This is awesome, and exactly the sort of thing Open Source is great at: making projects that are geek-centric, geek-powered, and just plain A-Z geek.
Since that "geek-centric, geek-powered, and just plain A-Z geek" thing known as "The Internet" is an Open Source project, I would say your characterization and patronizing dismissal of Open Source as being for niches only is a lot of horseshit.
Glad to see you still can't comprehend logic.
1. The Internet is a network, it's not an open source project. 2. I was never patronizing *or* dismissive of open source in my post. In fact, quite the contrary! 3. Even if the internet *was* an open source project, that doesn't disprove in any way the notion that geek-things are "exactly the sort of thing Open Source is great at".
But please, don't ever change. Your buffoonery never fails to amuse.
Linux users when given a choice are even more willing to pay more than those on other Operating Systems. Windows users are cheap skates and always want something for nothing.
Correction: a small subset of Linux users are willing to pay more.
And this is a rather artificial example. There's a lot of pent up demand for gaming, so they are paying not just for the game, but for the game on Linux, in support of the few companies that toss them a bone.
It's definitely interesting that Linux users pay more, on average (and that's just *average* anyway), but it doesn't all of a sudden turn Linux users into big spenders.
My DIY setup: booksized chassis Mini ITX formfactor H67 board with Core i7 2600K and 5750 graphics board, 8GB RAM, SSD boot and multi Terabyte spindle disk.
Fantastic. This is exactly what I'm talking about. *You* built a device for *yourself*, and didn't take on any fantasy about killing Sony, MS, or Nintendo...
Oh, your subject title change? How disappointing.
"Really, my DYI setup kills Sony MS Ninteno"
No, it doesn't. Sorry to burst your bubble, but *your* PC will kill nothing. You should be happy that it works great for you, and quit with this lame gamer fanboy bullshit.
On any metric (FPS etc) or subjective criteria, any games available as console and PC totally suck compared to the PC system.
Bullshit. There are plenty of games designed for the console which translate poorly to the PC. Additionally, just being able to plop down $200-$300, pop in a disc and go is something no gaming PC can ever match. That's why it won't kill Nintendo, MS, or Sony.
Yes, you are a nerd hipster, how fantastic for you.
My point is that this is the way to approach these things. Open source, DIY, geek projects are about doing things you want to see done, not worrying about toppling the proprietary companies. If that's your goal, you're in for a shock. But if you want to make cool things to play with and work with, this is the way to go. Just look at Linux. It sucks for general, consumer desktop use, but it's fantastic for geeks to play with and to also get real work done on.
Perhaps, but open source doesn't have to be small-scale geeky DIY.
I never said it did. I said geekiness is where it excels (regardless of scale).
Take Firefox, Linux, Android, for some examples of open source software that do compete with the proprietary software.
All very geek-centric projects. Firefox and Android have found consumer success, but not because of anything to do with being open source.
Is there room in the market for a console that's more open than Xbox, PS3 or Wii?
Absolutely not, and this was the crux of my point. Nobody gives a shit outside of the nerd bunch. What practical benefit will the average person see from an open source console? Very little, if any at all. But the cost would be far more immense than the average nerd can comprehend.
I was expecting some fanboyistic "this will take on Sony and Microsoft!" or something similar. People aren't going to chose some DIY console over something where all the hard work is done for them, like has been done by Sony, MS, and Nintendo.
However, that's not what this is at all. This is awesome, and exactly the sort of thing Open Source is great at: making projects that are geek-centric, geek-powered, and just plain A-Z geek.
A 'retro-minimalist' 8-bit console using SNES controllers? What could possibly be more geek than that? It's fantastic.
My sentiments exactly. That's why I said, "the only functionality that even remotely fits this bill is the lack of Flash". In other words, not a big deal, but if anything, that's something people talk about.
No bluetooth headset.
What?
No keyboard navigation. Completely locked down, requires $99 subscription to develop. *These* are the things it's missing.
Not to 99% of the people out there. This is the exact point I'm trying to make. The things slashdot nerds care about aren't nearly as relevant as they seem to think.
If it had Flash, you'd be complaining about battery life.
Yes, I would. I don't have Flash installed on my Macs, except via Chrome. I've noted a marked improvement by not installing Flash. I'd shudder to think of the impact Flash would have on a handheld device or tablet!
The one that is only coming out through the appstore? Think about that for a while.
OH MY GOD, THEY ARE USING THEIR STORE TO SELL THEIR OS!!!
Seriously, they are moving all their software to the Mac App Store. This is a sign to you that they are about to shitcan a product, or move it to a "Pro" line? Please, explain your logic.
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it.
Isn't that what Android is supposed to be?
Newsflash: the iPad isn't crippled.
Crippled implies missed functionality. The only functionality that even remotely fits this bill is the lack of Flash, and that's more of a thing that people talk about, but end up not really missing all that much (and there are apps in the App Store that make almost all Flash sites work on the iPad). Hardly sufficient to call it "crippled" in the eyes of most people.
(I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
And while that's true for you, it's not really true for most people in any practical sense.
That's why the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch have enjoyed such great success, in spite of the cries from the slashdot crowd. Those things that matter so much to you? For most everyone else, they quite simply could care less.
How can you keep the patents a secret? If you ask for licenses, don't you generally have to list what the license is for? And even more so when you bring forth a lawsuit?
There is not a shortage of Honeycomb applications. The vast majority of 2.x Applications will run on 3.0 with no trouble. Some of the UI's are not made for 10" screens but that does not make the applications difficult to use at all. The TFA is just trolling for page hits (it's ComputerWorld, did you expect anything different).
Rubbish. Outright rubbish. The claim isn't that 2.x apps are "difficult to use", it's that they aren't as nice as apps designed for the larger screens and resolutions. What sort of self-delusion is required to believe that a UI designed for a 3-4" screen is going to be the optimal UI design for a 9+" screen?
It's truly a shame that there aren't more Honeycomb apps. All you're doing is seeing that they don't exist and declaring that they aren't desired. Not because they aren't desired (they most certainly are, by the thousands of people who have bought Android tablets), but because they don't exist, so it's simpler to just pretend you didn't want them anyway.
Exactly. We aren't asking for tablet apps because we don't need them. Everything works and looks decent.
That's just apologetics. There's no demand for Android tablet apps because there's no demand for Android tablets.
But to say that phone apps look good on a 9" screen is ludicrous. Some might, but the UI you design for 3-4" is not generally the same UI you design for 9"+. Just compare, for example, Pandora on iPhone vs on iPad.
Then what exactly is your point? Mine is that people want iOS devices more than they want Android devices. The lack of success of non-phone Android devices is evidence of this. If Android PMPs were more capable, sure there'd be more demand. But it wouldn't surpass the iPod touch, just as Android tablet demand hasn't surpassed that for the iPad.
I don't know about "should", but that's exactly what ended up happening. The individual OS's have their own names (Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, etc.), but they are all called "Linux" (well, one of those goes by GNU/Linux).
Deb and rpm handle this problem completely. Package your app and be done with it.
Do you know how selling software works? If you just throw together a.deb or.rpm, and "be done with it", you'll find an inbox full of angry customers demanding support. Oh, you packaged your.deb based on Debian Squeeze? Well, package foo upon which you software was tested doesn't work the same in Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. And never mind all the requests from Gentoo users who want to know which flags they need to set to recompile their software to fix some obscure bug that pops up when trying to run the software as installed by your.rpm.
Oh, and where does your package install to? Is it/usr/local/? Or maybe/opt/? Wherever you pick, you will piss off someone who wants it somewhere else.
And for systems that aren't based on.rpm or.deb packages, so they don't have proper dependancies? *You* might say they are ignorable, they *they* sure won't see it that way.
There is no "package your app and be done with it" in Linux.
If you can't even be bothered to do that you never would have ported you app to begin with.
And that's exactly what most software makers choose, simply not even porting it in the first place.
It's also a niche market filled with skinflints who won't pay anything for software
Yes, that's why Linux users have consistently paid more for the Humble Indie Bundle games than Mac or Windows users. We're all so cheap.
Hell, I punched in what I thought was a fair price and was downright shocked to see what Windows users were paying. There's a bunch of cheapskate bastards if I ever saw one.
How many people do you think there are that will gladly buy software with their own money who won't also run either Windows or OS X? And I say "gladly", because there are some Linux users who would reluctantly buy proprietary, binary-only software, but they don't like it. It runs counter to some of the motivation behind running Linux in the first place.
There aren't as many of you as you seem to think.
Most people who want proprietary software will run Windows or OS X. If you use Linux because it's UNIX-like, OS X is a fantastic UNIX which enjoys great third-party software support.
Otherwise, you'll have to make a choice. Stay with Linux and get almost no proprietary software (something which most Linux users won't see as a bad thing), run Windows (at least in dual-boot mode or in a VM), or buy a Mac.
The confusion comes from people who keep talking about Linux when they mean all of the extra stuff on top of the kernel.
No, the confusion is with people who think that Linux can only refer to the kernel. Even Linus doesn't play the "GNU/Linux" game.
Certainly, it would have save a lot of hassle had Linus decided to give his kernel and the GNU OS using his kernel completely different names, like Darwin and xnu. Instead, he called the kernel "Linux", named the file "vmlinux" or "vmlinuz" (depending on whether it's compressed or not).
The language may be imprecise, but you can't blame people for using the language as it exists. Just because a bunch of nerds with an aversion to ambiguity have come up with a way to be more precise doesn't make it right. It just makes a set of more specific terminology, that almost nobody uses. Not even most of the people who make a fuss about it.
After all, are you saying that you aren't also one of the "people who keep talking about Linux when they mean all of the extra stuff on top of the kernel"?
You make a good point, but come to the wrong conclusion.
The word "Linux" can be used to describe just the kernel alone, or the GNU/Linux (to use Stallman's nomenclature, which Linus Torvalds rejects) system in general. When someone says "Linux distro", they mean a "GNU/Linux distro". And, isn't Android GNU/Linux anyway? Doesn't it include the GNU tools? What it's not is a traditional GNU/X11/GNOME|KDE|other-X11-based UI/Linux Intel-compatible PC distro. I think it's not unreasonable that people don't go around being so specific, and just say "Linux".
So, Android is an OS based on a heavily modified Linux kernel, it's not a Linux distro in the way people use the term. And even if you want to play the semantics card and call it one, you still fail to answer the question posed in the article. If it makes you feel linguistically better, use the term "traditional" or "common" or something similar.
Rewrite the headline in your mind to read: Drawing the Line Between Android and the Common, Traditional Form of GNU/Linux Distro
That's what the author meant, and most people (who even know what Linux is in the first place) take as understood.
Slashdot Mirror
Since that "geek-centric, geek-powered, and just plain A-Z geek" thing known as "The Internet" is an Open Source project, I would say your characterization and patronizing dismissal of Open Source as being for niches only is a lot of horseshit.
Glad to see you still can't comprehend logic.
1. The Internet is a network, it's not an open source project.
2. I was never patronizing *or* dismissive of open source in my post. In fact, quite the contrary!
3. Even if the internet *was* an open source project, that doesn't disprove in any way the notion that geek-things are "exactly the sort of thing Open Source is great at".
But please, don't ever change. Your buffoonery never fails to amuse.
Linux users when given a choice are even more willing to pay more than those on other Operating Systems. Windows users are cheap skates and always want something for nothing.
Correction: a small subset of Linux users are willing to pay more.
And this is a rather artificial example. There's a lot of pent up demand for gaming, so they are paying not just for the game, but for the game on Linux, in support of the few companies that toss them a bone.
It's definitely interesting that Linux users pay more, on average (and that's just *average* anyway), but it doesn't all of a sudden turn Linux users into big spenders.
I don't know about you, but I approved about $7200 in RHEL subscriptions this morning.
Approving isn't the same as paying. I'm sure elrous0 wasn't talking about businesses.
My DIY setup: booksized chassis Mini ITX formfactor H67 board with Core i7 2600K and 5750 graphics board, 8GB RAM, SSD boot and multi Terabyte spindle disk.
Fantastic. This is exactly what I'm talking about. *You* built a device for *yourself*, and didn't take on any fantasy about killing Sony, MS, or Nintendo...
Oh, your subject title change? How disappointing.
"Really, my DYI setup kills Sony MS Ninteno"
No, it doesn't. Sorry to burst your bubble, but *your* PC will kill nothing. You should be happy that it works great for you, and quit with this lame gamer fanboy bullshit.
On any metric (FPS etc) or subjective criteria, any games available as console and PC totally suck compared to the PC system.
Bullshit. There are plenty of games designed for the console which translate poorly to the PC. Additionally, just being able to plop down $200-$300, pop in a disc and go is something no gaming PC can ever match. That's why it won't kill Nintendo, MS, or Sony.
But I'm glad it works for you an many others.
DIY game machines rule.
Fanboy.
It might be retro, but what does it say about open sources ability to compete against closed source? It seems it's currently over 20 years behind.
What does it matter? It's all about building stuff for ourselves.
Yes, you are a nerd hipster, how fantastic for you.
My point is that this is the way to approach these things. Open source, DIY, geek projects are about doing things you want to see done, not worrying about toppling the proprietary companies. If that's your goal, you're in for a shock. But if you want to make cool things to play with and work with, this is the way to go. Just look at Linux. It sucks for general, consumer desktop use, but it's fantastic for geeks to play with and to also get real work done on.
Perhaps, but open source doesn't have to be small-scale geeky DIY.
I never said it did. I said geekiness is where it excels (regardless of scale).
Take Firefox, Linux, Android, for some examples of open source software that do compete with the proprietary software.
All very geek-centric projects. Firefox and Android have found consumer success, but not because of anything to do with being open source.
Is there room in the market for a console that's more open than Xbox, PS3 or Wii?
Absolutely not, and this was the crux of my point. Nobody gives a shit outside of the nerd bunch. What practical benefit will the average person see from an open source console? Very little, if any at all. But the cost would be far more immense than the average nerd can comprehend.
I was expecting some fanboyistic "this will take on Sony and Microsoft!" or something similar. People aren't going to chose some DIY console over something where all the hard work is done for them, like has been done by Sony, MS, and Nintendo.
However, that's not what this is at all. This is awesome, and exactly the sort of thing Open Source is great at: making projects that are geek-centric, geek-powered, and just plain A-Z geek.
A 'retro-minimalist' 8-bit console using SNES controllers? What could possibly be more geek than that? It's fantastic.
Seriously? Flash? Who cares?
My sentiments exactly. That's why I said, "the only functionality that even remotely fits this bill is the lack of Flash". In other words, not a big deal, but if anything, that's something people talk about.
No bluetooth headset.
What?
No keyboard navigation. Completely locked down, requires $99 subscription to develop. *These* are the things it's missing.
Not to 99% of the people out there. This is the exact point I'm trying to make. The things slashdot nerds care about aren't nearly as relevant as they seem to think.
If it had Flash, you'd be complaining about battery life.
Yes, I would. I don't have Flash installed on my Macs, except via Chrome. I've noted a marked improvement by not installing Flash. I'd shudder to think of the impact Flash would have on a handheld device or tablet!
Protip: If you think Apple is about to end their highly popular Mac operating system, you just *might* be going insane.
The one that is only coming out through the appstore?
Think about that for a while.
OH MY GOD, THEY ARE USING THEIR STORE TO SELL THEIR OS!!!
Seriously, they are moving all their software to the Mac App Store. This is a sign to you that they are about to shitcan a product, or move it to a "Pro" line? Please, explain your logic.
What's even more ironic is that this is true despite the various ways that Apple has chosen to cripple the iPad. All they need to do is make something iPad-like that isn't crippled, and the people who want an iPad that isn't crippled will buy it.
Isn't that what Android is supposed to be?
Newsflash: the iPad isn't crippled.
Crippled implies missed functionality. The only functionality that even remotely fits this bill is the lack of Flash, and that's more of a thing that people talk about, but end up not really missing all that much (and there are apps in the App Store that make almost all Flash sites work on the iPad). Hardly sufficient to call it "crippled" in the eyes of most people.
(I have an iPad and like it, but the fact that I can't do shortcuts on the keyboard and can't run an interpreter on it or fork subprocesses means that it is much less useful to me than it could be.)
And while that's true for you, it's not really true for most people in any practical sense.
That's why the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch have enjoyed such great success, in spite of the cries from the slashdot crowd. Those things that matter so much to you? For most everyone else, they quite simply could care less.
How can you keep the patents a secret? If you ask for licenses, don't you generally have to list what the license is for? And even more so when you bring forth a lawsuit?
As for TFA this is just damned smart business and if it were Apple or Google doing this the fanbois would be lining up to defend it.
Looks like the same is true for MS doing it.
There is not a shortage of Honeycomb applications. The vast majority of 2.x Applications will run on 3.0 with no trouble. Some of the UI's are not made for 10" screens but that does not make the applications difficult to use at all. The TFA is just trolling for page hits (it's ComputerWorld, did you expect anything different).
Rubbish. Outright rubbish. The claim isn't that 2.x apps are "difficult to use", it's that they aren't as nice as apps designed for the larger screens and resolutions. What sort of self-delusion is required to believe that a UI designed for a 3-4" screen is going to be the optimal UI design for a 9+" screen?
It's truly a shame that there aren't more Honeycomb apps. All you're doing is seeing that they don't exist and declaring that they aren't desired. Not because they aren't desired (they most certainly are, by the thousands of people who have bought Android tablets), but because they don't exist, so it's simpler to just pretend you didn't want them anyway.
Exactly. We aren't asking for tablet apps because we don't need them. Everything works and looks decent.
That's just apologetics. There's no demand for Android tablet apps because there's no demand for Android tablets.
But to say that phone apps look good on a 9" screen is ludicrous. Some might, but the UI you design for 3-4" is not generally the same UI you design for 9"+. Just compare, for example, Pandora on iPhone vs on iPad.
Then what exactly is your point? Mine is that people want iOS devices more than they want Android devices. The lack of success of non-phone Android devices is evidence of this. If Android PMPs were more capable, sure there'd be more demand. But it wouldn't surpass the iPod touch, just as Android tablet demand hasn't surpassed that for the iPad.
People just aren't that into Android.
I don't know about "should", but that's exactly what ended up happening. The individual OS's have their own names (Slackware, Debian, Red Hat, etc.), but they are all called "Linux" (well, one of those goes by GNU/Linux).
I think you've just found Slashdot's new masthead.
Deb and rpm handle this problem completely. Package your app and be done with it.
Do you know how selling software works? If you just throw together a .deb or .rpm, and "be done with it", you'll find an inbox full of angry customers demanding support. Oh, you packaged your .deb based on Debian Squeeze? Well, package foo upon which you software was tested doesn't work the same in Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. And never mind all the requests from Gentoo users who want to know which flags they need to set to recompile their software to fix some obscure bug that pops up when trying to run the software as installed by your .rpm.
Oh, and where does your package install to? Is it /usr/local/? Or maybe /opt/? Wherever you pick, you will piss off someone who wants it somewhere else.
And for systems that aren't based on .rpm or .deb packages, so they don't have proper dependancies? *You* might say they are ignorable, they *they* sure won't see it that way.
There is no "package your app and be done with it" in Linux.
If you can't even be bothered to do that you never would have ported you app to begin with.
And that's exactly what most software makers choose, simply not even porting it in the first place.
It's also a niche market filled with skinflints who won't pay anything for software
Yes, that's why Linux users have consistently paid more for the Humble Indie Bundle games than Mac or Windows users. We're all so cheap.
Hell, I punched in what I thought was a fair price and was downright shocked to see what Windows users were paying. There's a bunch of cheapskate bastards if I ever saw one.
A few exceptions don't disprove the rule.
The reality is software for the most part is not worth much of anything
That sentiment right there sums up the average Linux user almost perfectly.
How many people do you think there are that will gladly buy software with their own money who won't also run either Windows or OS X? And I say "gladly", because there are some Linux users who would reluctantly buy proprietary, binary-only software, but they don't like it. It runs counter to some of the motivation behind running Linux in the first place.
There aren't as many of you as you seem to think.
Most people who want proprietary software will run Windows or OS X. If you use Linux because it's UNIX-like, OS X is a fantastic UNIX which enjoys great third-party software support.
Otherwise, you'll have to make a choice. Stay with Linux and get almost no proprietary software (something which most Linux users won't see as a bad thing), run Windows (at least in dual-boot mode or in a VM), or buy a Mac.
The confusion comes from people who keep talking about Linux when they mean all of the extra stuff on top of the kernel.
No, the confusion is with people who think that Linux can only refer to the kernel. Even Linus doesn't play the "GNU/Linux" game.
Certainly, it would have save a lot of hassle had Linus decided to give his kernel and the GNU OS using his kernel completely different names, like Darwin and xnu. Instead, he called the kernel "Linux", named the file "vmlinux" or "vmlinuz" (depending on whether it's compressed or not).
The language may be imprecise, but you can't blame people for using the language as it exists. Just because a bunch of nerds with an aversion to ambiguity have come up with a way to be more precise doesn't make it right. It just makes a set of more specific terminology, that almost nobody uses. Not even most of the people who make a fuss about it.
After all, are you saying that you aren't also one of the "people who keep talking about Linux when they mean all of the extra stuff on top of the kernel"?
You make a good point, but come to the wrong conclusion.
The word "Linux" can be used to describe just the kernel alone, or the GNU/Linux (to use Stallman's nomenclature, which Linus Torvalds rejects) system in general. When someone says "Linux distro", they mean a "GNU/Linux distro". And, isn't Android GNU/Linux anyway? Doesn't it include the GNU tools? What it's not is a traditional GNU/X11/GNOME|KDE|other-X11-based UI/Linux Intel-compatible PC distro. I think it's not unreasonable that people don't go around being so specific, and just say "Linux".
So, Android is an OS based on a heavily modified Linux kernel, it's not a Linux distro in the way people use the term. And even if you want to play the semantics card and call it one, you still fail to answer the question posed in the article. If it makes you feel linguistically better, use the term "traditional" or "common" or something similar.
Rewrite the headline in your mind to read: Drawing the Line Between Android and the Common, Traditional Form of GNU/Linux Distro
That's what the author meant, and most people (who even know what Linux is in the first place) take as understood.