I highly recommend looking at SuSE, I think it addresses nicely the issues you're having, particularly in the last 2 releases (8.1 and 8.2). SuSE 8.1 was what finally let me ditch Windows for good, with no regrets.
Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool) provides easy GUI administration of almost everything (the one notable exception is the innitial setup of Samba, but once you have it going it has it's own web-based GUI). X configuration especially has been greatly simplified. I doubt it will solve your mouse problem, though (see below).
Important: spend the money to actually buy the Pro boxed version, as the printed manuals it comes with are easily the most useful Linux books in my collection (which numbers in the low 'teens). Suse doesn't offer ISOs to download, but you can install directly from their ftp site. It's pretty simple to do, and they provide boot images (4 floppies or a 16MB iso) to kick it off. Typically it takes a month or so after the release of the box for the new version to show up on ftp. Again, for a newbie, I highly recommend putting up the cash for the Suse Pro box.
Guess what else? I sure would like my logitech 3 button + wheel mouse to work correctly. When connected via PS2, the only selection that works is 2 button wheel mouse. Changing to the USB port, RH discovers it nicely (I was floored to see the mouse discovered when booting!), but I have no idea what the thumb button does nor do I know how to change it.
I think you are perhaps a bit confused about what you actually have. On most wheel mice the wheel also is clickable. That makes the wheel your 3rd button (aka middle button), which in Linux is typically "copy/paste". You should be able to highlight text anywhere and click on some other location with the wheel/middle button to copy/paste the highlighted text to the new location. This much should be no problem for any Linux distro (although sometimes you have to add a line to XF86Config to get the wheel working).
What you actually have, I believe, is a 4-button + wheel mouse*. I'm in a similar situation with a 5-button + wheel MS Intellimouse. I haven't been able to figure out how to bind these, and I have looked. The bad news is they do occasionally do something, though I'm rarely sure exactly what. I think most of the time they just replicate the functionality of one of the other buttons. There are rumors that the buttons can be bound to specific tasks, but I haven't been able to find any real info, and I strongly suspect that it would have to be set up individually for each app you wanted to use it in.
* XF86 treats wheel-up and wheel-down as buttons, typically buttons 4 and 5, so it would actually consider your mouse to be 6-button. XF86Config needs to have ZAxisMapping bound to buttons 4 and 5 in order for the wheel to work (this would be found in the "mouse" section, which is usually towards the bottom). I doubt this info will specifically help you solve the problem, but it should at least help you properly pose the question on IRC or USENET (I recommend USENET, as I've found it to be friendlier, but only if you don't post rants like the one I'm responding to).
While reading the first page my main thought was "This guy is a total ass. He needs to stop taking PR advice from SCO." He takes every question as an opportunity to take shots at IBM and Linux, largely avoiding answering the actual questions.
I love how he says that Red Hat can't compete with Sun's $100/person/year price. I also like how he completely ignores Apple as a competitor. What a tool!
Running Windows in a dual boot config for the sole purpose of gaming would not mean you need XP Pro, nor would it take hours upon hours to set up. Win98 is still fine for gaming, not to mention XP Home.
I'm aware of theat. However, my experience has given me a dim view of MS' home offerings. As I've already stated, my time is not worthless, and the Pro versions are superior in that respect for things I'm in the habit of doing, such as networking and swapping out hardware.
Additionally, I've found that 98SE gets less stable the more current you stay with the patches. A fully patched 98SE is more of a PITA than an unpatched install, which is clearly not a viable option. Stability overall, patch or un-, is another reason I won't be buying 9x. Did you miss the part about Windows requiring for more of my attention than an OS should? I know that the NT based versions can at least go more than 6 months without the need for a format/reinstall.
Finally, if I'm going to lay out my hard-earned cash I want something that's both current and going to be supported for the forseeable future. This is hardly a Windows specific issue, I wouldn't pay for SuSE 6.x either.
Considering all these factors, clearly the only Windows versions worth paying for are 2k Pro and XP Pro, and XP is the newer of the two and supposedly much better for gaming. The choice seems pretty clear to me. I would have expected you to understand this before you embarked on your advocacy.
If you think Windows is more difficult than Linux, then that's a personal issue of yours, not the standard.
Of course it's not the standard. I actually took the time to get to know Linux as well as I knew Windows. The standard is to download a RH or Mandrake ISO, play with it for a week, and then declare it too hard to use without putting any real effort into learning how to use it.
(remember, we're just talkin about using windows as a secondary os, in a game console fashion...)
If Windows enjoyed console-like stability and simplicity, you might have a valid arguement there.
Well goody for you. Hey, on a similar note, I won't be supporting Nintendo, because they don't support me and my XBox.
And you think Nintendo doesn't consider that a problem? They may not be considering porting their major titles, but I assure you the business they aren't getting from you is very much on their minds.
If game companies only want to develop exclusively for DirectX, then that's the linux-only users' problem, not theirs.
Are you not aware that we live in a capitalist society? Are you not aware that games are a luxury item? As such, the fact that they will not be getting my business IS their problem, NOT mine. They need my business far more than I need their product.
They're not being unreasonable in not going out of their way to support the Linux community. Businesses that support open-source / *nix are commendable, but we shouldn't expect it from them
I don't expect any company to support Linux, but I see no reason to support a company that doesn't. They've chosen not to support Linux, and that makes their product useless to me.
The position you've taken, although I doubt it's concious on your part, is that not only should I buy their product anyway, but I should go to a great deal of effort and multiple times the expense of their product in order to make it useful to me, even though they are clearly not willing to put forth equivalent effort for me. How is that more reasonable than my position?
I don't see why any cell phone couldn't be dunked in alcohol, though I'd remove the battery first. Every person I know who knows anything about hardware repair uses isopropyl for their board cleaning.
The autoclave might be a different story, I don't know how hot they get, but I suspect that would be fine also.
If there's one thing that's true of computers, it's that everybody has a different experience with them. Mine has been exactly the opposite of yours, at least on the desktop (obviously we agree on what's best for servers). All I can say is that you should try it again, the Linux desktop has improved dramaticly in the last few years, enough so that I strongly suspect that's the main difference in our respective experiences.
[disclaimer]: I use SuSE exclusively, YMMV.
I constantly sent back the registration cards for games with "Purchased for use with Linux" scrawled on them in bright red letters.
I commend you for doing that, but unless there's a box for Linux on the card, I very much doubt that there's a field for the person entering that data to put it in, so it's quite unlikely that it gets to anyone that matters. I could be wrong, though.
While it was fun using Linux as my desktop OS, and toying with various window managers, multiple desktops etc. I found it just ate too much of my time up.
When this changes, and Linux consumes less of my personal time on the desktop, I will switch back to using it on the desktop - but not until then.
I think the answer to the second paragraph is in the first. I actually made the switch because I found that Linux required LESS of my time as a desktop OS than Windows (a large part of that is that it's better able to withstand the unholy duo that is my wife and daughter, while still giving them all the functionality they want). That's not to say that I don't spend more time messing with Linux than I did with Windows, but the vast majority of that time is what I consider play time, whereas with windows it was almost exclusively maintainance and repair.
Oh really... you're not just conveniently uninterested in any games that aren't ported?
In the interests of my own convenience, yes, I'm much less interested in games that aren't available for Linux. More on that below.
Will you still be making such a claim after HL2 is not ported?
Yup! I'm far more interested in ut2k4, to be perfectly honest. The main selling point of HL2 for me is CS2, but I've been enjoying ut2k3 enough that I've pretty much stopped playing CS these days, so it's not that strong of a pull for me at this point.
And you'd really have to spend "$300 or so" - for example if you decided to dual boot with Windows for the sake of gaming? Uh, no, another exaggeration. Even if you did have to buy (hard to believe), you could do so at under $100.
Well, I don't pirate software anymore (that must be the idealist BS you're talking about), and I don't have a legitimate copy of Windows (or an illegitimate copy for that matter, since I tossed all my warez when I made the switch).
I haven't looked at prices for HL2, but my bet is that it will retail in the $60-70 range. According to the quick search I did just now WindowsXP Pro can be had for about $140 (OEM) or $240 (Retail). I'm sure, if you are indeed a real geek, I don't have to explain the reasons why I'm wouldn't be interesting in XP Home or any of the 9x's, which are clearly what you're refering to in your comment.
Anyway, when you add them together and calculate tax, and most likely shipping, the result is close enough to $300 that the difference is irrelevant to me. Of course, the cost doesn't stop there. It has been said that Linux is only free if your time is worthless. Well, I buy the upgrade version of every release SuSE puts out, so that's a little over $100 a year. My time is certainly not worthless, in fact the fair market value seems to be about $25/hour at the moment. Guess what? Based on my experience, and considering all the numbers, Linux is still considerably cheaper than Windows. THAT is why I switched, not because I'm some sort of idealistic zealot.
There's no shame in a dual boot setup my friend.
Shame has nothing to do with it. Windows is simply unreasonably expensive in terms of money, time, and aggravation.
That's true, it is a matter of priorities. I didn't switch to Linux because I'm a zealot, I switched because I have better things to do with my time than fix Windows problems. The switch has actually given me more time to play games, and to be perfectly honest I'm pretty satisfied with the games that are available to me right now. I'd be interested in a good new game, but IMO no game is worth the additional $200 for Windows plus the hours of patch/reboot/repeat involved in getting Windows installed and running properly. That's aggravating enough when I'm getting paid to deal with it, I'm certainly not going to put myself through that on my own dime.
Unlike say, ID which does the Linux port for "practice". Carmac's words, not mine. Of course, Valve doesn't have a Carmac.
BUT, Carmac developes on Unix, so in effect the Windows version is a port too.
I agree with all your points, and I think Carmac's developement method simply underscores points made by others in this thread: 1) Porting is easy if you plan it from the get-go, and 2) it's a lot easier to develope for *nix and port to Windows that vice-versa.
Nice sentiment - unfortunately it does not mean much.
It means more, statisticly speaking, than my vote in a presidential election, and yet I still drag my ass to the polls every chance I get. To say that I shouldn't vote because my one vote is like a spit in the ocean is just plain stupid.
What it comes down to is this: Windows isn't the only thing I gave up a year ago, I also vowed to never again pirate software. I don't care how great of a game HL2 is, it's not worth the $300 or so it would cost me to get it and a legitimate copy of Windows to run it on, never mind the however many hours of patch/reboot/repeat it'll take to get it running properly. Windows is aggravating enough when I'm being paid to deal with it, I'm certainly not going to subject myself to that in my spare time and on my own dime. I can get all the games I'm currently interested in playing, all of which are already ported to Linux, for less money than that, and it will take me less time to get them all installed.
I tried this a few years ago, I switched entirely to Linux on my home PC. Guess What? I had a bunch of nice Loki Games, but other than Quake 3 I could not deathmatch with my friends in games like Half Life.
I got Half-life running under wine without difficulty, same with Counter-strike. You are aware that progress has been made on Linux in the last few years, aren't you? With Q3, RtCW, and UT2k3, that covers all of my gaming need currently. (I like America's Army, but their authentication servers seem to have serious issues) I know people who have been happily gaming exclusively on Linux for over 3 years now.
What CAN we do?
Well - find some way to make games profitable for Linux.
I don't know about you, but I'll continue doing exactly what I've been doing: buying games that support Linux, and more specifically buying them from vendors like tuxgames that make a point of letting the producers know that my copy was bought to be played on Linux.
Dual booting and buying all the newest and greatest Windows-only games certainly isn't going to solve the problem.
But, to each their own. Clearly, games being made available on Linux isn't important to you. Fine, that's your choice. It is important to me, and I've decided to do something about it; namely voting with my wallet. It may not be terribly effective, but what else am I gonna do, buy a game that won't run on my computer?
I finally said goodby to Windows almost a year ago, and I won't be going back for a mere game, no matter how good it is. If they won't support me, I won't support them.
If they do decide to port it, though, I will gladly give them some of my money. Sadly, I don't see that happening. I guess I'll just have to give it to id and Epic instead.
If you must be at work by 7:30 and you get in trouble for being even 1 minute late you are not on flex time. Perhaps what you really mean is that you're allowed to work overtime whenever you feel it's necessary, but that is not flex time. Flex time means that as long as you put in your time and the work gets done it doesn't matter what time you come in (although it might be strongly recommended that you get there before a certain time, which is generally around 9:30 in my experience.)
Based on my experience, no this is not standard in the tech industry. It IS standard for production lines. If your boss is trying to run developement like a production line he is either an idiot or an asshole, probably both, and you should be looking for a new job.
There is centripetal force, which is the force of the string accelerating the rock towards the center, and there is the inertia of the rock resisting that force which is tangential to its orbit. Centrifugal force, which would be force directed from the center to the rock, pushing it outwards, is an illusion produced by your mind's incorrect interpretation of the rock's inertia.
I've had DSL with Pacbell/SBC since spring of 2000, and have had only one problem that I've called tech support on, and I found them very helpful and responsive. I really got the feeling that they were bending over backwards to try and get my connection working again, and by that I mean everyone from the first guy I talked to, to the guy it got escalated to, to the guy they sent out to my house. (It turned out that my NIC was flaky, which was not really a big suprise. That was the last 3Com NIC I will ever buy.)
What might have made a difference for me, though, is that I try to be helpful and responsive in return. This leads me to the conclusion that perhaps the reason you've had a consistently bad experience whenever you deal with phone support is YOU!
Let's take your average Summer Blockbuster. Average pricetag with good actors and good special affects and some reasonable marketing seems to be around the $100M mark. But that was just the cost of making the movie. Now we need to make it into a DVD.
A large part of that cost, if not all of it, is recouped at the box office, so including that as a cost of making the DVD is at best misleading.
Lets add another $20M for: * The cost of converting 35mm Kodak into digital form.
The process is called telecine, and I very much doubt that any summer blockbuster is going to be shot on 35mm Kodak (that's a largely irrelevant detail, but while I'm pointing out inaccuracies in your assessment I might as well hit them all). The process can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. It's not like telecine is a new technology, in fact, it's at least as old as television. The rural community college I took my first video production class at had one.
Disclaimer/FYI: I'm a technician at a division of Thomson, and one of the products lines I support is telecine (Spirit, Shadow, etc, if anyone cares). Another division of Thomson mass-produces DVDs
* Editing time to get a seperate made for TV "Full Screen" version.
This process is called "Pan and Scan", and it's largely automated and/or done in realtime with modern telecine equipment. This is something that has to be done anyway for release on VHS and for broadcast on "premium" channels (PPV, HBO, etc, which is another significant income source for the studios), the only difference is that the telecine now adds MPEG2 to the list of formats/codecs it outputs simultaneously. Since it adds no real time to the process and has to be done anyway, calling it a cost is not really accurate.
Editing for time or content for broadcast TV is done either by the TV station itself or by a third party as a service to broadcasters. It is NOT done by the studio, and therefore isn't a cost of creating a DVD.
* Paying spanish and french voice artists to do some dubbing.
Again, this is has to be done anyway for global release, even just in theaters. Foreign release represents a substantial portion of the studios revenue stream. The only effect the DVD has on this is, as above, providing another way to extract value out of something they have to do already.
* More editing and remastering time for the "Making Of" mini-feature. * Interview time with important cast members.
Movie makers were doing this stuff long before DVDs were even conceived. I think DVDs have changed the way filmmakers think of these things, but it isn't anything new. Director and actor commentary is, at least to the public at large, but I really doubt that adds significant cost.
* Various royalties associated with having DVD player software come bundled with the disk so you can just pop it into your computer and watch it.
Most DVDs I own don't have this (thank god, since the free software that comes bundled with most DVD-drives is of orders of magnitude higher quality). Considering the quality of that software, I very much doubt that any royalties on it are significant.
Now that you have this $120M master disk, how many copies do you make? How much money are you going to invest in packaging and additional goodies to make the DVD more tempting? How much do blank DVD's run in uber-bulk quantities? How much does the distribution chain cost to get the DVD from your warehouse to the self of the local Wall-Mart in Bum-F*ck, Idaho? If sales are slow, how much is your warehouse space costing per day because you made too many copies?
Since I don't work in that division, I can't say much about how these things are figured out. I can say, however, that Thomson offers surplus DVDs to employees at $3-8 each (usually right before christmas). Since I know they aren't selling those at a loss, and I very much doubt they're selling them at cost, I would estimate that the actual pr
you can make any choice you want, but if not enough people make the same choice as you, then none of you get to keep it.
My answer to this arguement (and to people who don't vote because "it makes no difference") is: What if everyone who thought like you do actually voted according to their real beliefs?
Even if the candidate you vote for doesn't win, you're still sending a message to the winner (assuming he's smart enough to realize it, which rules out the current administration) that somebody believed in what he was saying and maybe that needs to be looked at a little closer and given some consideration.
Politics in this country is determined by the voters, and currently that seems to mean the elderly and religious. That's hardly a representative cross-section of the America I know. If everyone who was elligable actually got off their asses and voted I think the political landscape would change dramaticly, and even more so if they voted for what they really believed in rather than just the next best thing that has a real chance of winning.
What that means is: the only reason we have a 2 party system is because we keep voting for them.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that this makes copyright infringement legal. What it does do, however, is give some legitimacy to p2p networks and maybe some defense for them against the DMCA (non-infringing use). At the very least it weakens the RIAA's case against p2p in general as it can be shown that they do directly and intentionally benefit from them.
It's not the same discussion at all, or at the very least it's taken to a new level.
The Book of Vile Darkness isn't about devils and deamons, those are present in the core Monster Manual. The BoVD deals with things like drug abuse, rape, torture, etc... things that are TRUELY vile in other words.
It should be noted that WotC caught some flack for the Book of Vile Darkness. They caught a ton of flack for the associated "Vile Content" section they put in Dragon. There were a bunch of letters to the tune of "I let my 8 year old kid read Dragon, now I'm not sure I should be letting him play D&D at all".
I don't think I agree with their new stance, but I do see where it's coming from.
At the same time as he was writing the Foundation stories, where far i the future there didn't seem to be computers, he was also writing his robot series, which had AI in the very near future. I'm not sure if he did this dichotomy on purpose; many years later he unified these future histories by something to do with the robots going underground to guide humanity from secrecy (I didn't read many of these, they seemed crappy compared with his earlier work).
He did unify the histories in the later books. As I recall, one of the main characters in those books got a ship with a navigation computer that cut the calculation time down to hours rather than days, but they were new and he didn't trust it so he still double checked it by hand the first few times.
The thing that gets me about it, in the origional trilogy, is that it was clearly a problem he'd thought about, why else would he point it out? He just hadn't really thought out the solution, I think.
It's hard to say if he did it on purpose or not. What makes me think it wasn't is that he threw in computers in the later books.
I think the main problem SF has is it's short shelf-life. Take Asimov's Foundation trilogy for example: it's set how many thousand years in the future, and yet the guy has to sit down for a week between jumps to triangulate his position by hand, without even so much as a pocket calculator? Don't get me wrong, I loved the books and I think they're totally worth reading, but it seems pretty ludicrous to me to have interstellar travel and nuclear powered force field wristbands and nothing to help with something so fundamental as basic computation.
Obviously, this sort of thing is not a problem for Fantasy.
I haven't ignored your argument, but I'm on the edge of dismissing it out of hand.
Right back at ya!
Here's the problem - if a worker at Linux-using company A can't be hired at Linux-using company B because it would require retraining...
What a load of crap! Have you ever actually USED Linux? You seem to be implying that it's impossible to make more than one environment available to ones employees on Linux, which is simply not true, in fact it's quite simple to do so. Related to that, you're suggesting that applications written for one environment can't be used in another environment, which is also simply not true....while a worker from Company MS1, running Windows, can be hired at Company MS2, also running Windows, and the company doesn't have to retrain them on the computer interface which has NOTHING to do with their job...
Now you're trying to claim that the Windows environment is static, which is, again, simply not true.
The home market, you say? People use what they know. Why, as a normal user would anyone want to learn a whole different way of doing things at home than they use at the office?
One of my wife's friends came over this weekend and wanted to show us something she'd run across on the internet; she had the browser launched and the page loaded before it even occured to her that she wasn't using Windows (Konqueror in KDE), and she is certainly not a technical person.
My point is that these huge roadblock differences which are the key to your argument don't exist exist.
To claim that the OS community could never support a single interface as the dominant one borders on hysterical and ignores the inroads made by OpenOffice/StarOffice as the dominant native productivity suite. If an interface is chosen as the "best compromise", the OSS developers can stop wasting their time on things like how big the scroll sliders should be and start working on making people more productive.
I'm sure that you could get the agreement of every single window manager and toolkit hacker... right up to the point where you tell them they have to give up their project and work on a different one, and at that point it will likely become abundantly clear that you have no way to make them. THAT is why it will never happen.
To point to OpenOffice as an example of an area where this has happened only further shows your apparent ignorance if the realities of the Linux world.
First of all, OO doesn't have (and has never had) real competition. When Sun started it WordPerfect had already pretty much fallen off the map, and the Koffice apps were still (and still are, IMHO) in their infancy. That is far from the case in the desktop environment space.
Second, the presence of OO hasn't stopped, or even significantly slowed, the developement of competing apps. The KDE folks are still plugging away at their apps, Abiword seems to be doing fine, and I haven't yet heard the death of gnumeric announced.
You've completely ignored my entire arguement. It is the people laboring under a "consistent" must-be-the-same-for-everyone interface that are suffering, not the people who have discovered the freedom to choose an environment that fits them.
The most crucial point that you seem to be missing, though, is that there will NEVER be a single GUI for Linux. To do that would require a fundamental change in the way Linux and Open Source in general operate, and it would be a resounding failure. Any attempt to do something like that would result in the death of Linux as the OSS developers that make it the powerhouse it is left the community in droves to work on something that's still Free.
Slashdot Mirror
My thought was:
"They'll be unable to interoperate with the reat of the world, just like Europeans can't watch American TV shows because they use PAL and not NTSC.
Oh, wait..."
It's quite shocking to me that the top guy at Intel is so fundamentally ignorant of the realities of modern computing and communication.
I highly recommend looking at SuSE, I think it addresses nicely the issues you're having, particularly in the last 2 releases (8.1 and 8.2). SuSE 8.1 was what finally let me ditch Windows for good, with no regrets.
Yast (Yet Another Setup Tool) provides easy GUI administration of almost everything (the one notable exception is the innitial setup of Samba, but once you have it going it has it's own web-based GUI). X configuration especially has been greatly simplified. I doubt it will solve your mouse problem, though (see below).
Important: spend the money to actually buy the Pro boxed version, as the printed manuals it comes with are easily the most useful Linux books in my collection (which numbers in the low 'teens). Suse doesn't offer ISOs to download, but you can install directly from their ftp site. It's pretty simple to do, and they provide boot images (4 floppies or a 16MB iso) to kick it off. Typically it takes a month or so after the release of the box for the new version to show up on ftp. Again, for a newbie, I highly recommend putting up the cash for the Suse Pro box.
Guess what else? I sure would like my logitech 3 button + wheel mouse to work correctly. When connected via PS2, the only selection that works is 2 button wheel mouse. Changing to the USB port, RH discovers it nicely (I was floored to see the mouse discovered when booting!), but I have no idea what the thumb button does nor do I know how to change it.
I think you are perhaps a bit confused about what you actually have. On most wheel mice the wheel also is clickable. That makes the wheel your 3rd button (aka middle button), which in Linux is typically "copy/paste". You should be able to highlight text anywhere and click on some other location with the wheel/middle button to copy/paste the highlighted text to the new location. This much should be no problem for any Linux distro (although sometimes you have to add a line to XF86Config to get the wheel working).
What you actually have, I believe, is a 4-button + wheel mouse*. I'm in a similar situation with a 5-button + wheel MS Intellimouse. I haven't been able to figure out how to bind these, and I have looked. The bad news is they do occasionally do something, though I'm rarely sure exactly what. I think most of the time they just replicate the functionality of one of the other buttons. There are rumors that the buttons can be bound to specific tasks, but I haven't been able to find any real info, and I strongly suspect that it would have to be set up individually for each app you wanted to use it in.
* XF86 treats wheel-up and wheel-down as buttons, typically buttons 4 and 5, so it would actually consider your mouse to be 6-button. XF86Config needs to have ZAxisMapping bound to buttons 4 and 5 in order for the wheel to work (this would be found in the "mouse" section, which is usually towards the bottom). I doubt this info will specifically help you solve the problem, but it should at least help you properly pose the question on IRC or USENET (I recommend USENET, as I've found it to be friendlier, but only if you don't post rants like the one I'm responding to).
While reading the first page my main thought was "This guy is a total ass. He needs to stop taking PR advice from SCO." He takes every question as an opportunity to take shots at IBM and Linux, largely avoiding answering the actual questions.
I love how he says that Red Hat can't compete with Sun's $100/person/year price. I also like how he completely ignores Apple as a competitor. What a tool!
It ran great on the 1.4GHz P4 Dell I had at work, but I couldn't get it to run at home at all.
I actually really enjoyed the game once I got used to the controls.
Running Windows in a dual boot config for the sole purpose of gaming would not mean you need XP Pro, nor would it take hours upon hours to set up. Win98 is still fine for gaming, not to mention XP Home.
I'm aware of theat. However, my experience has given me a dim view of MS' home offerings. As I've already stated, my time is not worthless, and the Pro versions are superior in that respect for things I'm in the habit of doing, such as networking and swapping out hardware.
Additionally, I've found that 98SE gets less stable the more current you stay with the patches. A fully patched 98SE is more of a PITA than an unpatched install, which is clearly not a viable option. Stability overall, patch or un-, is another reason I won't be buying 9x. Did you miss the part about Windows requiring for more of my attention than an OS should? I know that the NT based versions can at least go more than 6 months without the need for a format/reinstall.
Finally, if I'm going to lay out my hard-earned cash I want something that's both current and going to be supported for the forseeable future. This is hardly a Windows specific issue, I wouldn't pay for SuSE 6.x either.
Considering all these factors, clearly the only Windows versions worth paying for are 2k Pro and XP Pro, and XP is the newer of the two and supposedly much better for gaming. The choice seems pretty clear to me. I would have expected you to understand this before you embarked on your advocacy.
If you think Windows is more difficult than Linux, then that's a personal issue of yours, not the standard.
Of course it's not the standard. I actually took the time to get to know Linux as well as I knew Windows. The standard is to download a RH or Mandrake ISO, play with it for a week, and then declare it too hard to use without putting any real effort into learning how to use it.
(remember, we're just talkin about using windows as a secondary os, in a game console fashion...)
If Windows enjoyed console-like stability and simplicity, you might have a valid arguement there.
Well goody for you. Hey, on a similar note, I won't be supporting Nintendo, because they don't support me and my XBox.
And you think Nintendo doesn't consider that a problem? They may not be considering porting their major titles, but I assure you the business they aren't getting from you is very much on their minds.
If game companies only want to develop exclusively for DirectX, then that's the linux-only users' problem, not theirs.
Are you not aware that we live in a capitalist society? Are you not aware that games are a luxury item? As such, the fact that they will not be getting my business IS their problem, NOT mine. They need my business far more than I need their product.
They're not being unreasonable in not going out of their way to support the Linux community. Businesses that support open-source / *nix are commendable, but we shouldn't expect it from them
I don't expect any company to support Linux, but I see no reason to support a company that doesn't. They've chosen not to support Linux, and that makes their product useless to me.
The position you've taken, although I doubt it's concious on your part, is that not only should I buy their product anyway, but I should go to a great deal of effort and multiple times the expense of their product in order to make it useful to me, even though they are clearly not willing to put forth equivalent effort for me. How is that more reasonable than my position?
I don't see why any cell phone couldn't be dunked in alcohol, though I'd remove the battery first. Every person I know who knows anything about hardware repair uses isopropyl for their board cleaning.
The autoclave might be a different story, I don't know how hot they get, but I suspect that would be fine also.
If there's one thing that's true of computers, it's that everybody has a different experience with them. Mine has been exactly the opposite of yours, at least on the desktop (obviously we agree on what's best for servers). All I can say is that you should try it again, the Linux desktop has improved dramaticly in the last few years, enough so that I strongly suspect that's the main difference in our respective experiences.
[disclaimer]: I use SuSE exclusively, YMMV.
I constantly sent back the registration cards for games with "Purchased for use with Linux" scrawled on them in bright red letters.
I commend you for doing that, but unless there's a box for Linux on the card, I very much doubt that there's a field for the person entering that data to put it in, so it's quite unlikely that it gets to anyone that matters. I could be wrong, though.
While it was fun using Linux as my desktop OS, and toying with various window managers, multiple desktops etc. I found it just ate too much of my time up.
When this changes, and Linux consumes less of my personal time on the desktop, I will switch back to using it on the desktop - but not until then.
I think the answer to the second paragraph is in the first. I actually made the switch because I found that Linux required LESS of my time as a desktop OS than Windows (a large part of that is that it's better able to withstand the unholy duo that is my wife and daughter, while still giving them all the functionality they want). That's not to say that I don't spend more time messing with Linux than I did with Windows, but the vast majority of that time is what I consider play time, whereas with windows it was almost exclusively maintainance and repair.
Oh really... you're not just conveniently uninterested in any games that aren't ported?
In the interests of my own convenience, yes, I'm much less interested in games that aren't available for Linux. More on that below.
Will you still be making such a claim after HL2 is not ported?
Yup! I'm far more interested in ut2k4, to be perfectly honest. The main selling point of HL2 for me is CS2, but I've been enjoying ut2k3 enough that I've pretty much stopped playing CS these days, so it's not that strong of a pull for me at this point.
And you'd really have to spend "$300 or so" - for example if you decided to dual boot with Windows for the sake of gaming? Uh, no, another exaggeration. Even if you did have to buy (hard to believe), you could do so at under $100.
Well, I don't pirate software anymore (that must be the idealist BS you're talking about), and I don't have a legitimate copy of Windows (or an illegitimate copy for that matter, since I tossed all my warez when I made the switch).
I haven't looked at prices for HL2, but my bet is that it will retail in the $60-70 range. According to the quick search I did just now WindowsXP Pro can be had for about $140 (OEM) or $240 (Retail). I'm sure, if you are indeed a real geek, I don't have to explain the reasons why I'm wouldn't be interesting in XP Home or any of the 9x's, which are clearly what you're refering to in your comment.
Anyway, when you add them together and calculate tax, and most likely shipping, the result is close enough to $300 that the difference is irrelevant to me. Of course, the cost doesn't stop there. It has been said that Linux is only free if your time is worthless. Well, I buy the upgrade version of every release SuSE puts out, so that's a little over $100 a year. My time is certainly not worthless, in fact the fair market value seems to be about $25/hour at the moment. Guess what? Based on my experience, and considering all the numbers, Linux is still considerably cheaper than Windows. THAT is why I switched, not because I'm some sort of idealistic zealot.
There's no shame in a dual boot setup my friend.
Shame has nothing to do with it. Windows is simply unreasonably expensive in terms of money, time, and aggravation.
That's true, it is a matter of priorities. I didn't switch to Linux because I'm a zealot, I switched because I have better things to do with my time than fix Windows problems. The switch has actually given me more time to play games, and to be perfectly honest I'm pretty satisfied with the games that are available to me right now. I'd be interested in a good new game, but IMO no game is worth the additional $200 for Windows plus the hours of patch/reboot/repeat involved in getting Windows installed and running properly. That's aggravating enough when I'm getting paid to deal with it, I'm certainly not going to put myself through that on my own dime.
Unlike say, ID which does the Linux port for "practice". Carmac's words, not mine. Of course, Valve doesn't have a Carmac.
BUT, Carmac developes on Unix, so in effect the Windows version is a port too.
I agree with all your points, and I think Carmac's developement method simply underscores points made by others in this thread: 1) Porting is easy if you plan it from the get-go, and 2) it's a lot easier to develope for *nix and port to Windows that vice-versa.
Nice sentiment - unfortunately it does not mean much.
It means more, statisticly speaking, than my vote in a presidential election, and yet I still drag my ass to the polls every chance I get. To say that I shouldn't vote because my one vote is like a spit in the ocean is just plain stupid.
What it comes down to is this: Windows isn't the only thing I gave up a year ago, I also vowed to never again pirate software. I don't care how great of a game HL2 is, it's not worth the $300 or so it would cost me to get it and a legitimate copy of Windows to run it on, never mind the however many hours of patch/reboot/repeat it'll take to get it running properly. Windows is aggravating enough when I'm being paid to deal with it, I'm certainly not going to subject myself to that in my spare time and on my own dime. I can get all the games I'm currently interested in playing, all of which are already ported to Linux, for less money than that, and it will take me less time to get them all installed.
I tried this a few years ago, I switched entirely to Linux on my home PC. Guess What? I had a bunch of nice Loki Games, but other than Quake 3 I could not deathmatch with my friends in games like Half Life.
I got Half-life running under wine without difficulty, same with Counter-strike. You are aware that progress has been made on Linux in the last few years, aren't you? With Q3, RtCW, and UT2k3, that covers all of my gaming need currently. (I like America's Army, but their authentication servers seem to have serious issues) I know people who have been happily gaming exclusively on Linux for over 3 years now.
What CAN we do?
Well - find some way to make games profitable for Linux.
I don't know about you, but I'll continue doing exactly what I've been doing: buying games that support Linux, and more specifically buying them from vendors like tuxgames that make a point of letting the producers know that my copy was bought to be played on Linux.
Dual booting and buying all the newest and greatest Windows-only games certainly isn't going to solve the problem.
But, to each their own. Clearly, games being made available on Linux isn't important to you. Fine, that's your choice. It is important to me, and I've decided to do something about it; namely voting with my wallet. It may not be terribly effective, but what else am I gonna do, buy a game that won't run on my computer?
I finally said goodby to Windows almost a year ago, and I won't be going back for a mere game, no matter how good it is. If they won't support me, I won't support them.
If they do decide to port it, though, I will gladly give them some of my money. Sadly, I don't see that happening. I guess I'll just have to give it to id and Epic instead.
If you must be at work by 7:30 and you get in trouble for being even 1 minute late you are not on flex time. Perhaps what you really mean is that you're allowed to work overtime whenever you feel it's necessary, but that is not flex time. Flex time means that as long as you put in your time and the work gets done it doesn't matter what time you come in (although it might be strongly recommended that you get there before a certain time, which is generally around 9:30 in my experience.)
Based on my experience, no this is not standard in the tech industry. It IS standard for production lines. If your boss is trying to run developement like a production line he is either an idiot or an asshole, probably both, and you should be looking for a new job.
There is no such thing as centrifugal force.
There is centripetal force, which is the force of the string accelerating the rock towards the center, and there is the inertia of the rock resisting that force which is tangential to its orbit. Centrifugal force, which would be force directed from the center to the rock, pushing it outwards, is an illusion produced by your mind's incorrect interpretation of the rock's inertia.
I've had DSL with Pacbell/SBC since spring of 2000, and have had only one problem that I've called tech support on, and I found them very helpful and responsive. I really got the feeling that they were bending over backwards to try and get my connection working again, and by that I mean everyone from the first guy I talked to, to the guy it got escalated to, to the guy they sent out to my house. (It turned out that my NIC was flaky, which was not really a big suprise. That was the last 3Com NIC I will ever buy.)
What might have made a difference for me, though, is that I try to be helpful and responsive in return. This leads me to the conclusion that perhaps the reason you've had a consistently bad experience whenever you deal with phone support is YOU!
I know it is a nitpick, but it always bugs me that there are so many countrys in American and the USA is implied by the word America...
Until one of those countries changes their name so it actually has the word "America" in it, they (and you) can STFU!
Let's take your average Summer Blockbuster. Average pricetag with good actors and good special affects and some reasonable marketing seems to be around the $100M mark. But that was just the cost of making the movie. Now we need to make it into a DVD.
A large part of that cost, if not all of it, is recouped at the box office, so including that as a cost of making the DVD is at best misleading.
Lets add another $20M for:
* The cost of converting 35mm Kodak into digital form.
The process is called telecine, and I very much doubt that any summer blockbuster is going to be shot on 35mm Kodak (that's a largely irrelevant detail, but while I'm pointing out inaccuracies in your assessment I might as well hit them all). The process can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. It's not like telecine is a new technology, in fact, it's at least as old as television. The rural community college I took my first video production class at had one.
Disclaimer/FYI: I'm a technician at a division of Thomson, and one of the products lines I support is telecine (Spirit, Shadow, etc, if anyone cares). Another division of Thomson mass-produces DVDs
* Editing time to get a seperate made for TV "Full Screen" version.
This process is called "Pan and Scan", and it's largely automated and/or done in realtime with modern telecine equipment. This is something that has to be done anyway for release on VHS and for broadcast on "premium" channels (PPV, HBO, etc, which is another significant income source for the studios), the only difference is that the telecine now adds MPEG2 to the list of formats/codecs it outputs simultaneously. Since it adds no real time to the process and has to be done anyway, calling it a cost is not really accurate.
Editing for time or content for broadcast TV is done either by the TV station itself or by a third party as a service to broadcasters. It is NOT done by the studio, and therefore isn't a cost of creating a DVD.
* Paying spanish and french voice artists to do some dubbing.
Again, this is has to be done anyway for global release, even just in theaters. Foreign release represents a substantial portion of the studios revenue stream. The only effect the DVD has on this is, as above, providing another way to extract value out of something they have to do already.
* More editing and remastering time for the "Making Of" mini-feature.
* Interview time with important cast members.
Movie makers were doing this stuff long before DVDs were even conceived. I think DVDs have changed the way filmmakers think of these things, but it isn't anything new. Director and actor commentary is, at least to the public at large, but I really doubt that adds significant cost.
* Various royalties associated with having DVD player software come bundled with the disk so you can just pop it into your computer and watch it.
Most DVDs I own don't have this (thank god, since the free software that comes bundled with most DVD-drives is of orders of magnitude higher quality). Considering the quality of that software, I very much doubt that any royalties on it are significant.
Now that you have this $120M master disk, how many copies do you make? How much money are you going to invest in packaging and additional goodies to make the DVD more tempting? How much do blank DVD's run in uber-bulk quantities? How much does the distribution chain cost to get the DVD from your warehouse to the self of the local Wall-Mart in Bum-F*ck, Idaho? If sales are slow, how much is your warehouse space costing per day because you made too many copies?
Since I don't work in that division, I can't say much about how these things are figured out. I can say, however, that Thomson offers surplus DVDs to employees at $3-8 each (usually right before christmas). Since I know they aren't selling those at a loss, and I very much doubt they're selling them at cost, I would estimate that the actual pr
you can make any choice you want, but if not enough people make the same choice as you, then none of you get to keep it.
My answer to this arguement (and to people who don't vote because "it makes no difference") is: What if everyone who thought like you do actually voted according to their real beliefs?
Even if the candidate you vote for doesn't win, you're still sending a message to the winner (assuming he's smart enough to realize it, which rules out the current administration) that somebody believed in what he was saying and maybe that needs to be looked at a little closer and given some consideration.
Politics in this country is determined by the voters, and currently that seems to mean the elderly and religious. That's hardly a representative cross-section of the America I know. If everyone who was elligable actually got off their asses and voted I think the political landscape would change dramaticly, and even more so if they voted for what they really believed in rather than just the next best thing that has a real chance of winning.
What that means is: the only reason we have a 2 party system is because we keep voting for them.
I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that this makes copyright infringement legal. What it does do, however, is give some legitimacy to p2p networks and maybe some defense for them against the DMCA (non-infringing use). At the very least it weakens the RIAA's case against p2p in general as it can be shown that they do directly and intentionally benefit from them.
It's not the same discussion at all, or at the very least it's taken to a new level.
The Book of Vile Darkness isn't about devils and deamons, those are present in the core Monster Manual. The BoVD deals with things like drug abuse, rape, torture, etc... things that are TRUELY vile in other words.
It should be noted that WotC caught some flack for the Book of Vile Darkness. They caught a ton of flack for the associated "Vile Content" section they put in Dragon. There were a bunch of letters to the tune of "I let my 8 year old kid read Dragon, now I'm not sure I should be letting him play D&D at all".
I don't think I agree with their new stance, but I do see where it's coming from.
At the same time as he was writing the Foundation stories, where far i the future there didn't seem to be computers, he was also writing his robot series, which had AI in the very near future. I'm not sure if he did this dichotomy on purpose; many years later he unified these future histories by something to do with the robots going underground to guide humanity from secrecy (I didn't read many of these, they seemed crappy compared with his earlier work).
He did unify the histories in the later books. As I recall, one of the main characters in those books got a ship with a navigation computer that cut the calculation time down to hours rather than days, but they were new and he didn't trust it so he still double checked it by hand the first few times.
The thing that gets me about it, in the origional trilogy, is that it was clearly a problem he'd thought about, why else would he point it out? He just hadn't really thought out the solution, I think.
It's hard to say if he did it on purpose or not. What makes me think it wasn't is that he threw in computers in the later books.
I think the main problem SF has is it's short shelf-life. Take Asimov's Foundation trilogy for example: it's set how many thousand years in the future, and yet the guy has to sit down for a week between jumps to triangulate his position by hand, without even so much as a pocket calculator? Don't get me wrong, I loved the books and I think they're totally worth reading, but it seems pretty ludicrous to me to have interstellar travel and nuclear powered force field wristbands and nothing to help with something so fundamental as basic computation.
Obviously, this sort of thing is not a problem for Fantasy.
I haven't ignored your argument, but I'm on the edge of dismissing it out of hand.
...while a worker from Company MS1, running Windows, can be hired at Company MS2, also running Windows, and the company doesn't have to retrain them on the computer interface which has NOTHING to do with their job...
Right back at ya!
Here's the problem - if a worker at Linux-using company A can't be hired at Linux-using company B because it would require retraining...
What a load of crap! Have you ever actually USED Linux? You seem to be implying that it's impossible to make more than one environment available to ones employees on Linux, which is simply not true, in fact it's quite simple to do so. Related to that, you're suggesting that applications written for one environment can't be used in another environment, which is also simply not true.
Now you're trying to claim that the Windows environment is static, which is, again, simply not true.
The home market, you say? People use what they know. Why, as a normal user would anyone want to learn a whole different way of doing things at home than they use at the office?
One of my wife's friends came over this weekend and wanted to show us something she'd run across on the internet; she had the browser launched and the page loaded before it even occured to her that she wasn't using Windows (Konqueror in KDE), and she is certainly not a technical person.
My point is that these huge roadblock differences which are the key to your argument don't exist exist.
To claim that the OS community could never support a single interface as the dominant one borders on hysterical and ignores the inroads made by OpenOffice/StarOffice as the dominant native productivity suite. If an interface is chosen as the "best compromise", the OSS developers can stop wasting their time on things like how big the scroll sliders should be and start working on making people more productive.
I'm sure that you could get the agreement of every single window manager and toolkit hacker... right up to the point where you tell them they have to give up their project and work on a different one, and at that point it will likely become abundantly clear that you have no way to make them. THAT is why it will never happen.
To point to OpenOffice as an example of an area where this has happened only further shows your apparent ignorance if the realities of the Linux world.
First of all, OO doesn't have (and has never had) real competition. When Sun started it WordPerfect had already pretty much fallen off the map, and the Koffice apps were still (and still are, IMHO) in their infancy. That is far from the case in the desktop environment space.
Second, the presence of OO hasn't stopped, or even significantly slowed, the developement of competing apps. The KDE folks are still plugging away at their apps, Abiword seems to be doing fine, and I haven't yet heard the death of gnumeric announced.
You've completely ignored my entire arguement. It is the people laboring under a "consistent" must-be-the-same-for-everyone interface that are suffering, not the people who have discovered the freedom to choose an environment that fits them.
The most crucial point that you seem to be missing, though, is that there will NEVER be a single GUI for Linux. To do that would require a fundamental change in the way Linux and Open Source in general operate, and it would be a resounding failure. Any attempt to do something like that would result in the death of Linux as the OSS developers that make it the powerhouse it is left the community in droves to work on something that's still Free.