Really, this has nothing whatsoever to do with open source, other than that you're claiming that you want it.
For a disk of crossover apps, you're limiting yourself by only including open source software. How about stuff that's just free? How about demos of software that's actually commercial, closed-source, but available on both platforms?
Weaning someone off of Windows for Linux is one thing. Weaning someone off of all non-open-source (and by whose definition?) software is entirely something else. Make sure you're clear on what you want to do.
Having said that, the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo (and soon game) is available in Windows and Linux versions. Why not throw that on?
How many people are going to actually take a drive in on warranty after four years? Virtually none. If they honour it, then after a three week wait you get back a brand spanking new (actually refurbished) 2GB drive. WOO!
The company wins for having a comprehensive warranty, but the nature of computing means that they almost never have to honour it.
90dB is a bit of a stretch, but not necessarily that much.
Excellent quality vinyl, when played on top quality equipment, can have a noise floor of -85dB or so. Yeah, I know Bels are log, but that's still pretty impressive! Also, much better than most people realise.
More typically however, vinyl has a noise floor of -70 or -75dB.
For someone to go through this much effort without finding out exactly how the grooves are cut in the first place left me scratching my head too. There's quite a potential for collecting music from records here.
On the other hand, it's been done by others. There's an extremely expensive turntable that uses a reflective laser pickup instead of a stylus/cartidge to read the record. Great for museums. There have also been interesting SF stories about similar ideas in the past.
However, an entire record read with a common scanner? Cool! Even better, it's conceivable that image manipulation could repair certain defects in records far better than audio filters (analog or digital).
You're right, of course. There aren't enough Linux users willing to buy apps to drive a developer into writing/porting for Linux.
HOWEVER, that's not a reason that we should be aggressively supporting Windows, when we're actually using Wine. If a company sells stuff for Windows, they "know" that it's being run on Windows, and they'll keep developing...for Windows.
If they know that some small percentage of their user base is working extra hard to run it without Windows, then maybe they'll consider talking to RedHat (etc.) about partnering on projects. In two years the numbers might be there, and if they've been seeing a steady increase in the number of people using Wine over those two years, they're more likely to consider developing for Linux than if suddenly someone tells them that there are enough linux geeks to make a profit from.
All I'm suggesting is to make sure that the market is fairly represented. Don't let the number crunchers declare that no one would ever buy a Linux game, because every game sold has been to a Windows user. THEN, if the numbers will support it, companies might start doing the coding for Linux.
As for Loki, a corrupt company is a corrupt company, no matter what happens.
"Wine helps Linux break out of the Chicken / Egg stage..."
Unfortunately, this is not the case. IBM tried that path with OS/2 for Windows. For a few years I actually ran OS/2, and ran all of my applications under it. All of my _Windows_ applications, that is. Most of the time they worked really well, and sometimes they were a bit of a pain.
Ultimately, I gave up. OS/2 was a VASTLY superior OS, but I was using it to run the same old crap, and working harder at it. It just wasn't worth it. Eventually, the fact that you could run Windows applications on it was one of things that led to no native apps.
Ironically, Wine is part of the problem and the solution at the same time.
Seriously, though. You go out, you buy a WINDOWS game, you spend ages trying to get it running under Linux/Wine, and what happens? The developer sees huge sales for Windows-only games. Result? They keep making games for Windows, and you have to keep playing with Wine.
A much better solution would be games under Linux of course. As a useful intermediate though, how about this idea: Everyone who plays a game through Wine should write to the developer and explain to them that they'd much rather the game was written for Linux in the first place. A thousand letters (or ten thousand) is hard to completely ignore.
There has been a lot of discussion about refering to the New York Times for articles (due to the required registration), and the usual response is that the stories aren't available elsewhere.
Now we have a story that is submitted coming from the WP, and Michael has to throw in an entirely gratuitous link to th NYT again. Time to stop refering to those twits!
Come to think of it, my opinion of Michael goes down every time he adds something to a story, so much so that he's down to about 4JK[1] now. Time to start focusing on delivering the stories without the added commentary, Michael!
Bah. End of rant. Thanks for reading.
[1] The JK scale is a measure of an editor's relative worth vs. Jon Katz. All unknown editors start at 10JK (ten times as relevant, readable, and rational as J.K. himself) and move up or down, depending on performance. Once an editor drops below 2JK, he or she gets ignored.
Heh. Well I'm a sysadmin and maintenance analyst, which means I get called in to work on an unknown system which is braindamaged. Since they're usually big servers, they almost never have framebuffers, meaning I'm usually stuck with a terminal session, or in a surprising number of cases, a real, honest, hardwired VT-102. (rarely a VT-52, sometimes a VT-420)
vi is always there, and always works. Since it is massively useful, consistent across the Unix universe (more or less:-), and is all I need (I'm not a developer), I can't be bothered with a proper IDE.
Oh man, my brain went on vacation and didn't tell me!
OK, Mozilla is either really slow to load, or almost exactly as fast as IE, depending on if you have 'quickload' turned on. Basically it preloads most of the browser into memory, just like IE does on bootup.
Hmmm, curious. I've not played with Opera for a while, but I'll assume it _is_ the fastest, since I've heard that so many times. (and very little opposition to that statement)
But of the ones I've used, I find the speed goes:
Mozilla IE NS6 NS4
NS4 is _dog_ slow for anything other than simple HTML pages, and usually looks like hell. IE is admittedly pretty close to Mozilla. I hate the interface, the anti-standard stance, and the company, but it's fairly fast.
Any version of NS6 I've seen has been such a disaster considering that it's based on Mozilla, that I've quit telling people it exists.
Heh. I went to University with the creator of BtAF, when it was just a local campus strip. Bad art, demented stories, and non-sequitors. Not bad for campus comics!:-)
But now it's a comic with a near-cult following. I don't quite understand how that happened. Strange days.
"The rules of blackjack are designed as such that you make a decision as to how much money you want to bet. You receive your cards, and make a decision as to what will be done."
Ah, see there's the thing. There is no one single set of blackjack rules. In fact one could get into a philosophical discussion about the Platonic Ideal of blackjack, vs. what really is done.
Here's the thing. If you nicely asked at a casino, I would imagine they'd give you a written copy of their house rules and their game rules. If they write into the blackjack rules that card counting isn't allowed, then within the confines of their casino, that makes it so for the game.
" A University can not require a specific computer language and remain accredited. Those are the rules."
Yes they are. IN THE FUCKING USA!!!!
Waterloo is not accredited in the US for the same reason that Oxford and Cambridge (UK) aren't. Neither is the University of Hong Kong, amazingly. They're not in the US. They don't get US accreditation. This isn't a difficult concept.
That's always been my thought. However, what happens when the game doesn't work unless it can get to Sony? You will take it back. I will take it back. 99.99% of the population will play it, happily submitting all of their demographics to Sony.
So the end result is that the only people who would do something about it get marginallised, and can only avoid it by not playing. Whee.
"Remeber the orignial TV set? It had a round screen, B&W, and was about 4" in diameter."
Exactly right. And there are two important points about those little 4" TVs:
1) Nobody made the manufacture of those TVs illegal. 2) Those little TVs will STILL TO THIS DAY pick up broadcast stations!!!
With this legislation, all old TVs will be (a) illegal to manufacture, and (b) unusable. That's simply not something that congress should be messing with.
Ummm...the display speed of the console is (more or less) fixed at 9600-baud. That's why it's slow. Once Solaris takes over, it can do whatever it wants, of course.
Many (Most? All?) of Sun's high end video cards are made by ATI currently. Sun and ATI co-write the drivers. These are not commodity cards, but they are commodity chips.
"Past history is a very good indicator of future performance."
True, with some caveats.
"Its up to Trident to overcome their past history."
Also true. (although their history is for making really really cheap cards which they in fact did fairly well)
"Until then, they deserve the negative response they get."
Not really. They deserve some suspicion certainly, but they don't deserve to be written off wholesale, sight-unseen. They deserve the chance to overcome their past, whether or not they can.
For the record, ATI drivers for Solaris are flawless.
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Really, this has nothing whatsoever to do with open source, other than that you're claiming that you want it.
For a disk of crossover apps, you're limiting yourself by only including open source software. How about stuff that's just free? How about demos of software that's actually commercial, closed-source, but available on both platforms?
Weaning someone off of Windows for Linux is one thing. Weaning someone off of all non-open-source (and by whose definition?) software is entirely something else. Make sure you're clear on what you want to do.
Having said that, the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo (and soon game) is available in Windows and Linux versions. Why not throw that on?
Ah, but it IS cost effective!
How many people are going to actually take a drive in on warranty after four years? Virtually none. If they honour it, then after a three week wait you get back a brand spanking new (actually refurbished) 2GB drive. WOO!
The company wins for having a comprehensive warranty, but the nature of computing means that they almost never have to honour it.
90dB is a bit of a stretch, but not necessarily that much.
Excellent quality vinyl, when played on top quality equipment, can have a noise floor of -85dB or so. Yeah, I know Bels are log, but that's still pretty impressive! Also, much better than most people realise.
More typically however, vinyl has a noise floor of -70 or -75dB.
For someone to go through this much effort without finding out exactly how the grooves are cut in the first place left me scratching my head too. There's quite a potential for collecting music from records here.
On the other hand, it's been done by others. There's an extremely expensive turntable that uses a reflective laser pickup instead of a stylus/cartidge to read the record. Great for museums. There have also been interesting SF stories about similar ideas in the past.
However, an entire record read with a common scanner? Cool! Even better, it's conceivable that image manipulation could repair certain defects in records far better than audio filters (analog or digital).
Neat!
You're right, of course. There aren't enough Linux users willing to buy apps to drive a developer into writing/porting for Linux.
HOWEVER, that's not a reason that we should be aggressively supporting Windows, when we're actually using Wine. If a company sells stuff for Windows, they "know" that it's being run on Windows, and they'll keep developing...for Windows.
If they know that some small percentage of their user base is working extra hard to run it without Windows, then maybe they'll consider talking to RedHat (etc.) about partnering on projects. In two years the numbers might be there, and if they've been seeing a steady increase in the number of people using Wine over those two years, they're more likely to consider developing for Linux than if suddenly someone tells them that there are enough linux geeks to make a profit from.
All I'm suggesting is to make sure that the market is fairly represented. Don't let the number crunchers declare that no one would ever buy a Linux game, because every game sold has been to a Windows user. THEN, if the numbers will support it, companies might start doing the coding for Linux.
As for Loki, a corrupt company is a corrupt company, no matter what happens.
"Wine helps Linux break out of the Chicken / Egg stage..."
Unfortunately, this is not the case. IBM tried that path with OS/2 for Windows. For a few years I actually ran OS/2, and ran all of my applications under it. All of my _Windows_ applications, that is. Most of the time they worked really well, and sometimes they were a bit of a pain.
Ultimately, I gave up. OS/2 was a VASTLY superior OS, but I was using it to run the same old crap, and working harder at it. It just wasn't worth it. Eventually, the fact that you could run Windows applications on it was one of things that led to no native apps.
Ironically, Wine is part of the problem and the solution at the same time.
How's THAT for an eye-catching headline? :-)
Seriously, though. You go out, you buy a WINDOWS game, you spend ages trying to get it running under Linux/Wine, and what happens? The developer sees huge sales for Windows-only games. Result? They keep making games for Windows, and you have to keep playing with Wine.
A much better solution would be games under Linux of course. As a useful intermediate though, how about this idea: Everyone who plays a game through Wine should write to the developer and explain to them that they'd much rather the game was written for Linux in the first place. A thousand letters (or ten thousand) is hard to completely ignore.
OK, this is way offtopic, I'll admit.
There has been a lot of discussion about refering to the New York Times for articles (due to the required registration), and the usual response is that the stories aren't available elsewhere.
Now we have a story that is submitted coming from the WP, and Michael has to throw in an entirely gratuitous link to th NYT again. Time to stop refering to those twits!
Come to think of it, my opinion of Michael goes down every time he adds something to a story, so much so that he's down to about 4JK[1] now. Time to start focusing on delivering the stories without the added commentary, Michael!
Bah. End of rant. Thanks for reading.
[1] The JK scale is a measure of an editor's relative worth vs. Jon Katz. All unknown editors start at 10JK (ten times as relevant, readable, and rational as J.K. himself) and move up or down, depending on performance. Once an editor drops below 2JK, he or she gets ignored.
Heh. Well I'm a sysadmin and maintenance analyst, which means I get called in to work on an unknown system which is braindamaged. Since they're usually big servers, they almost never have framebuffers, meaning I'm usually stuck with a terminal session, or in a surprising number of cases, a real, honest, hardwired VT-102. (rarely a VT-52, sometimes a VT-420)
:-), and is all I need (I'm not a developer), I can't be bothered with a proper IDE.
vi is always there, and always works. Since it is massively useful, consistent across the Unix universe (more or less
Oh man, my brain went on vacation and didn't tell me!
OK, Mozilla is either really slow to load, or almost exactly as fast as IE, depending on if you have 'quickload' turned on. Basically it preloads most of the browser into memory, just like IE does on bootup.
Hmmm, curious. I've not played with Opera for a while, but I'll assume it _is_ the fastest, since I've heard that so many times. (and very little opposition to that statement)
But of the ones I've used, I find the speed goes:
Mozilla IE NS6 NS4
NS4 is _dog_ slow for anything other than simple HTML pages, and usually looks like hell. IE is admittedly pretty close to Mozilla. I hate the interface, the anti-standard stance, and the company, but it's fairly fast.
Any version of NS6 I've seen has been such a disaster considering that it's based on Mozilla, that I've quit telling people it exists.
Well, I'm CERTAINLY glad to hear that!!!
:-)
So when, exactly, is kdevelop going to appear in base installs of Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, IRIX, and so on?
And how are we going to magically back-implement them to all of the older platforms that are already installed?
Oh, not to mention make them available for a minimally-running system, being accessed from a remote VT-102?
Oh, silly me--kdevelop and anjuta are IDEs! vi(m) is a text editor, last time I checked. As a text editor, it's still got some life in it.
Emacs, as an editor or an IDE, also isn't quite dead yet. However, it's dying--I don't expect it to hang on for much more than 15 more years.
Ah well, that's different then! Carry on.
If. You. Don't. Like. User. Friendly. Then. Don't. Read. It.
Simple enough for you?
Some of us like it, through Illiad's strong and weak days.
Heh. I went to University with the creator of BtAF, when it was just a local campus strip. Bad art, demented stories, and non-sequitors. Not bad for campus comics! :-)
But now it's a comic with a near-cult following. I don't quite understand how that happened.
Strange days.
"The rules of blackjack are designed as such that you make a decision as to how much money you want to bet. You receive your cards, and make a decision as to what will be done."
Ah, see there's the thing. There is no one single set of blackjack rules. In fact one could get into a philosophical discussion about the Platonic Ideal of blackjack, vs. what really is done.
Here's the thing. If you nicely asked at a casino, I would imagine they'd give you a written copy of their house rules and their game rules. If they write into the blackjack rules that card counting isn't allowed, then within the confines of their casino, that makes it so for the game.
" A University can not require a specific computer language and remain accredited. Those are the rules."
Yes they are. IN THE FUCKING USA!!!!
Waterloo is not accredited in the US for the same reason that Oxford and Cambridge (UK) aren't. Neither is the University of Hong Kong, amazingly. They're not in the US. They don't get US accreditation. This isn't a difficult concept.
Card counting is not cheating? That's a really tough statement to defend or attack.
The casinos have rules that prohibit card counting. Counting cards is against the casino rules, but not necessarily against the rules of Blackjack.
Cheating? Hard to say. Grounds for getting you kicked out? Definitely, because they make the rules that say so.
Not as I read it.
It will be illegal to manufacture a TV without a digital tuner. That's what it says, and that's pretty heavyhanded.
That's always been my thought. However, what happens when the game doesn't work unless it can get to Sony? You will take it back. I will take it back. 99.99% of the population will play it, happily submitting all of their demographics to Sony.
So the end result is that the only people who would do something about it get marginallised, and can only avoid it by not playing. Whee.
You are an ass.
"Remeber the orignial TV set? It had a round screen, B&W, and was about 4" in diameter."
Exactly right. And there are two important points about those little 4" TVs:
1) Nobody made the manufacture of those TVs illegal.
2) Those little TVs will STILL TO THIS DAY pick up broadcast stations!!!
With this legislation, all old TVs will be (a) illegal to manufacture, and (b) unusable. That's simply not something that congress should be messing with.
Ummm...the display speed of the console is (more or less) fixed at 9600-baud. That's why it's slow.
Once Solaris takes over, it can do whatever it wants, of course.
Many (Most? All?) of Sun's high end video cards are made by ATI currently. Sun and ATI co-write the drivers. These are not commodity cards, but they are commodity chips.
"Past history is a very good indicator of future performance."
True, with some caveats.
"Its up to Trident to overcome their past history."
Also true. (although their history is for making really really cheap cards which they in fact did fairly well)
"Until then, they deserve the negative response they get."
Not really. They deserve some suspicion certainly, but they don't deserve to be written off wholesale, sight-unseen. They deserve the chance to overcome their past, whether or not they can.
For the record, ATI drivers for Solaris are flawless.
"This was a new laptop, off the shelf, designed for XP."
And you're bitching because it doesn't work well...under Linux?
Ah.