"OpenGL doesn't just work. It just works if you have a modern nVidia card and the binary drivers. Otherwise, it works with caveats."
Which a SteamBox would solve totally. And even Windows/DirectX isn't "Just Works", here, either, and never has. It's an economics of scale problem, however.
If many devs support a certain system, then the pitfalls will become smaller as the kinks and caveats of the system gets worked out. Valve experienced this when they ported Source to Linux. That meant a lot of bugs were worked out in both nVidia, AMD and Intel drivers.
I give you one thing though; Linux is incredibly hard to support due to how the distros are handled. There are two ways one can go about it, either release the source and sell "game packs" (not as crazy as it sounds) - or have a middleman that concentrates on making.deb/.rpm packages of your game for the most popular distros. Neither option is 100%...
What many people miss out is that many middleware libraries these days allow for easy porting between Linux, Windows and OSX. Most big titles aren't locked to a single platform, either. GTA V is out for both XBox 360, PS3 and PC. That means there is an OpenGL version and any Windows-specific functions are hidden away in a software abstraction layer. That in turn means a Linux port (as in, get the damn thing up and running on a Linux box) is not only feasible, but could probably be done by two programmers in one months' time.
There are also a bunch of promising kickstarter projects, nearly all of them promise a Linux port these days. Games like Planetary Annihilation[1] or Mighty No 9[2] have got Linux ports out of the box and would be available on Steambox with 99% certainty.
So, yes, while there is a cost to porting, it's not half as huge as it used to be and it gets smaller all the time.
GMG is like Youtube. Except, you don't only post videos. You post one item, which can be any number of different media - an article or "blog post", a song, a video, a 3D-rendered image, a video game... Anything. People may comment on this item to say "Wow, nice job" or "Eww that sucks!"
Now, further imagine that all files are hosted on your own equipment.
Now, further imagine that there are thousands of these servers, and they all speak to one another, and they never require you to sign up for anything in order to comment and create "video responses" and whatnot. Sounds good yet?
1. Stop trying to control the non-commercial filesharing. The damages to creators are, at worst, about as big as trespassing on private property that isn't near a house or is actively exploited - like say, a forest. The positive effects, meanwhile, are huge and not to be neglected. Instead focus on the commercial filesharing efforts and the people making money on protected works without sharing those profits.
2. Lots of works can no longer be used because their right holders cannot be found (orphan works). In order to solve this problem, copyrighted works should be registered or face a very short copyright term on e.g. five years after publication. An extension of this idea is that economic copyright should only be allowed as long as the copyrighted works do have a substantial value, therefore we have a yearly fee of 2^x where x is the number of years a copyrighted work has been published. This ensures orphaned works become public domain, but it also ensures that copyrighted works that no longer have any commercial value also falls into public domain.
3. Copyright terms either need to be severely reduced, or there needs to be an exception clause for archivists, museums, libraries and the like to let them complete and create as complete collections of works as possible, lest our entire culture from the fifties and onward disappear.
Dude. I know what I see, and compared to Windows, Ubuntu really has it beat.
Name any hardware older than six months and chances are, Ubuntu supports it out of the box. Hardware just works, except for the notable exception of graphics drivers.
On Windows I need to run around and hunt for tonnes of software and serial numbers and whatnot. On Ubuntu, I can just apt-get it. On Windows I usually spend the first hour or so uninstalling all the crapware, though granted, crapware isn't Windows' fault, it's still a huge annoyance I do not have to deal with on Ubuntu.
Sure Ubuntu has it's warts - but for the average user? Set it up once and it just works until the hardware finally wears out...:)
"Average people have ZERO desire to use the command line and ZERO desire to edit conf files by hand. Average people want something that works, has simple buttons and icons, and is backed by good CUSTOMER SERVICE..."
So why on earth are they using Windows, which is more or less a piece of crap in all of those regards? Also I've found Ubuntu to be a much more user friendly and consistent experience than Windows alternatives, once you get over the learning threshold.
I do agree Apple is sexy-schmexy - It's like driving a sports car with an automatic gearbox and it's easy to control - as long as you're not riding on a dirt road. Problem is, as soon as you need to go on a dirt road, that car will show it's warts. But if you don't expect to be driving dirt roads much, then by all means run Apple! More people than you think need that dirt road functionality though...
Incidentally the spam filtering is only a service provided specifically because you as a customer demands it. It's easy as hell to opt-out should you want to.
No, but we're discussing the second Death Star and the shield generator around it, not the Battle of Hoth.
The shield generator on Hoth, incidentally, protected the planet from orbital planetary bombardment. It did what it was supposed to do, but could not stop ground troops from coming down to the surface and destroy it.
I'd say that the web technologies of today *is* broken - but it's more because of what the web has evolved to than anything else.
The original web was never supposed to be dynamic. It was supposed to be static pages with maybe some theming thrown around for good measure. And for a while, that worked, then came requirements of theming (CSS) and form handling (PHP) and cool effects (JS).
These days however, it's all about webapps. Few if any sites have static content, it's all in a database somewhere. HTML is merely an afterthought; noone cares whether HTML validates or not, because the pages aren't static and shit just works. The entire "presentation vs content" that was going on doesn't really exist anymore - The content has moved to the database and HTML is today only used as a presentational language. Sad but true.
Therefore I think we need to rethink and reinvent the entire web as we know it, since the current path will only lead to more and more brokenness. HTML has outlived it's purpose, it's as simple as that...
So, by creating MIR Ubuntu contributed to Wayland by giving the Gnome devs a big kick in the butt?
Well played, Canonical, well played!:)
And for the record, as long as both MIR and Wayland are more or less interoperable I don't care what's behind the hood. Both are open source and will be solid by the time they come out, so may the best implementation win. A little competition every now and then is just healthy.
Hardly. Google is also such an indexing service. Just google for whatever with the name torrent behind it. I can assure you it will be at least as effective as TPB.
They simply do not understand that they with this are chipping away at the very foundation that supports their business; their customers. They might stay afloat for a while but sooner or later something is bound to crack in a big way. I feel sad for every person this happen to, but it's unavoidable.
Yeah, it only took five freaking years to get all classic preorders filled.:)
The OpenPandora is unfortunately too little too late - it was interesting when it came out, but now? Now I can use my Android for everything I wanted to use my Pandora for...
Rowling had a day job while writing her first Potter. How would keeping copyright exactly as it is help Rowling 2.0 write her first Potter 2.0 without having a day job?
For that matter, if copyrights were to be reduced to twenty years, how would it prevent Rowling 2.0 to earn just as much money writing Potter 2.0?
Copyright is today a limitation of the consumers ownership rights. Therefore we must always ask ourselves, is it fair that they keep having this right? Why? And is their right outstepping their bounds?
It's not illegal to make a backup copy for fair use.
And I swear to god, should someone go after Byuu for taking on and finishing this monumental task, then I and many with me will pitch in the fundraiser to cover his attorney costs.
Controller: Give you that one, they sucked harder than a vietnamese prostitute. In the seventies:P
Vibration pack: Oh come ON. Nintendo introduced vibrating controllers to the console market (for PC "Force Feedback" had been available for a loooooong time). Then Sony improved it (Rumble released April 1997, Dual Shock released November 30th 1997 - 6 months after Nintendo).
One analog stick: Nintendo introduced the concept to consoles and gamepads. Before there had been joysticks but never on a controller like this. Yeah, compared to PS1 Dual Analog (and later Dual Shock) it sucked, but do remember that Nintendo had developed this already in 1995 (though the console itself turned up 1996), and Sony had the Dual Analog ready a whole year after that - well into the lifetime of the PS1, so it wasn't on every PS1 the way the N64 controller was.
Cooling: Never happened to my N64, despite having it on for 24-hour marathons of DK64. Might've been a problem with your specific unit or a specific game? Not saying it didn't happen, just that it probably wasn't a general fault.
Cartridges: Aye, they crap out when kids do that, but it's not NEARLY as bad as scratched discs. You seen the kids' DVD collection at your average family? Yeah, they would have been equally scratched in your family.
From what I remember the N64 was more powerful hardware-wise but suffered from the cartridge memory restrictions and the fact that it was hard to develop for and therefore max the performance. When you had the option of having a buttload of textures and CD-quality music on the PS1 vs few-and-compressed textures and synthesized music on the N64, the choice was rather clear. It got better with the GameCube, but 1.5GB vs 4GB again turned out to be a really painful limitation...
Slashdot Mirror
It's good as long as they use a common interface.
KDE, Gnome, XFCE and Unity all use the X display server right now.
However, with this move, some of those will use Wayland, some will use MIR, and some will be able to use both.
As long as the parts are interchangable - great. But as soon as interfaces change, it's generally bad.
"OpenGL doesn't just work. It just works if you have a modern nVidia card and the binary drivers. Otherwise, it works with caveats."
Which a SteamBox would solve totally. And even Windows/DirectX isn't "Just Works", here, either, and never has. It's an economics of scale problem, however.
If many devs support a certain system, then the pitfalls will become smaller as the kinks and caveats of the system gets worked out. Valve experienced this when they ported Source to Linux. That meant a lot of bugs were worked out in both nVidia, AMD and Intel drivers.
I give you one thing though; Linux is incredibly hard to support due to how the distros are handled. There are two ways one can go about it, either release the source and sell "game packs" (not as crazy as it sounds) - or have a middleman that concentrates on making .deb/.rpm packages of your game for the most popular distros. Neither option is 100%...
What many people miss out is that many middleware libraries these days allow for easy porting between Linux, Windows and OSX. Most big titles aren't locked to a single platform, either. GTA V is out for both XBox 360, PS3 and PC. That means there is an OpenGL version and any Windows-specific functions are hidden away in a software abstraction layer. That in turn means a Linux port (as in, get the damn thing up and running on a Linux box) is not only feasible, but could probably be done by two programmers in one months' time.
There are also a bunch of promising kickstarter projects, nearly all of them promise a Linux port these days. Games like Planetary Annihilation[1] or Mighty No 9[2] have got Linux ports out of the box and would be available on Steambox with 99% certainty.
So, yes, while there is a cost to porting, it's not half as huge as it used to be and it gets smaller all the time.
[1] http://www.uberent.com/pa/
[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mightyno9/mighty-no-9
200 launch titles is nothing to scoff at, actually...
Not quite.
Imagine Youtube. You post videos, right?
GMG is like Youtube. Except, you don't only post videos. You post one item, which can be any number of different media - an article or "blog post", a song, a video, a 3D-rendered image, a video game... Anything. People may comment on this item to say "Wow, nice job" or "Eww that sucks!"
Now, further imagine that all files are hosted on your own equipment.
Now, further imagine that there are thousands of these servers, and they all speak to one another, and they never require you to sign up for anything in order to comment and create "video responses" and whatnot. Sounds good yet?
1. Stop trying to control the non-commercial filesharing. The damages to creators are, at worst, about as big as trespassing on private property that isn't near a house or is actively exploited - like say, a forest. The positive effects, meanwhile, are huge and not to be neglected. Instead focus on the commercial filesharing efforts and the people making money on protected works without sharing those profits.
2. Lots of works can no longer be used because their right holders cannot be found (orphan works). In order to solve this problem, copyrighted works should be registered or face a very short copyright term on e.g. five years after publication. An extension of this idea is that economic copyright should only be allowed as long as the copyrighted works do have a substantial value, therefore we have a yearly fee of 2^x where x is the number of years a copyrighted work has been published. This ensures orphaned works become public domain, but it also ensures that copyrighted works that no longer have any commercial value also falls into public domain.
3. Copyright terms either need to be severely reduced, or there needs to be an exception clause for archivists, museums, libraries and the like to let them complete and create as complete collections of works as possible, lest our entire culture from the fifties and onward disappear.
Just a couple of ideas to get started...
Copying a file is as much stealing as walking on private property is. It may be a crime but it isn't theft - it's trespassing.
You wouldn't walk on someone else's lawn now, would you?
Dude. I know what I see, and compared to Windows, Ubuntu really has it beat.
Name any hardware older than six months and chances are, Ubuntu supports it out of the box. Hardware just works, except for the notable exception of graphics drivers.
On Windows I need to run around and hunt for tonnes of software and serial numbers and whatnot. On Ubuntu, I can just apt-get it. On Windows I usually spend the first hour or so uninstalling all the crapware, though granted, crapware isn't Windows' fault, it's still a huge annoyance I do not have to deal with on Ubuntu.
Sure Ubuntu has it's warts - but for the average user? Set it up once and it just works until the hardware finally wears out... :)
"Average people have ZERO desire to use the command line and ZERO desire to edit conf files by hand. Average people want something that works, has simple buttons and icons, and is backed by good CUSTOMER SERVICE..."
So why on earth are they using Windows, which is more or less a piece of crap in all of those regards? Also I've found Ubuntu to be a much more user friendly and consistent experience than Windows alternatives, once you get over the learning threshold.
I do agree Apple is sexy-schmexy - It's like driving a sports car with an automatic gearbox and it's easy to control - as long as you're not riding on a dirt road. Problem is, as soon as you need to go on a dirt road, that car will show it's warts. But if you don't expect to be driving dirt roads much, then by all means run Apple! More people than you think need that dirt road functionality though...
Hey, every guy (and gal) needs a hobby! :D
Emails are sent in the open - like postcards.
Incidentally the spam filtering is only a service provided specifically because you as a customer demands it. It's easy as hell to opt-out should you want to.
Small/Medium Business
No, but we're discussing the second Death Star and the shield generator around it, not the Battle of Hoth.
The shield generator on Hoth, incidentally, protected the planet from orbital planetary bombardment. It did what it was supposed to do, but could not stop ground troops from coming down to the surface and destroy it.
I'd say that the web technologies of today *is* broken - but it's more because of what the web has evolved to than anything else.
The original web was never supposed to be dynamic. It was supposed to be static pages with maybe some theming thrown around for good measure. And for a while, that worked, then came requirements of theming (CSS) and form handling (PHP) and cool effects (JS).
These days however, it's all about webapps. Few if any sites have static content, it's all in a database somewhere. HTML is merely an afterthought; noone cares whether HTML validates or not, because the pages aren't static and shit just works. The entire "presentation vs content" that was going on doesn't really exist anymore - The content has moved to the database and HTML is today only used as a presentational language. Sad but true.
Therefore I think we need to rethink and reinvent the entire web as we know it, since the current path will only lead to more and more brokenness. HTML has outlived it's purpose, it's as simple as that...
Nono... That's TROLLS!
Gnomes are small cute persons. They're even smaller than halflings.
Sheeesh, kids these days...
So, by creating MIR Ubuntu contributed to Wayland by giving the Gnome devs a big kick in the butt?
Well played, Canonical, well played! :)
And for the record, as long as both MIR and Wayland are more or less interoperable I don't care what's behind the hood. Both are open source and will be solid by the time they come out, so may the best implementation win. A little competition every now and then is just healthy.
Hardly. Google is also such an indexing service. Just google for whatever with the name torrent behind it. I can assure you it will be at least as effective as TPB.
The MAFIAAs coffin, that is.
They simply do not understand that they with this are chipping away at the very foundation that supports their business; their customers. They might stay afloat for a while but sooner or later something is bound to crack in a big way. I feel sad for every person this happen to, but it's unavoidable.
Yeah, it only took five freaking years to get all classic preorders filled. :)
The OpenPandora is unfortunately too little too late - it was interesting when it came out, but now? Now I can use my Android for everything I wanted to use my Pandora for...
That should read, "ejabberd or Openfire". Gah, stupid typoes! :P
If it's for your own personal use, I reccommend Prosody. Small, simple, stable and with the features you want.
If it's for a larger org like a medium-large company, then Erlang or Openfire is the better way to go though.
Rowling had a day job while writing her first Potter. How would keeping copyright exactly as it is help Rowling 2.0 write her first Potter 2.0 without having a day job?
For that matter, if copyrights were to be reduced to twenty years, how would it prevent Rowling 2.0 to earn just as much money writing Potter 2.0?
Copyright is today a limitation of the consumers ownership rights. Therefore we must always ask ourselves, is it fair that they keep having this right? Why? And is their right outstepping their bounds?
It's not illegal to make a backup copy for fair use.
And I swear to god, should someone go after Byuu for taking on and finishing this monumental task, then I and many with me will pitch in the fundraiser to cover his attorney costs.
Next up, maybe the PAL set? :)
The more people will realise "Hey, wait a second, screw those assholes! I don't have to put up with this. I can say no to their products!"
And when enough shit happens, your Average Joe will go free culture (aka Creative Commons) ON YO ASS, YO!
Either they stop chasing their customers, or they die trying to squeeze their customers every penny they got.
Controller: Give you that one, they sucked harder than a vietnamese prostitute. In the seventies :P
Vibration pack: Oh come ON. Nintendo introduced vibrating controllers to the console market (for PC "Force Feedback" had been available for a loooooong time). Then Sony improved it (Rumble released April 1997, Dual Shock released November 30th 1997 - 6 months after Nintendo).
One analog stick: Nintendo introduced the concept to consoles and gamepads. Before there had been joysticks but never on a controller like this. Yeah, compared to PS1 Dual Analog (and later Dual Shock) it sucked, but do remember that Nintendo had developed this already in 1995 (though the console itself turned up 1996), and Sony had the Dual Analog ready a whole year after that - well into the lifetime of the PS1, so it wasn't on every PS1 the way the N64 controller was.
Cooling: Never happened to my N64, despite having it on for 24-hour marathons of DK64. Might've been a problem with your specific unit or a specific game? Not saying it didn't happen, just that it probably wasn't a general fault.
Cartridges: Aye, they crap out when kids do that, but it's not NEARLY as bad as scratched discs. You seen the kids' DVD collection at your average family? Yeah, they would have been equally scratched in your family.
From what I remember the N64 was more powerful hardware-wise but suffered from the cartridge memory restrictions and the fact that it was hard to develop for and therefore max the performance. When you had the option of having a buttload of textures and CD-quality music on the PS1 vs few-and-compressed textures and synthesized music on the N64, the choice was rather clear. It got better with the GameCube, but 1.5GB vs 4GB again turned out to be a really painful limitation...