Nintendo lost their way because of the "fad gaming" that was popular with the Wii. They tried to go somewhere with that because it was making them a lot of money, but the problem is that it was just that: a fad. If you want to ride that train, you need to see what's coming next and make sure your thing is the next fad, too. Nintendo didn't do that and lost most of that audience to Facebook and mobile gaming. That problem was compounded by the poor marketing for the Wii U (many consumers don't even realize it's a completely new system due to the unfortunate name).
This wouldn't have been such a big deal if they hadn't alienated their core fanbase in the process. A lot of former Nintendo fanboys have migrated to other platforms by now because Nintendo just wasn't putting out the volume nor the quality necessary to keep us interested (flops like Metroid: Other M especially didn't help matters). Plus, they didn't have the majority of popular cross-platform games. This, in turn, made a lot of their fans go out and get other platforms to play these games. And when the Wii U rolled around, there wasn't really any reason to get it because we could get more and better games on the other platform we were forced to get. I have no plans to get a Wii U unless it comes down substantially in price no matter what they release for it. I'm not going to spend that kind of money on a system just to play the new Smash, one or two new Zelda games, and possibly a new Metroid game that may or may not be good. I like those series, but it's just not worth it when I have a limited income.
Google's business has always been ads. I really don't see how static banner ads are any more evil than text ads, especially when they're just running them on search results. The only way it's really any worse is that it's mildly more distracting and takes up a trivially larger amount of bandwidth. There are other competitors who don't do this if it bothers you, or you can just Adblock them. I'd be more concerned with the targeting they're probably doing over this because that's something that's arguably evil. Now if they started allowing Flash ads or ads with movement, that would bother me, sure.
I see a lot of complaining but not a lot of doing. If you're serious about changing this, you can start by making a donation (time/effort or money) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're the most significant group I'm aware of that actively works to fight crap like this (there are others, but their scope and focus may differ; the EFF specifically focuses on fighting issues that threaten internet freedom).
The problem with stallman is that he doesn't grasp that anything requiring years of education and basically amounts to a time commitment of a full time job needs to get paid for.
I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize. That said, I don't think a lot of large scale development (especially from big devs who have been doing things with the normal model for years) can switch over without a lot of effort (and effort means money), especially when the end result may very likely lead to less income. Businesses don't work that way.
Stallman (and the FSF in general) also believes that any proprietary software is immoral and it should be shunned and not used ever. I agree that this is the right ideal, but I think the long road to it may require some sacrifices along the way. If SteamOS leads to a significant trend away from current ingrained non-free systems (like Windows), that in turn makes devs (like Nvidia's) play nicer with free software devs and creates a positive feedback loop. I believe that's a good thing, even if the fact that SteamOS is closed is not. I think the correct course of action is to urge Valve to try and free the software or to develop a fully free alternative rather than simply urging people not to use it at all, and I think this applies to other parts of a mixed-freedom environment. For instance, the FSF encourages the use of what it deems fully free GNU/Linux distributions, which are often just forks of popular distributions with any non-free software removed. I don't like this approach; I think a better one would be to make it transparent what parts are non-free and simply make it a top priority to free or rewrite these portions.
Stallman and the FSF are very interesting and make a lot of good points (if you read the literature they put out, it really does make a lot of sense), but it's always best to think for yourself and not blindly adhere to any ideology. What Stallman thinks and says is often interesting and insightful, but it shouldn't be the only metric you use to make a decision. I don't disagree with the FSF very often, but in this case, I do think SteamOS is good for the long-term prospects of GNU/Linux and free software primarily because of the politics involved.
I mostly agree, but with your third point, I have to take issue. You seem to be implying that the ideals of free software have no place in the movement. I think this is absurd. The idealists often force us to reconsider compromises we might otherwise make that would hurt us in the long run, and a lot of the work they do is good for us, even if it's not immediately useful. You mention gNewSense; distros like this are useful because they make it very visible which parts of the modern GNU/Linux ecosystem are reliant on non-free software. This encourages developers that have an interest in those things to recreate that functionality as free software, which is extremely useful in the long run. Nouveau, for instance, may not be perfect right now, but hedging all our bets on Nvidia's work always being available, up-to-date, and constantly improved is silly. It won't be. There is already functionality being added to Nouveau for older cards that Nvidia hasn't added to their closed source driver, for instance.
Do I think compromises are sometimes necessary? Sure. But you (and the people who modded you up) are implying that we should be willing to compromise anything just to focus all development resources on making things "more usable." Aside from the fact that there are some developers who just don't have an interest in that topic, if we start compromising too much and just "trusting" non-free software, we're going to end up with significant portions of the GNU/Linux ecosystem that rely on things that we can't fix when they break and that we can't improve once the original developers lose interest.
Regardless of whose hands it's in, VirtualBox is free software, excluding a small extension pack which is not included by default. Unlike other proprietary products, like VMware, you have the freedom to fork it if you don't like the direction development is going or don't like the vendor. And if you're worried about security, you can always audit the software.
As for other options, you may want to check out Wikipedia. Usually they have lists/comparisons of classes of software, and I do remember seeing one for virtualization software a while back.
On the other hand, I managed not to break my laptop, which I got in my senior year of high school. I took it everywhere on campus (literally; if I left the dorm, I had my laptop with me, period). I also did some pretty heavy gaming on it. It lasted me well into my junior year, when the motherboard finally fried; though, to be fair, some time in my sophomore year, it blew something and leaked magic smoke all over the dorm. However, both of these things happened at rest (having it sitting on a table with Facebook open).
So yeah, I wouldn't trust a kid with a portable device unless they have a history of treating their equipment with care. Like you said, warning signs. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
"'We would like to see the law of armed conflict integrated into the games so that players have a realistic experience and deal first hand with the dilemmas facing real combatants on real battlefields"
This could actually be interesting for a certain class of games. Spec Ops: The Line is a prime example of this in play, and it works perfectly. That said, their rationale for this is all wrong. They seem to be implying that rewarding gamers for "evil" behavior, if you will, is inherently wrong. It's not. Games are games. Yes, there will always be the off person who goes nuts and then pins the blame on whatever the popular target is at the time, but that's irrelevant. If we start outlawing everything that might potentially hurt someone, we'd all be living in nice little padded cells our entire lives. The vast majority of people are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality.
Possibly because the left is generally in bed with Hollywood and if there was political bias involved, it would likely be toward the industry's side, which it is not.
I imagine GNU's Firefox fork (IceCat) will probably not have any part in this nonsense and will refuse to implement it. Hopefully, it will at least be an option (disabled by default?) on the more popular browsers.
As much as I disagree with his business tactics over the years, Gates is a freaking genius. One read of the "Internet Tidal Wave" memo, which was written years ago and was correct about 90% of its predictions, should tell you that. Gates was one of the primary reasons, if not the only reason, Microsoft was successful to begin with. These three people are complete fools and ought to be off with Ballmer.
To be fair, GNU has a reasonable claim to contributing at least as much (if not more) than the Linux kernel did to the operating system people refer to as "Linux" or "GNU/Linux." See here.
September 27, 2013. 9/27/13. 9 = 3*3, 27 = 3*3*3, 13 = 1, 3, and 2013 is divisible by 3. So of course, it's the perfect day to announce the NEW CONTROLLER!
Perhaps, but not an excuse to let Java applets run freely in your browser. TFS says that this only applies to applets; programs run out-of-browser will probably function normally. Even if that's not the case, I'm sure they'll have an option to allow unsigned code to run.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo lost their way because of the "fad gaming" that was popular with the Wii. They tried to go somewhere with that because it was making them a lot of money, but the problem is that it was just that: a fad. If you want to ride that train, you need to see what's coming next and make sure your thing is the next fad, too. Nintendo didn't do that and lost most of that audience to Facebook and mobile gaming. That problem was compounded by the poor marketing for the Wii U (many consumers don't even realize it's a completely new system due to the unfortunate name).
This wouldn't have been such a big deal if they hadn't alienated their core fanbase in the process. A lot of former Nintendo fanboys have migrated to other platforms by now because Nintendo just wasn't putting out the volume nor the quality necessary to keep us interested (flops like Metroid: Other M especially didn't help matters). Plus, they didn't have the majority of popular cross-platform games. This, in turn, made a lot of their fans go out and get other platforms to play these games. And when the Wii U rolled around, there wasn't really any reason to get it because we could get more and better games on the other platform we were forced to get. I have no plans to get a Wii U unless it comes down substantially in price no matter what they release for it. I'm not going to spend that kind of money on a system just to play the new Smash, one or two new Zelda games, and possibly a new Metroid game that may or may not be good. I like those series, but it's just not worth it when I have a limited income.
Google's business has always been ads. I really don't see how static banner ads are any more evil than text ads, especially when they're just running them on search results. The only way it's really any worse is that it's mildly more distracting and takes up a trivially larger amount of bandwidth. There are other competitors who don't do this if it bothers you, or you can just Adblock them. I'd be more concerned with the targeting they're probably doing over this because that's something that's arguably evil. Now if they started allowing Flash ads or ads with movement, that would bother me, sure.
I see a lot of complaining but not a lot of doing. If you're serious about changing this, you can start by making a donation (time/effort or money) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're the most significant group I'm aware of that actively works to fight crap like this (there are others, but their scope and focus may differ; the EFF specifically focuses on fighting issues that threaten internet freedom).
I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize. That said, I don't think a lot of large scale development (especially from big devs who have been doing things with the normal model for years) can switch over without a lot of effort (and effort means money), especially when the end result may very likely lead to less income. Businesses don't work that way.
Stallman (and the FSF in general) also believes that any proprietary software is immoral and it should be shunned and not used ever. I agree that this is the right ideal, but I think the long road to it may require some sacrifices along the way. If SteamOS leads to a significant trend away from current ingrained non-free systems (like Windows), that in turn makes devs (like Nvidia's) play nicer with free software devs and creates a positive feedback loop. I believe that's a good thing, even if the fact that SteamOS is closed is not. I think the correct course of action is to urge Valve to try and free the software or to develop a fully free alternative rather than simply urging people not to use it at all, and I think this applies to other parts of a mixed-freedom environment. For instance, the FSF encourages the use of what it deems fully free GNU/Linux distributions, which are often just forks of popular distributions with any non-free software removed. I don't like this approach; I think a better one would be to make it transparent what parts are non-free and simply make it a top priority to free or rewrite these portions.
Stallman and the FSF are very interesting and make a lot of good points (if you read the literature they put out, it really does make a lot of sense), but it's always best to think for yourself and not blindly adhere to any ideology. What Stallman thinks and says is often interesting and insightful, but it shouldn't be the only metric you use to make a decision. I don't disagree with the FSF very often, but in this case, I do think SteamOS is good for the long-term prospects of GNU/Linux and free software primarily because of the politics involved.
Mismodded, ignore
Aside from the obvious abuse of power, there's this: http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
I mostly agree, but with your third point, I have to take issue. You seem to be implying that the ideals of free software have no place in the movement. I think this is absurd. The idealists often force us to reconsider compromises we might otherwise make that would hurt us in the long run, and a lot of the work they do is good for us, even if it's not immediately useful. You mention gNewSense; distros like this are useful because they make it very visible which parts of the modern GNU/Linux ecosystem are reliant on non-free software. This encourages developers that have an interest in those things to recreate that functionality as free software, which is extremely useful in the long run. Nouveau, for instance, may not be perfect right now, but hedging all our bets on Nvidia's work always being available, up-to-date, and constantly improved is silly. It won't be. There is already functionality being added to Nouveau for older cards that Nvidia hasn't added to their closed source driver, for instance.
Do I think compromises are sometimes necessary? Sure. But you (and the people who modded you up) are implying that we should be willing to compromise anything just to focus all development resources on making things "more usable." Aside from the fact that there are some developers who just don't have an interest in that topic, if we start compromising too much and just "trusting" non-free software, we're going to end up with significant portions of the GNU/Linux ecosystem that rely on things that we can't fix when they break and that we can't improve once the original developers lose interest.
Don't worry, it's not free.
Regardless of whose hands it's in, VirtualBox is free software, excluding a small extension pack which is not included by default. Unlike other proprietary products, like VMware, you have the freedom to fork it if you don't like the direction development is going or don't like the vendor. And if you're worried about security, you can always audit the software.
As for other options, you may want to check out Wikipedia. Usually they have lists/comparisons of classes of software, and I do remember seeing one for virtualization software a while back.
Reminder to sign the FSF-sponsored petition against DRM in HTML 5 if this bothers you. Link
I use it for Bing rewards. I have no loyalty to any particular search engine and if Microsoft's going to pay me to use theirs, so be it.
On the other hand, I managed not to break my laptop, which I got in my senior year of high school. I took it everywhere on campus (literally; if I left the dorm, I had my laptop with me, period). I also did some pretty heavy gaming on it. It lasted me well into my junior year, when the motherboard finally fried; though, to be fair, some time in my sophomore year, it blew something and leaked magic smoke all over the dorm. However, both of these things happened at rest (having it sitting on a table with Facebook open).
So yeah, I wouldn't trust a kid with a portable device unless they have a history of treating their equipment with care. Like you said, warning signs. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
"'We would like to see the law of armed conflict integrated into the games so that players have a realistic experience and deal first hand with the dilemmas facing real combatants on real battlefields"
This could actually be interesting for a certain class of games. Spec Ops: The Line is a prime example of this in play, and it works perfectly. That said, their rationale for this is all wrong. They seem to be implying that rewarding gamers for "evil" behavior, if you will, is inherently wrong. It's not. Games are games. Yes, there will always be the off person who goes nuts and then pins the blame on whatever the popular target is at the time, but that's irrelevant. If we start outlawing everything that might potentially hurt someone, we'd all be living in nice little padded cells our entire lives. The vast majority of people are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality.
Then how about just implementing it in the latter?
Possibly because the left is generally in bed with Hollywood and if there was political bias involved, it would likely be toward the industry's side, which it is not.
I imagine GNU's Firefox fork (IceCat) will probably not have any part in this nonsense and will refuse to implement it. Hopefully, it will at least be an option (disabled by default?) on the more popular browsers.
I wish I had mod points, that deserves at least a few +interesting.
Difficult to find? Hardly. I'm all for faulting Facebook when it's deserved, but the "skip check-in" link is in plain sight (link).
As much as I disagree with his business tactics over the years, Gates is a freaking genius. One read of the "Internet Tidal Wave" memo, which was written years ago and was correct about 90% of its predictions, should tell you that. Gates was one of the primary reasons, if not the only reason, Microsoft was successful to begin with. These three people are complete fools and ought to be off with Ballmer.
The "kernel" is not an operating system, and without GNU, you do not have a functional system. See: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#tools
"If you don't like it, don't buy it. Enough with the stupid fucking boycotts."
Uh, you do know what a boycott is, right?
To be fair, GNU has a reasonable claim to contributing at least as much (if not more) than the Linux kernel did to the operating system people refer to as "Linux" or "GNU/Linux." See here.
September 27, 2013. 9/27/13. 9 = 3*3, 27 = 3*3*3, 13 = 1, 3, and 2013 is divisible by 3. So of course, it's the perfect day to announce the NEW CONTROLLER!
They already said you can still use KB+M. I mean, the hardware's going to be running GNU/Linux, after all.
Perhaps, but not an excuse to let Java applets run freely in your browser. TFS says that this only applies to applets; programs run out-of-browser will probably function normally. Even if that's not the case, I'm sure they'll have an option to allow unsigned code to run.