them :-).

Listen to my presentation here:

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2011/may/10/why-samba-switched-to-GPLv3/

to explain why GPLv3 is a *better* license for commercial use the GPLv2.

Jeremy.

Possibly their marketing and senior exec's hate it (although I doubt that - Thomas Pfenning is at director level in the Windows org and he think's it's pretty cool.

But I know their engineers think it's cool :-).

Jeremy.

In the words of Francis Urquart:

"You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.." :-).

It's just an AD server. Why would running under Virtualization environments, Hyper-V, Multiple AD servers, matter ?

Jeremy.

Yes :-). That's why you can use the Windows tools to administer Samba4.0 AD server :-).

Jeremy.

Ahem. Microsoft provided a positive quote for the press release, and were involved in bug fixing to ensure interoperability.

So no, I don't think they hate it :-).

Jeremy.

...or did he send a very slightly differently punctuated/spaced email to every employee, just to see which version ended up leaked? I'm pretty sure that's what Bruce Schneier would do.

The "everyone should run our open (tm) software" plea. I'm not falling for it. No customer is demanding "cloud portability" because customers don't want to change ISP, ever. I just don't think portability of whole VM networks will ever be feasible on a technical level. Even if you could shuffle IPv4 addresses and masses of data around the whole internet between providers without down time, there's no incentive for ISPs to cooperate, or willingly turn themselves into a cheaper sub-brand of Rackspace. It would instantly put them at a competitive disadvantage. Your entire business model controlled by a competitor? You can go to Parallels for that; their software works out of the box, it will gladly migrate ISPs for you, and the per-customer fees are reasonable!

The customers who have sussed cloud portability already have it through tools like puppet, rigid version control, or a tightly-specced development environment supported by lots of ISPs (PHP, Java, .net - ish). The customers that don't have a portable setup won't magically get it through an "open" hosting API, they will be lashed to their current provider as they always have been.

However, the basic gameplay mechanics are just so-so. It's just a physics simulation. The real problem is that there is such a massive luck factor involved. For example, when someone beats a difficult "level", what is the chance that they can actually reproduce their success in the exact same way? Pretty much impossible.

I think this just is the definition of a game you suck at ;-) And I think the reason it's successful isn't that it's luck based at all - sure you experiment, you learn, but eventually you succeed at clearing a level, and a skilled played _can_ repeat their performance. It's not unpredictable, but you do need skill. I bet 1980s-you would have liked it. It's like a streamlined Lemmings. It's definitely a classic, and apart from the reliance on touch screen, not a modern game design at all.

If you want to grumble about an evil modern game design, look at Jetpack fucking Joyride. It's skill-based, but makes the absolute minimum actual game in favour of a zillion metagames designed to bore you into "buying" progress. THAT is Satan's gaming, designed to be addictive, shallow and will take a few dollars off you as it goes. I'm sure there are worse examples.

For fuck's sake, sorry, the base price is £220 not £320.

Yeah sorry I spotted the disparity too late. It's an ASUS 1025CE which has a spec of 1GB RAM and 320GB HDD, for £320. It's upgradeable to 4GB RAM, but because they forgot to cut a whole in the underneath, you have to take the bastard thing apart. The SSD was an Intel 80GB I had spare which I think goes for about £70-80 these days.

Linux i386 installs fine, but the "Cedar View" Intel graphics drivers are still hard to find packaged. The rest of the hardware worked with Ubuntu 12.04 just fine though.

Oh I misread ... obviously $250 is nearly half of £300, ish. Am still surprised that the ARM doesn't stand for better battery life though.