I don't think they need to create an actual console. It would be enough to come up with a nailed-down spec for a game platform. Then they could certify particular computers as compatible with the platform.
"This computer is TUXBOX Level 1 compatible" If you see a sticker like that, you know that any TUXBOX Level 1 game will just run on that computer.
Here is a possible spec for TUXBOX:
128 MB of RAM or more
CPU chip of 600 MHz or over
Sound Blaster Live (any version: Value, Platinum, whatever)
any video card from a (very short) TUXBOX-compatible list
CD-ROM drive or DVD drive
Then a TUXBOX CD will load a Linux kernel, X, and anything else needed for the game. Then it will run the game. So, you can boot from the game, or boot from a generic TUXBOX boot floppy, and just play.
They should then make a TUXBOX CD disk that has about 30 games. This disk would boot to a loader that lets you choose which game. You should be able to play multiple games without rebooting. Any save game info can be saved on a floppy disk.
And, if you are already running Linux, you know you can just pop in any TUXBOX CD and play, without having to reboot.
If this were to happen, lots of small computer shops would burn TUXBOX CDs and give them away with the computers they sell. The computers would not even need to have Linux installed.
If the TUXBOX spec got some momentum going, they would have a small but nice revenue stream certifying computers as TUXBOX compatible. At that point, maybe someone would actually fund a company to make consoles.
gun: primary purpose - throwing a bullet at dangerous speed through the air
car: primary purpose - accelerating a ton of metal at dangerous speed (on the ground, which is where small children play)
We wouldn't have interstate crime much if it weren't for cars. Every time a person is carried off in a car by a serial killer or kidnapper, you might expect to see the car maker sued as an "enabler". But you don't see that.
You don't see that because people understand that cars are much more often used for buying groceries than for carrying off victims. No jury will buy this "enabler" nonsense.
And the same thing turns out to be true of guns. Well over 99% of all guns never hurt any human being; they are used for target shooting, self-defense, simple collecting, etc. Thousands of guns are used each year for bad things, but there are millions of guns in the country. The problem is that you can get juries to buy this "enabler" nonsense because many folks these days don't own or even understand guns.
I'm sure it is possible for the theme editor to be used to infringe Apple copyrights, but the same thing is true of any screenshot utility. Will Apple go after those folks as "enablers" next?
CHINA: It is a good apology. But we have decided that the apology is not enough. Next you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... with... a herring! [dramatic chord]
I just downloaded 1.0. While the Progeny betas fit on a single CD, it turns out that the 1.0 version has just a little bit too much stuff so they went to two CDs. There is lots of extra room left over, so I don't expect them to grow past two CDs anytime soon.
I'm using the latest Debian stuff. When it's all nice and stable it will all be released under the name of "Woody", thus in my mind I'm using Woody, albeit I'm using the unstable branch. But I should use the names the same way everyone else does!
The "stable" version of Debian right now is Potato. Thus "stable" and "Potato" both refer to the same collection of packages.
The "testing" version of Debian is called Woody. When testing is over and Woody is released, then Potato will be retired and Woody will become the new stable. A new code name will be chosen for the next Debian (from the movie Toy Story if the tradition holds), and that new code name will be the new testing.
The "unstable" version of Debian is called "Sid" and always will be called that. (Sid was the boy who enjoyed destroying and mangling toys. Of all characters in Toy Story he was the clear choice for a code name for unstable!)
If you want the latest packages, you should apt-get from unstable. If you want fairly recent packages and you want less risk, you should apt-get from testing. When a package has been in unstable for a while and it tests out okay, it gets migrated over into testing. Thus, there is a huge overlap between the packages in testing and the ones in unstable: every package in testing is in unstable, but the version in unstable might be a more recent version.
Because testing and unstable are fairly close, you can apt-get from unstable, and then switch back to testing if you like. This can be a convenient way to grab a few packages you want that are too new to be in testing yet.
I have found that unstable hasn't lived up to its name; I haven't had any bad problems with it yet, and I really want to get each update to GNOME as soon as possible, so I'm using unstable right now.
Progeny is just a particular set of packages for Debian, with a nice installer. This is a very good thing.
The Progeny guys don't support the full 3000+ packages available for Debian. (Right now if you were to burn CDs for the latest version of Debian it would take 4 CDs to hold all the packages; Progeny fits on a single CD.) They have put together a working, tested set of packages that make a pretty darn nice installation, and they will keep it up to date. For many people Progeny will provide them with everything they will ever need.
Since Progeny is still Debian, you can easily add packages from the main Debian distribution if you want something that Progeny doesn't provide. And if you ever tire of Progeny or they ever disappear, you can just switch smoothly over to using the main Debian distribution. So there really is no down side to choosing Progeny.
And, by the way, Progeny is donating all their new stuff back to the Debian community. So the improved installer should find its way to Debian. (Probably not for the Woody release, but the one after that should have it.)
For my friends who get interested in Linux, I am burning Progeny CDs and giving them away.
I'd really like to check it out, but I also want safe path back.
The important thing about Progeny is this: it is Debian.
They didn't screw anything up or glue in something proprietary. It's just a particular set of Debian packages with a nice installer.
Thus, once you have Progeny set up, you can point your sources.list file at a Debian mirror, and start using apt-get against the Woody package set, and you are using Woody.
Their installer does create a few icons on the desktop that say Progeny, but if you were really gung-ho about having a non-Progeny Woody system you could delete those.
As for going back to Potato, it would be just the same as taking a Woody system back to Potato. I have never done it but it would be possible. Just point sources.list at a Potato package set, and use apt-get to get the Potato packages. You will have to force apt-get to "downgrade" since the versions of the packages will be older, but that functionality is supported. It would be something of a pain, and I don't know why you would bother; I'm running Woody unstable and I'm extremely happy with it.
The Free Software movement seeks to end the quaint fallacy of "intellectual property".
So, if there is no intellectual property, then I can do anything I want with any software, right? I can take emacs, modify it into a proprietary version, and sell my version without giving away the source code?
After all, it is the intellectual property laws that the GPL is making use of. If they are ever truly destroyed, then effectively all software is public domain. If you are right, RMS can save a lot of time by just releasing all FSF code as public domain instead of GPL.
I know the knee-jerk capitalists who don't understand Marxism will shriek
I guess I don't understand Marxism. Please provide me with some examples I can study. Exactly where in the world has Marxism ever been successfully tried? Where have the predictions of Marx ever come to pass?
For example, the U.S.S.R. had a system where a privileged elite ran the country with dictatorial powers; this system was called Communism, but I don't think Marx would say it was what he had in mind. Am I wrong, and that was a good example of Communism? Or is real Communism still in our future?
It's time for these companies to pay the piper.
Maybe you think so, but they will decide whether they want to pay or not. Free software is free. The companies that modified GPL code have released their modifications to the community; they have no obligation to do anything more than that.
I hope he just accidentallty hit the 'R' key in front of that last word.
We should judge Linus by what he says and what he does. If you add everything up, that 'R' doesn't mean much against everything else. As far as I can tell, Linus actually is pretty humble.
And you are assuming that Linus came up with that title, which may not be correct. The publishing company may have come up with the title, or at least the subtitle (the part that contains that 'R' word).
in 10 years, we can have the functionality of software that was obsolete 10 years ago.
It's not obsolete if people still want to use it. If people have useful Hypercard stacks and don't want to give them up, who are you to say they are wrong?
We/. types like it because it's free. Big Business will like it because they will never have to pay anything to use it. The only people who won't like it will be the ones who want to lock up the music, but in the long run they are doomed to fail.
(Given a choice between paying for music in WMF format and paying for music in a CD format, I will buy the CD every time. I predict that enough other people will do the same to ensure that WMF never takes over the world.)
It is often said that the many Linux distributions is a strength. I'll believe it if it is possible to move between systems.
The various distros set up the system in slightly different ways. It would be a lot of work to write a tool that would scan through a Red Hat install, extract all the config info, and magically configure and install Debian for you. Worse, the tool would have to understand different versions of Red Hat, and Mandrake, and etc.
The Debian installer gets the job done, but it isn't newbie-friendly. The good part is that you have complete control over everything it is doing. The bad part is it is constantly asking you for input about things a newbie might not understand. (But if you choose the defaults you can perhaps get through an install without full understanding of what is going on.)
The very good thing about Debian is that you only install it once. After you have your Debian system up, you just keep running apt-get and upgrading things. When Debian comes out with a new release, you can even use apt-get to upgrade to that. (The command is "apt-get dist-upgrade".)
By the way, if you want to try Debian and you are not looking forward to the installer, you might want to check out
Progeny Debian.
Progeny Debian is a version of Debian that has an improved installer. Unlike what Corel did with Debian, Progeny is sharing all the improvements with the Debian community so that future versions of Debian can have a cool installer too.
Well, let's see... important, valuable applications came out for Win32 only, and OS/2 couldn't run them. Thus the advantages of OS/2 were not interesting to any user who wanted to run, say, Photoshop.
In other words, people had to choose between running OS/2 and running certain applications. This made it harder for them to choose OS/2.
It is clear to me that the more backwards-compatible free OSes can become, the easier it becomes for a person to choose a free OS instead of Windows.
And, consider this. Right now, game companies write only for Windows, and test only on Windows. If WINE and WineX get good, and really large numbers of gamers start running games under WineX, the game companies might start testing under WineX. Wouldn't it be cool to have the games work under WineX out of the box, instead of having to hack WineX to make them work? You might even see game companies making contributions to WineX.
If you want game companies to write native games for free OSes, first you need a really large number of desktops running the free OSes. One way to grow the number of desktops is really good backward compatibility.
First, you overestimate the number of $10 shareware programs for NeXT. Software for that beast was expensive.
My point was that there never would be any $10 shareware programs if the only way you could distribute them was on $50 MO disks. The Internet was not then what it is today, and companies like Public Brand software who distributed shareware, did the distributing on floppies.
Note that Sun boxes were selling like hotcakes at the time.
Let's see, about the time the NeXT started selling, Sun would have been shipping the SPARCstation 1, which was several times faster than the 68000-family workstations it competed against while not being very expensive. Sounds like a recipe for success to me.
Guess what? NO FLOPPY!
Are you sure? The SPARCstation 1 had a floppy; see
this web page.
The floppy was on the side, where it wasn't obvious, but it was there.
But never mind all that. NeXT may have shipped the first cube with no floppy drive, but they added one later and from then on, as long as they made computers, the computers had a floppy disk drive.
NeXT originally sold into universities and the financial market. Those people had ethernet
True, but NeXT really wanted to sell to business people in general. Lack of floppies was one barrier that kept businesses from buying NeXT, and it was just dumb.
Do you really think NeXT sat down and said: "Our business plan is to sell only to people who have live Ethernet connections to the Internet"? At the time, that would have been dramatically dumb.
Some original cube models did ship with a SCSI hard disk in addition to the MO drive.
True, but that was extra cost. Tech-savvy people buying NeXT computers would spring for the hard drive.
I really think GNOME is the future. People laugh at me (not that they didn't before)... they say Windows is going to rule forever, or that the Mac is the only platform with any chance to topple Windows. But it's gonna be GNOME.
I don't think KDE is going to dry up and blow away, either. I think both GNOME and KDE will be around forever; this isn't an anti-KDE troll.
GNOME can be made to run on anything: Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, even Windows. It has lower system requirements than OS X; you can install GNOME and all the KDE libraries and run any GNOME or KDE application, and it will still run in less than 128MB of RAM. The former Mac developers at Eazel are working to make a GNOME environment every bit as slick and polished as an Apple environment. The only thing we need are more apps, and we are getting them.
The very first thing he did, at NeXT, was spend an absurd amount of money for a logo. The first NeXT computer was a cube, 12"x12"x12" -- why? No technical reason; Jobs insisted it had to be a cube and it had to be that size. The first cube shipped with no floppy drive and no hard disk; instead it had an MO drive, media cost $50 each. In those days people actually used floppy drives to send things to each other; Jobs figured they didn't need to, or else he figured they wouldn't mind using $50 MO disks to ship a $10 shareware program, or else (my choice) Jobs just wasn't thinking. And while you could run from the MO it made things slow. The worst sin: Jobs found out at Apple that if you try to sell a computer called the Lisa for $10,000 that it doesn't work; at NeXT he tried to sell the cube for $10,000 and it didn't work.
The first NeXT box that actually got some traction was the "pizza box". It had a hard disk, it had a floppy disk, and if I recall correctly it was much less than $10,000.
In other words, the NeXT computers as conceived by Jobs were flops, and the worst features were the ones Jobs insisted upon. (Not unlike the Mac situation: the original Mac, as conceived by Jobs, was a totally closed box completely controlled by Apple; the Mac didn't become really successful until the Mac II shipped, with expandability, color, hard drives, etc.)
I don't think Steve Jobs is a genius. I give him some credit, because Apple seems to be doing okay at the moment and he seems to have had a lot to do with that. But looking at his history, he has done much more that was stupid than brilliant.
I have, and I love RAM prices lately. But that's beside the point: the requirements for OS X are steep.
OS X requires you to throw all these resources at it, and I'll bet it will still be a bit sluggish. And I really want to see how it performs on the first iMac computers. (I'll bet that Linux running GNOME would be snappy-fast on even the very first iMacs.)
You mean Microsoft BASIC, ported to the Apple II family? Not a good example of user friendly, and not a good example of Apple.
Then the Macintosh.
That's more like it. The Mac was developed by people who really cared about stuff being user-friendly.
All this when PCs were still command line as a standard.
Microsoft made a mistake when they tried to make Windows run on the common PC hardware available in 1984. It would have saved them so much time if they had simply ginned up new hardware as Apple did.
But don't forget that Apple's legacy also includes repeatedly screwing over their own loyal customers. The engineers who care about user-friendliness probably aren't evil. The management probably are. Apple as a company definitely is.
One of the reasons for me is that they failed to open-source their enhancements. Therefore, they actually did _nothing_ for Linux, just for themselves. When RedHat does something great, everyone benefits. However, if Corel does something similar, all you get is Corel lock-in, which is one of the main things that Linux people are trying to avoid.
Exactly. I actually bought Corel Linux. I knew little about Linux at the time... once I figured out that Corel Linux was based on this distro called Debian, and that Corel had some lock-in proprietary stuff, I became non-interested in Corel and went to Debian. (And I'm very happy with Debian; apt-get rocks!)
The ironic thing is that I bought Corel Linux because it is so easy to install, but I was unable to install it. The Corel Linux graphical installer in 1.0 would choke and die on any GeForce video card, and there was no text-based installer. The web site contained a suggested workaround: get a non-GeForce video card, swap it in to your system, install, swap the GeForce back in... I never got around to it.
subtitles aren't how the creator of the original intended you to watch the movie
And random Americans aren't who the voices were supposed to be done by.
Subtitles let me hear and enjoy the original voice-acting. It's hard for me to imagine anyone but Megumi Hayashibara doing the voice for
Nuku Nuku,
for example. And I'm a Megumi fan -- if a movie has Megumi-chan doing a voice, that's a plus that makes me more interested in the movie. If she sings, so much the better.
The best thing about DVDs is that you get the sub version and the dub version at the same time. When small kids come over, I wish I had a dub version of Nuku Nuku to show them, but when I watch I want the subtitles. (If and when I see a DVD of Nuku Nuku I'll buy it.)
What I want to know is whether you will be able to order a G4 Cube with 64MB of memory and a GeForce3 card. Then your system memory and your video memory will be equal... I've never had a computer like that!
When the GeForce4 comes out with 128MB of memory, do you think Apple will still be selling G4 computers with 64MB? That would be even funnier.
I
I'm not sure you realize this, but it sounds like a lot of the fluffy effects will be turned off when OS X is installed on a G3 machine.
That's news to me. I read an article a few months ago saying that the original Bondi Blue iMacs were not going to be supported; either that was in error, or Apple improved things. Thanks for the correction.
Anyway, you can use pre-iMac PPC Macs for useful stuff with Linux, and they won't ever be supported for OS X.
I have to wonder just whether the effort put forth in the LinuxPPC project is worth the effort.
Maybe it isn't worth the effort to you, but it is worth the effort to the people actually working on it. Different people have different attitudes.
One good thing about Linux on PPC: you can use an old PPC box for something useful. Mac OS X is a seriously heavyweight system. To run it you need a fast PPC chip, minimum 128 MB of RAM, and 3D acceleration. There is no chance of ever running this on any computer as old as the first iMac, or older.
Maybe for the very newest Mac computers, OS X will be better in every way than Linux. But for the marginal computers, the ones just barely fast enough to run OS X, I'll bet GNOME or KDE on Linux would be snappier and thus more fun to use.
Slashdot Mirror
"This computer is TUXBOX Level 1 compatible" If you see a sticker like that, you know that any TUXBOX Level 1 game will just run on that computer.
Here is a possible spec for TUXBOX:
128 MB of RAM or more
CPU chip of 600 MHz or over
Sound Blaster Live (any version: Value, Platinum, whatever)
any video card from a (very short) TUXBOX-compatible list
CD-ROM drive or DVD drive
Then a TUXBOX CD will load a Linux kernel, X, and anything else needed for the game. Then it will run the game. So, you can boot from the game, or boot from a generic TUXBOX boot floppy, and just play.
They should then make a TUXBOX CD disk that has about 30 games. This disk would boot to a loader that lets you choose which game. You should be able to play multiple games without rebooting. Any save game info can be saved on a floppy disk.
And, if you are already running Linux, you know you can just pop in any TUXBOX CD and play, without having to reboot.
If this were to happen, lots of small computer shops would burn TUXBOX CDs and give them away with the computers they sell. The computers would not even need to have Linux installed.
If the TUXBOX spec got some momentum going, they would have a small but nice revenue stream certifying computers as TUXBOX compatible. At that point, maybe someone would actually fund a company to make consoles.
steveha
car: primary purpose - accelerating a ton of metal at dangerous speed (on the ground, which is where small children play)
We wouldn't have interstate crime much if it weren't for cars. Every time a person is carried off in a car by a serial killer or kidnapper, you might expect to see the car maker sued as an "enabler". But you don't see that.
You don't see that because people understand that cars are much more often used for buying groceries than for carrying off victims. No jury will buy this "enabler" nonsense.
And the same thing turns out to be true of guns. Well over 99% of all guns never hurt any human being; they are used for target shooting, self-defense, simple collecting, etc. Thousands of guns are used each year for bad things, but there are millions of guns in the country. The problem is that you can get juries to buy this "enabler" nonsense because many folks these days don't own or even understand guns.
I'm sure it is possible for the theme editor to be used to infringe Apple copyrights, but the same thing is true of any screenshot utility. Will Apple go after those folks as "enablers" next?
steveha
US: O Chinese government, we apologize.
CHINA: It is a good apology. But we have decided that the apology is not enough. Next you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... with... a herring! [dramatic chord]
steveha (apologies to Monty Python)
steveha
Okay. You are right.
I'm using the latest Debian stuff. When it's all nice and stable it will all be released under the name of "Woody", thus in my mind I'm using Woody, albeit I'm using the unstable branch. But I should use the names the same way everyone else does!
The "stable" version of Debian right now is Potato. Thus "stable" and "Potato" both refer to the same collection of packages.
The "testing" version of Debian is called Woody. When testing is over and Woody is released, then Potato will be retired and Woody will become the new stable. A new code name will be chosen for the next Debian (from the movie Toy Story if the tradition holds), and that new code name will be the new testing.
The "unstable" version of Debian is called "Sid" and always will be called that. (Sid was the boy who enjoyed destroying and mangling toys. Of all characters in Toy Story he was the clear choice for a code name for unstable!)
If you want the latest packages, you should apt-get from unstable. If you want fairly recent packages and you want less risk, you should apt-get from testing. When a package has been in unstable for a while and it tests out okay, it gets migrated over into testing. Thus, there is a huge overlap between the packages in testing and the ones in unstable: every package in testing is in unstable, but the version in unstable might be a more recent version.
Because testing and unstable are fairly close, you can apt-get from unstable, and then switch back to testing if you like. This can be a convenient way to grab a few packages you want that are too new to be in testing yet.
I have found that unstable hasn't lived up to its name; I haven't had any bad problems with it yet, and I really want to get each update to GNOME as soon as possible, so I'm using unstable right now.
steveha
The Progeny guys don't support the full 3000+ packages available for Debian. (Right now if you were to burn CDs for the latest version of Debian it would take 4 CDs to hold all the packages; Progeny fits on a single CD.) They have put together a working, tested set of packages that make a pretty darn nice installation, and they will keep it up to date. For many people Progeny will provide them with everything they will ever need.
Since Progeny is still Debian, you can easily add packages from the main Debian distribution if you want something that Progeny doesn't provide. And if you ever tire of Progeny or they ever disappear, you can just switch smoothly over to using the main Debian distribution. So there really is no down side to choosing Progeny.
And, by the way, Progeny is donating all their new stuff back to the Debian community. So the improved installer should find its way to Debian. (Probably not for the Woody release, but the one after that should have it.)
For my friends who get interested in Linux, I am burning Progeny CDs and giving them away.
steveha
The important thing about Progeny is this: it is Debian.
They didn't screw anything up or glue in something proprietary. It's just a particular set of Debian packages with a nice installer.
Thus, once you have Progeny set up, you can point your sources.list file at a Debian mirror, and start using apt-get against the Woody package set, and you are using Woody.
Their installer does create a few icons on the desktop that say Progeny, but if you were really gung-ho about having a non-Progeny Woody system you could delete those.
As for going back to Potato, it would be just the same as taking a Woody system back to Potato. I have never done it but it would be possible. Just point sources.list at a Potato package set, and use apt-get to get the Potato packages. You will have to force apt-get to "downgrade" since the versions of the packages will be older, but that functionality is supported. It would be something of a pain, and I don't know why you would bother; I'm running Woody unstable and I'm extremely happy with it.
steveha
So, if there is no intellectual property, then I can do anything I want with any software, right? I can take emacs, modify it into a proprietary version, and sell my version without giving away the source code?
After all, it is the intellectual property laws that the GPL is making use of. If they are ever truly destroyed, then effectively all software is public domain. If you are right, RMS can save a lot of time by just releasing all FSF code as public domain instead of GPL.
I know the knee-jerk capitalists who don't understand Marxism will shriek
I guess I don't understand Marxism. Please provide me with some examples I can study. Exactly where in the world has Marxism ever been successfully tried? Where have the predictions of Marx ever come to pass?
For example, the U.S.S.R. had a system where a privileged elite ran the country with dictatorial powers; this system was called Communism, but I don't think Marx would say it was what he had in mind. Am I wrong, and that was a good example of Communism? Or is real Communism still in our future?
It's time for these companies to pay the piper.
Maybe you think so, but they will decide whether they want to pay or not. Free software is free. The companies that modified GPL code have released their modifications to the community; they have no obligation to do anything more than that.
steveha
We should judge Linus by what he says and what he does. If you add everything up, that 'R' doesn't mean much against everything else. As far as I can tell, Linus actually is pretty humble.
And you are assuming that Linus came up with that title, which may not be correct. The publishing company may have come up with the title, or at least the subtitle (the part that contains that 'R' word).
steveha
It's not obsolete if people still want to use it. If people have useful Hypercard stacks and don't want to give them up, who are you to say they are wrong?
"If it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid."
steveha
I have high hopes for Ogg Vorbis.
We /. types like it because it's free. Big Business will like it because they will never have to pay anything to use it. The only people who won't like it will be the ones who want to lock up the music, but in the long run they are doomed to fail.
(Given a choice between paying for music in WMF format and paying for music in a CD format, I will buy the CD every time. I predict that enough other people will do the same to ensure that WMF never takes over the world.)
steveha
The various distros set up the system in slightly different ways. It would be a lot of work to write a tool that would scan through a Red Hat install, extract all the config info, and magically configure and install Debian for you. Worse, the tool would have to understand different versions of Red Hat, and Mandrake, and etc.
The Debian installer gets the job done, but it isn't newbie-friendly. The good part is that you have complete control over everything it is doing. The bad part is it is constantly asking you for input about things a newbie might not understand. (But if you choose the defaults you can perhaps get through an install without full understanding of what is going on.)
The very good thing about Debian is that you only install it once. After you have your Debian system up, you just keep running apt-get and upgrading things. When Debian comes out with a new release, you can even use apt-get to upgrade to that. (The command is "apt-get dist-upgrade".)
By the way, if you want to try Debian and you are not looking forward to the installer, you might want to check out Progeny Debian. Progeny Debian is a version of Debian that has an improved installer. Unlike what Corel did with Debian, Progeny is sharing all the improvements with the Debian community so that future versions of Debian can have a cool installer too.
steveha
Well, let's see... important, valuable applications came out for Win32 only, and OS/2 couldn't run them. Thus the advantages of OS/2 were not interesting to any user who wanted to run, say, Photoshop.
In other words, people had to choose between running OS/2 and running certain applications. This made it harder for them to choose OS/2.
It is clear to me that the more backwards-compatible free OSes can become, the easier it becomes for a person to choose a free OS instead of Windows.
And, consider this. Right now, game companies write only for Windows, and test only on Windows. If WINE and WineX get good, and really large numbers of gamers start running games under WineX, the game companies might start testing under WineX. Wouldn't it be cool to have the games work under WineX out of the box, instead of having to hack WineX to make them work? You might even see game companies making contributions to WineX.
If you want game companies to write native games for free OSes, first you need a really large number of desktops running the free OSes. One way to grow the number of desktops is really good backward compatibility.
This is good news, I am certain.
steveha
My point was that there never would be any $10 shareware programs if the only way you could distribute them was on $50 MO disks. The Internet was not then what it is today, and companies like Public Brand software who distributed shareware, did the distributing on floppies.
Note that Sun boxes were selling like hotcakes at the time.
Let's see, about the time the NeXT started selling, Sun would have been shipping the SPARCstation 1, which was several times faster than the 68000-family workstations it competed against while not being very expensive. Sounds like a recipe for success to me.
Guess what? NO FLOPPY!
Are you sure? The SPARCstation 1 had a floppy; see this web page. The floppy was on the side, where it wasn't obvious, but it was there.
But never mind all that. NeXT may have shipped the first cube with no floppy drive, but they added one later and from then on, as long as they made computers, the computers had a floppy disk drive.
steveha
True, but NeXT really wanted to sell to business people in general. Lack of floppies was one barrier that kept businesses from buying NeXT, and it was just dumb.
Do you really think NeXT sat down and said: "Our business plan is to sell only to people who have live Ethernet connections to the Internet"? At the time, that would have been dramatically dumb.
Some original cube models did ship with a SCSI hard disk in addition to the MO drive.
True, but that was extra cost. Tech-savvy people buying NeXT computers would spring for the hard drive.
steveha
I don't think KDE is going to dry up and blow away, either. I think both GNOME and KDE will be around forever; this isn't an anti-KDE troll.
GNOME can be made to run on anything: Linux, BSD, commercial UNIX, even Windows. It has lower system requirements than OS X; you can install GNOME and all the KDE libraries and run any GNOME or KDE application, and it will still run in less than 128MB of RAM. The former Mac developers at Eazel are working to make a GNOME environment every bit as slick and polished as an Apple environment. The only thing we need are more apps, and we are getting them.
steveha
I'm sorry, but his stupidity was always there.
The very first thing he did, at NeXT, was spend an absurd amount of money for a logo. The first NeXT computer was a cube, 12"x12"x12" -- why? No technical reason; Jobs insisted it had to be a cube and it had to be that size. The first cube shipped with no floppy drive and no hard disk; instead it had an MO drive, media cost $50 each. In those days people actually used floppy drives to send things to each other; Jobs figured they didn't need to, or else he figured they wouldn't mind using $50 MO disks to ship a $10 shareware program, or else (my choice) Jobs just wasn't thinking. And while you could run from the MO it made things slow. The worst sin: Jobs found out at Apple that if you try to sell a computer called the Lisa for $10,000 that it doesn't work; at NeXT he tried to sell the cube for $10,000 and it didn't work.
The first NeXT box that actually got some traction was the "pizza box". It had a hard disk, it had a floppy disk, and if I recall correctly it was much less than $10,000.
In other words, the NeXT computers as conceived by Jobs were flops, and the worst features were the ones Jobs insisted upon. (Not unlike the Mac situation: the original Mac, as conceived by Jobs, was a totally closed box completely controlled by Apple; the Mac didn't become really successful until the Mac II shipped, with expandability, color, hard drives, etc.)
I don't think Steve Jobs is a genius. I give him some credit, because Apple seems to be doing okay at the moment and he seems to have had a lot to do with that. But looking at his history, he has done much more that was stupid than brilliant.
steveha
I have, and I love RAM prices lately. But that's beside the point: the requirements for OS X are steep.
OS X requires you to throw all these resources at it, and I'll bet it will still be a bit sluggish. And I really want to see how it performs on the first iMac computers. (I'll bet that Linux running GNOME would be snappy-fast on even the very first iMacs.)
steveha
You mean Microsoft BASIC, ported to the Apple II family? Not a good example of user friendly, and not a good example of Apple.
Then the Macintosh.
That's more like it. The Mac was developed by people who really cared about stuff being user-friendly.
All this when PCs were still command line as a standard.
Microsoft made a mistake when they tried to make Windows run on the common PC hardware available in 1984. It would have saved them so much time if they had simply ginned up new hardware as Apple did.
But don't forget that Apple's legacy also includes repeatedly screwing over their own loyal customers. The engineers who care about user-friendliness probably aren't evil. The management probably are. Apple as a company definitely is.
steveha
Exactly. I actually bought Corel Linux. I knew little about Linux at the time... once I figured out that Corel Linux was based on this distro called Debian, and that Corel had some lock-in proprietary stuff, I became non-interested in Corel and went to Debian. (And I'm very happy with Debian; apt-get rocks!)
The ironic thing is that I bought Corel Linux because it is so easy to install, but I was unable to install it. The Corel Linux graphical installer in 1.0 would choke and die on any GeForce video card, and there was no text-based installer. The web site contained a suggested workaround: get a non-GeForce video card, swap it in to your system, install, swap the GeForce back in... I never got around to it.
steveha
And random Americans aren't who the voices were supposed to be done by.
Subtitles let me hear and enjoy the original voice-acting. It's hard for me to imagine anyone but Megumi Hayashibara doing the voice for Nuku Nuku, for example. And I'm a Megumi fan -- if a movie has Megumi-chan doing a voice, that's a plus that makes me more interested in the movie. If she sings, so much the better.
The best thing about DVDs is that you get the sub version and the dub version at the same time. When small kids come over, I wish I had a dub version of Nuku Nuku to show them, but when I watch I want the subtitles. (If and when I see a DVD of Nuku Nuku I'll buy it.)
steveha
When the GeForce4 comes out with 128MB of memory, do you think Apple will still be selling G4 computers with 64MB? That would be even funnier.
steveha
That's news to me. I read an article a few months ago saying that the original Bondi Blue iMacs were not going to be supported; either that was in error, or Apple improved things. Thanks for the correction.
Anyway, you can use pre-iMac PPC Macs for useful stuff with Linux, and they won't ever be supported for OS X.
steveha
Maybe it isn't worth the effort to you, but it is worth the effort to the people actually working on it. Different people have different attitudes.
One good thing about Linux on PPC: you can use an old PPC box for something useful. Mac OS X is a seriously heavyweight system. To run it you need a fast PPC chip, minimum 128 MB of RAM, and 3D acceleration. There is no chance of ever running this on any computer as old as the first iMac, or older.
Maybe for the very newest Mac computers, OS X will be better in every way than Linux. But for the marginal computers, the ones just barely fast enough to run OS X, I'll bet GNOME or KDE on Linux would be snappier and thus more fun to use.
steveha
steveha