The first time I heard was in an ICQ message also.
It's amazing how fast bad news travels, especially if it's on an instant messenger!
I agree with continuing tech stories, and the idea of everyone dropping everything for this is exactly what the terrorist scum wanted in the first place. Sure, for the first day I was too shocked to do anything (for some reason they even put the soaps on TV still. But I couldn't even begin to enjoy watching them.) But life must go on, else those people have won.
I tried WineX - neither Everquest nor Jumpgate worked with it. In fact I got the impression nothing would work with it yet (too early in development)
Obviously you would know better about that than I do:)
Just one other little thing I forgot to mention... it was *immensely* useful when one of us couldn't make it to class (due to being ill or whatever)
No more tedious copying down of the missed day's notes. We'd simply beam them over via IRDA, and whoever was absent that day would only have to read the notes (and ask any necessary questions) to catch up! When they got home, they'd print out the notes (as always) and file them for reference. Much easier.
Myself and a friend used Psion 5's in A-level classes just over a year ago, to take the usual notes.
The teachers didn't mind at all (in fact they were quite amused at the two of us tapping away in the corner whilst everyone else was scribbling with a pen and paper!)
It was *great* for some subjects (and we could play IRDA games during the boring bits.. heh heh) but it kinda sucked for others. It was ideal in Computer Studies (mostly copying from a textbook - we would have loved one of those handheld OCR scanners!) and the occasional flowchart which could be done either in Sketch or an addon program. It wasn't always great in Physics or Maths though (too many complex formulae that couldn't be typed, and were too difficult to sketch at the same pace as everyone else). In which case we resorted to good old pen and paper.
I mainly liked it for coursework, which I always used to end up copying from written work to a word processor. This way, it would start typed from the beginning, and the spreadsheet came in very handy along the way!
It'd be interesting if a PDA (or at least a package for one) would be developed specifically for schools. My main complaint with the Psion, which I believe has very sadly been discontinued, was the lack of any easy way to input long formulae. If there's a way around that yet, we're almost there.
It'd obviously help if the teacher has one so you can beam your work over for marking;) We used to run down to the library (which had the IRDA-capable printers) if anything needed printing.
They already have cable and ADSL in most of London... why would they need (or want) wireless access?
They should trial things like that over here in the Lake District. The cable companies simply refuse to lay any cable down in most of this area (because it'd cost too much to do so), and BT are dragging their feet too much with ADSL. Which means we're stuck with 56K or (if you're lucky, like me) ISDN.
But with wireless access, we'd be bypassing the need for expensive cable-laying, and also bypassing the incredibly slow BT. Just what we need.
This may take me down to -1, Troll oblivion, but just hear me out first. It's some honest pondering.
Could this be a bad sign of things to come? What I see, is one of the maintainers of a vital component of Linux(*1) ranting about the very organisations that (good or evil) *are* pretty vital parts of the Linux operating system. For the record, I agree with them about Stali^H^H^H^H^HStallman (*2). But frankly it's worrying that at least one of my operating system's vital components is written someone who rants about other people in the public release notes! (Which IMHO makes him a bit of a war monger)
On the other side of the fence... it's also worrying that the GPL, which maybe 70%(?) of the Linux software is distributed under, was thought up by someone who seems to be losing a lot of credibility and trustworthiness.
Couldn't he suddenly change the licence to a "new version" that allows him to claim all the work for himself, restrict it so that only he can distribute it, and make billions?
We've also seen sour grapes between the glibc and gcc developers over GCC 3.0, which also made it into the release notes. What if this turns out just as nasty? To the point where they refuse to co-operate? What use would glibc or GCC be if they were incompatible with each other?
(They *really* need to be written by the same people, but that's for another topic).
Am I just being paranoid and misinformed?
(*1): or GNU/Linux. "What Do You Want To Call It Today?"
(*2): True, if it weren't for RMS, Linux wouldn't be what it is today (if anything at all). But that doesn't mean I like what he's turned into.
Come on, I just got my PS2... and it was expensive too.. don't go associating it with creeps like those!
*Sobs* *Huggles PS2*
Which would I rather see... a PS2 ruined by AOL, or a PS2 ruined by Microsoft?
Go Microsoft! Go Microsoft!
(Hey, at least MS make decent hardware. AOL just eat people... and block people from using their lame instant messenger.)
But there's one thing we can be thankful for - there isn't really any definite way AOL can ruin the PS2:) It doesn't have their browser built into it already, so that would mean an expansion. An expansion that would surely have some *damn good* competition (hopefully well marketed. Since AOL are very good at fooling people with their marketing).
I could be wrong:( In which case I'll just kill myself:p
This is a *superb* idea, and there is one game I would use all the time on it. EverQuest.
Sony/Verant themselves have said time and time again that they have no plans to make a native Linux version, so this would be most welcome.
As far as I know it will be a long time until EQ works with it, but if anyone's managed to get it working I would be most interested to hear how.
There's only one concern I have. It barely works with a "Real" version of Windows if you have an SB Live (particularly Win2000, which is the only version I will agree to use). Still, it would be quite a laugh if it ends up working better in Linux:)
I like it. Why didn't anyone mention this idea before? I'd buy one straight away!
I really like the idea of being able to see if my CPU fan is working (I don't trust those monitoring apps quite as much as my own eyes:p ) whilst also keeping the case shut to reduce noise.
From the go-gnome script:
Official support for Woody has been held back due to installation
problems. We hope to have an officially supported install path on
Woody within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, you're
welcome to try to install our Potato packages on Woody, but we make
no guarantees.
They're not wrong there either. It was a right mess when I tried it a couple of weeks ago on my Woody system (using the go-gnome wizardy thing). Control Center hung when you opened the Sawfish controls, and I couldn't get any sound at all even with esd and oss working perfectly.
I hope they get it fixed soon, Debian Potato is too old for me now (particularly the glibc it uses). If anyone gets it working properly (with sound!) I'd be interested to know.
It's been a little while since I saw the various endings. Needless to say they were fansubbed (anyone who is half serious with anime would know that the subs are way better than the dubs 99% of the time)
But if I remember correctly, Death and Rebirth are like two different movies in one. Death is a short recap of the TV series. And Rebirth is a replacement for episodes 25 and 26... but also basically the first half of the newer movie "End of Evangelion".
In other words, it's better just to wait for End Of Eva. It's basically Eva:Rebirth with a few alterations, a continuation, and a very final conclusion. Seeing both would just mean a lot of repetition.
IMO, whether you see End of Eva at all should depend on what type of ending you like. Basically it's an alternative ending to please the crowds that were spamming them to death about having an unsatisfying ending on the TV series.
Without wishing to spoil it (stop now if you don't even want to know whether each ending is happy or not. Even then it is still speculation, it's just how happy the ending *appears* to be.)
...
I'll go so far as to say that the TV ending is "happy, but not very conclusive - lots of questions left unanswered". And End Of Eva is the "Gruesome, shocking ending that will please anyone who likes lots of violence, but they do not seem to live happily ever after if that's your thing."
XCDRoast uses.raw files... in fact, it won't see anything else. You could say they provided Progeny as.raw to avoid questions about how to record an ISO file in xcdroast - but then, everyone else in the world will be asking them how to burn a.raw file *shrug*
I wish people would agree to the same extension!
I also wish they'd stick to the same boot procedure (SysV?), but that's a different story.
There are actually some times when I prefer to buy a product, than to use a free / open-source program.
Suppose I have a suggestion towards improving a program with a feature that only a few people would use. Since open-source software is usually written for the author and not for the user, the answer is usually "No, I have no need for that, so why should I?" Since I'm getting free beer, what right do I have to ask for it to be served with a smaller head?
You could quite rightly say that the free means free speech, and I should learn C and add the feature myself. But not everyone has the time or intelligence, so it's not a very good answer. I'd rather pay someone to do it for me. So, pay-for software excels in this area. Nobody is going to buy software that doesn't do what they want, so the author has to write mainly for the user rather than himself.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, many Linux users appear too stubborn with the socialist idealism. There are times when I think of bringing a closed-source product to Linux as the same as trying to bring scientific views to the middle ages. I have this vision of the author being stoned to death by an angry mob of Slashdotters;)
Maybe I'll get modded down for this, but I urge you to step back and think if you're being biased first. Linux has it's place, and I like it as much as the rest of us:) But don't get me wrong, I think Windows, and any pay-for software, has it's place too.
It's perfectly *capable* of running on a desktop. I'm also someone who has used it on my home PC and liked it:) Sure, it's mainly a server OS but there is no problem at all in using it as a desktop. It runs many Linux binaries, and of course most *NIX sources can be recompiled to run on it without alteration.
You can even use KDE and GNOME on it, at least on FreeBSD. That kinda speaks for itself. Anything that runs KDE, the window manager that most desktop Linux distros thrive on, is what I would call a desktop OS.
BUT. If you see a desktop OS as something that Joe Average can use easily, then I guess BSD isn't great for it. It didn't have any friendly, graphical/pretty installation wizards last time I checked, and that's probably the biggest hurdle for Mr Average. A text based installer like the one FreeBSD uses is usually easy to follow if you have your brain plugged in, but at first glance most "newbie" types will just run off screaming. This is a concept that some Linux distros (Mandrake, SuSE and co) only just started to see a year or two ago, and now they're thriving from it.
Once up and running, BSD is very nice, and the hardware support is excellent (it seems better than Linux's in some places, like good USB support was there earlier). But getting it to the up-and-running stage is not the easiest of tasks unless you're experienced. Compare it to a more "out of the box" distro like Mandrake (and dare I say it, MS Windoze), and you know which Joe Average will go for.
And so stands my opinion. I think that if you really *want* to think of it as a desktop OS, do so! It's fully capable of being one. But I wouldn't expect to call it a "serious" desktop OS like Linux is becoming, Windoze unfortunately is, and BeOS was until recently. As it is, it just isn't newbie-friendly. To be honest, I hope it will never be. IMO, we will always need a free *NIX that is fully "cleansed" of the kind of fluff that newbies need.
Damn shame. I used BeOS for quite a while when version 4.0 was released, and loved it. The speed and stability were outstanding (especially the boot time!)
But to be honest, I saw this coming about 6 months ago. BeOS didn't really have much in the way of applications. By that time, those few developers that did support it slowly stopped, and the alarm bells rang. Now you have the vicious circle... other developers stop because the first lot did... repeat until death.
The lack of a decent office suite, among other things, is a good example of how the third party support was poor.
A little more hardware support would have made things a lot more hopeful too. Many people were stuck with black-and-white screens and no sound.
I never found the time to develop for it either. Actually, I'm still a novice at programming in general. I did try to support it by buying the versions they released since version 4.0, but it just wasn't enough.
I think that making a free version 5.0 and focusing on integrated stuff was a big mistake. It's nice as an integrated OS for appliances, but obviously it just didn't take off. Moving to that market was a huge gamble IMO. It would either be a huge success, or fail miserably... and unfortunately, it did the latter.
With "Personal Edition", I'm willing to bet that 95% of users would rather download the free version than buy the Professional one:) Heck, who wouldn't? The Pro version had Realplayer, and that was about it. I bought it to support them, but one or two people just isn't enough.
BeOS was a very bold idea. I honestly thought it would work. But when you look at it, they were basically trying to recreate MacOS on the PC (and the Mac, oddly) But if I wanted MacOS, perhaps it would be far more productive to buy a Mac. Perhaps that's why it failed.
Whatever the reason for its downfall, it's a shame.
As it is, there just aren't that many people who use Linux at home yet. Try asking people like my parents, and they will just ask "why?". It's more stable, but in their eyes it's more difficult to use because they're used to Windows. If there was a way to run Windows games though, it would be another huge reason for them at least to try it.
Until Linux has plenty of users, it's more profitable for the corporates to develop games for Windows. Therefore, this is a good way to keep gamers happy until Linux gets popular enough for native commercial games.
Even better in my view, would be to use consoles. Okay so they're less customisable, but I much prefer shoving a DVD into my PS2 and playing the game straight off, to faffing about trying to get it to run on my unique PC hardware.
That's the conclusion I came to today. If they see a threat, they don't just try to beat them - they just swallow them whole and spit the bones out at the innocent bystanders.
First the swallowed Kesmai and Gamestorm, promising that they would continue my old haunt Air Warrior 3 (or rather, Air Warrior 3 Millennium Version *eyeroll*). They are doing, for now, but it's a total mess and I think they'll stop supporting it soon. I'm sure they just did it do give AW's followers a false sense of confidence before finally plunging the dagger into their backs.
Lo and behold, they killed Air Warrior 4, which was looking to be totally awesome too. I don't know what their competition is, but obviously they couldn't stand the threat that AW4 gave it.
So next, they decide they've had enough of Origin. Maybe they're creating their own MMORPG or something. So they bought them too, decided to milk UO for a little while, and quietly axed UO2 before it became too much of a threat.
*Sigh*
EA.com are evil. Nothing less. Anyone want to start an antitrust lawsuit? They're a lot more deserving than Microsoft, and that's saying something.
There doesn't seem to be much missing. A little bit of DVD stuff, a few other small bits. In theory, they should do a free update when they've properly finished it:)
But being a long-suffering Windows user I wouldn't expect that. Microsoft would re-package the "full" version, call it Second Edition and charge $70 for the upgrade. Is this the kind of thing Apple would do, or would they make it free?
Faulty research on my part, you *can* buy a license to disable the adverts.
So what does it matter then? Either pay and put up with it (or whine about it not being GPLd), or put your hand in your pocket and be free of ads:)
Before anyone says it should be GPL or else etc... Opera Software are probably a bunch of guys who don't have any other job to make money. So support em durnit!
The likes of Getright and Eudora only have adverts if you don't want to pay. If you want rid of the banners, you pay them a couple of bucks and they give you a code to get rid of them. I can't see why Opera don't seem to do this!
In principle I don't mind banners. Not all software authors are nice enough to go GPL and give everything away - some would like to make money. That's fair enough, we all need to make it somehow!
But why not let us pay to have them removed? They will make far more from me paying them to remove the ads than they will ever get from me clicking them:)
I've personally never found Linux books (or any computer books for that matter) to be terribly helpful. It's probably the way I learn, but I find it much easier either getting a geek friend to teach you, going on a course (if you can find one that isn't too much BS) or just learning by experimentation. Asking around in newsgroups also helps, as long as the question isn't tooo dumb:)
Slashdot Mirror
The first time I heard was in an ICQ message also.
It's amazing how fast bad news travels, especially if it's on an instant messenger!
I agree with continuing tech stories, and the idea of everyone dropping everything for this is exactly what the terrorist scum wanted in the first place. Sure, for the first day I was too shocked to do anything (for some reason they even put the soaps on TV still. But I couldn't even begin to enjoy watching them.) But life must go on, else those people have won.
I tried WineX - neither Everquest nor Jumpgate worked with it. In fact I got the impression nothing would work with it yet (too early in development) :)
Obviously you would know better about that than I do
So I take it there are *still* no Windoze emulators that support DirectX?
:)
The only thing I ever use Windows for these days is playing games (Everquest and Jumpgate), so I don't see any point in emulating a non-DX version
Just one other little thing I forgot to mention... it was *immensely* useful when one of us couldn't make it to class (due to being ill or whatever)
No more tedious copying down of the missed day's notes. We'd simply beam them over via IRDA, and whoever was absent that day would only have to read the notes (and ask any necessary questions) to catch up! When they got home, they'd print out the notes (as always) and file them for reference. Much easier.
Myself and a friend used Psion 5's in A-level classes just over a year ago, to take the usual notes.
;) We used to run down to the library (which had the IRDA-capable printers) if anything needed printing.
The teachers didn't mind at all (in fact they were quite amused at the two of us tapping away in the corner whilst everyone else was scribbling with a pen and paper!)
It was *great* for some subjects (and we could play IRDA games during the boring bits.. heh heh) but it kinda sucked for others. It was ideal in Computer Studies (mostly copying from a textbook - we would have loved one of those handheld OCR scanners!) and the occasional flowchart which could be done either in Sketch or an addon program. It wasn't always great in Physics or Maths though (too many complex formulae that couldn't be typed, and were too difficult to sketch at the same pace as everyone else). In which case we resorted to good old pen and paper.
I mainly liked it for coursework, which I always used to end up copying from written work to a word processor. This way, it would start typed from the beginning, and the spreadsheet came in very handy along the way!
It'd be interesting if a PDA (or at least a package for one) would be developed specifically for schools. My main complaint with the Psion, which I believe has very sadly been discontinued, was the lack of any easy way to input long formulae. If there's a way around that yet, we're almost there.
It'd obviously help if the teacher has one so you can beam your work over for marking
The market is most definitely there.
Oops. Someone just reminded me to think "free speech" rather than "free beer"...
;)
Can't help it, I like free beer
Just to clarify, yes they can sell it:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
I presume they mean selling their *addons* to Linux, and the service of bundling them all together.
:)
(Expensive service, too)
AFAIK, they can't "sell Linux" as such without breaching the GPL.
I assume the wording is just unclear, as otherwise it could start a riot
They already have cable and ADSL in most of London... why would they need (or want) wireless access?
They should trial things like that over here in the Lake District. The cable companies simply refuse to lay any cable down in most of this area (because it'd cost too much to do so), and BT are dragging their feet too much with ADSL. Which means we're stuck with 56K or (if you're lucky, like me) ISDN.
But with wireless access, we'd be bypassing the need for expensive cable-laying, and also bypassing the incredibly slow BT. Just what we need.
This may take me down to -1, Troll oblivion, but just hear me out first. It's some honest pondering.
Could this be a bad sign of things to come? What I see, is one of the maintainers of a vital component of Linux(*1) ranting about the very organisations that (good or evil) *are* pretty vital parts of the Linux operating system. For the record, I agree with them about Stali^H^H^H^H^HStallman (*2). But frankly it's worrying that at least one of my operating system's vital components is written someone who rants about other people in the public release notes! (Which IMHO makes him a bit of a war monger)
On the other side of the fence... it's also worrying that the GPL, which maybe 70%(?) of the Linux software is distributed under, was thought up by someone who seems to be losing a lot of credibility and trustworthiness.
Couldn't he suddenly change the licence to a "new version" that allows him to claim all the work for himself, restrict it so that only he can distribute it, and make billions?
We've also seen sour grapes between the glibc and gcc developers over GCC 3.0, which also made it into the release notes. What if this turns out just as nasty? To the point where they refuse to co-operate? What use would glibc or GCC be if they were incompatible with each other?
(They *really* need to be written by the same people, but that's for another topic).
Am I just being paranoid and misinformed?
(*1): or GNU/Linux. "What Do You Want To Call It Today?"
(*2): True, if it weren't for RMS, Linux wouldn't be what it is today (if anything at all). But that doesn't mean I like what he's turned into.
Here's another one... set your language to Elmer Fudd, and scroll down to Czech -
"Czech...wwat's twat? Hwuh?"
Come on, I just got my PS2... and it was expensive too.. don't go associating it with creeps like those!
:) It doesn't have their browser built into it already, so that would mean an expansion. An expansion that would surely have some *damn good* competition (hopefully well marketed. Since AOL are very good at fooling people with their marketing).
:( In which case I'll just kill myself :p
*Sobs* *Huggles PS2*
Which would I rather see... a PS2 ruined by AOL, or a PS2 ruined by Microsoft?
Go Microsoft! Go Microsoft!
(Hey, at least MS make decent hardware. AOL just eat people... and block people from using their lame instant messenger.)
But there's one thing we can be thankful for - there isn't really any definite way AOL can ruin the PS2
I could be wrong
This is a *superb* idea, and there is one game I would use all the time on it. EverQuest.
:)
Sony/Verant themselves have said time and time again that they have no plans to make a native Linux version, so this would be most welcome.
As far as I know it will be a long time until EQ works with it, but if anyone's managed to get it working I would be most interested to hear how.
There's only one concern I have. It barely works with a "Real" version of Windows if you have an SB Live (particularly Win2000, which is the only version I will agree to use). Still, it would be quite a laugh if it ends up working better in Linux
I like it. Why didn't anyone mention this idea before? I'd buy one straight away!
:p ) whilst also keeping the case shut to reduce noise.
I really like the idea of being able to see if my CPU fan is working (I don't trust those monitoring apps quite as much as my own eyes
Wonderful.
So don't try it, it might make a mess.
From the go-gnome script:
Official support for Woody has been held back due to installation
problems. We hope to have an officially supported install path on
Woody within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, you're
welcome to try to install our Potato packages on Woody, but we make
no guarantees.
They're not wrong there either. It was a right mess when I tried it a couple of weeks ago on my Woody system (using the go-gnome wizardy thing). Control Center hung when you opened the Sawfish controls, and I couldn't get any sound at all even with esd and oss working perfectly.
I hope they get it fixed soon, Debian Potato is too old for me now (particularly the glibc it uses). If anyone gets it working properly (with sound!) I'd be interested to know.
It's been a little while since I saw the various endings. Needless to say they were fansubbed (anyone who is half serious with anime would know that the subs are way better than the dubs 99% of the time)
But if I remember correctly, Death and Rebirth are like two different movies in one. Death is a short recap of the TV series. And Rebirth is a replacement for episodes 25 and 26... but also basically the first half of the newer movie "End of Evangelion".
In other words, it's better just to wait for End Of Eva. It's basically Eva:Rebirth with a few alterations, a continuation, and a very final conclusion. Seeing both would just mean a lot of repetition.
IMO, whether you see End of Eva at all should depend on what type of ending you like. Basically it's an alternative ending to please the crowds that were spamming them to death about having an unsatisfying ending on the TV series.
Without wishing to spoil it (stop now if you don't even want to know whether each ending is happy or not. Even then it is still speculation, it's just how happy the ending *appears* to be.)
...
I'll go so far as to say that the TV ending is "happy, but not very conclusive - lots of questions left unanswered". And End Of Eva is the "Gruesome, shocking ending that will please anyone who likes lots of violence, but they do not seem to live happily ever after if that's your thing."
XCDRoast uses .raw files... in fact, it won't see anything else. You could say they provided Progeny as .raw to avoid questions about how to record an ISO file in xcdroast - but then, everyone else in the world will be asking them how to burn a .raw file *shrug*
I wish people would agree to the same extension!
I also wish they'd stick to the same boot procedure (SysV?), but that's a different story.
You raise some very good points.
;)
:) But don't get me wrong, I think Windows, and any pay-for software, has it's place too.
There are actually some times when I prefer to buy a product, than to use a free / open-source program.
Suppose I have a suggestion towards improving a program with a feature that only a few people would use. Since open-source software is usually written for the author and not for the user, the answer is usually "No, I have no need for that, so why should I?" Since I'm getting free beer, what right do I have to ask for it to be served with a smaller head?
You could quite rightly say that the free means free speech, and I should learn C and add the feature myself. But not everyone has the time or intelligence, so it's not a very good answer. I'd rather pay someone to do it for me.
So, pay-for software excels in this area. Nobody is going to buy software that doesn't do what they want, so the author has to write mainly for the user rather than himself.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, many Linux users appear too stubborn with the socialist idealism. There are times when I think of bringing a closed-source product to Linux as the same as trying to bring scientific views to the middle ages. I have this vision of the author being stoned to death by an angry mob of Slashdotters
Maybe I'll get modded down for this, but I urge you to step back and think if you're being biased first. Linux has it's place, and I like it as much as the rest of us
It depends on what you call a desktop OS.
:) Sure, it's mainly a server OS but there is no problem at all in using it as a desktop. It runs many Linux binaries, and of course most *NIX sources can be recompiled to run on it without alteration.
It's perfectly *capable* of running on a desktop. I'm also someone who has used it on my home PC and liked it
You can even use KDE and GNOME on it, at least on FreeBSD. That kinda speaks for itself. Anything that runs KDE, the window manager that most desktop Linux distros thrive on, is what I would call a desktop OS.
BUT. If you see a desktop OS as something that Joe Average can use easily, then I guess BSD isn't great for it. It didn't have any friendly, graphical/pretty installation wizards last time I checked, and that's probably the biggest hurdle for Mr Average. A text based installer like the one FreeBSD uses is usually easy to follow if you have your brain plugged in, but at first glance most "newbie" types will just run off screaming. This is a concept that some Linux distros (Mandrake, SuSE and co) only just started to see a year or two ago, and now they're thriving from it.
Once up and running, BSD is very nice, and the hardware support is excellent (it seems better than Linux's in some places, like good USB support was there earlier). But getting it to the up-and-running stage is not the easiest of tasks unless you're experienced. Compare it to a more "out of the box" distro like Mandrake (and dare I say it, MS Windoze), and you know which Joe Average will go for.
And so stands my opinion. I think that if you really *want* to think of it as a desktop OS, do so! It's fully capable of being one. But I wouldn't expect to call it a "serious" desktop OS like Linux is becoming, Windoze unfortunately is, and BeOS was until recently. As it is, it just isn't newbie-friendly. To be honest, I hope it will never be. IMO, we will always need a free *NIX that is fully "cleansed" of the kind of fluff that newbies need.
Damn shame. I used BeOS for quite a while when version 4.0 was released, and loved it. The speed and stability were outstanding (especially the boot time!)
:) Heck, who wouldn't? The Pro version had Realplayer, and that was about it. I bought it to support them, but one or two people just isn't enough.
But to be honest, I saw this coming about 6 months ago. BeOS didn't really have much in the way of applications. By that time, those few developers that did support it slowly stopped, and the alarm bells rang. Now you have the vicious circle... other developers stop because the first lot did... repeat until death.
The lack of a decent office suite, among other things, is a good example of how the third party support was poor.
A little more hardware support would have made things a lot more hopeful too. Many people were stuck with black-and-white screens and no sound.
I never found the time to develop for it either. Actually, I'm still a novice at programming in general. I did try to support it by buying the versions they released since version 4.0, but it just wasn't enough.
I think that making a free version 5.0 and focusing on integrated stuff was a big mistake. It's nice as an integrated OS for appliances, but obviously it just didn't take off. Moving to that market was a huge gamble IMO. It would either be a huge success, or fail miserably... and unfortunately, it did the latter.
With "Personal Edition", I'm willing to bet that 95% of users would rather download the free version than buy the Professional one
BeOS was a very bold idea. I honestly thought it would work. But when you look at it, they were basically trying to recreate MacOS on the PC (and the Mac, oddly) But if I wanted MacOS, perhaps it would be far more productive to buy a Mac. Perhaps that's why it failed.
Whatever the reason for its downfall, it's a shame.
As it is, there just aren't that many people who use Linux at home yet. Try asking people like my parents, and they will just ask "why?". It's more stable, but in their eyes it's more difficult to use because they're used to Windows. If there was a way to run Windows games though, it would be another huge reason for them at least to try it. Until Linux has plenty of users, it's more profitable for the corporates to develop games for Windows. Therefore, this is a good way to keep gamers happy until Linux gets popular enough for native commercial games. Even better in my view, would be to use consoles. Okay so they're less customisable, but I much prefer shoving a DVD into my PS2 and playing the game straight off, to faffing about trying to get it to run on my unique PC hardware.
That's the conclusion I came to today. If they see a threat, they don't just try to beat them - they just swallow them whole and spit the bones out at the innocent bystanders. First the swallowed Kesmai and Gamestorm, promising that they would continue my old haunt Air Warrior 3 (or rather, Air Warrior 3 Millennium Version *eyeroll*). They are doing, for now, but it's a total mess and I think they'll stop supporting it soon. I'm sure they just did it do give AW's followers a false sense of confidence before finally plunging the dagger into their backs. Lo and behold, they killed Air Warrior 4, which was looking to be totally awesome too. I don't know what their competition is, but obviously they couldn't stand the threat that AW4 gave it. So next, they decide they've had enough of Origin. Maybe they're creating their own MMORPG or something. So they bought them too, decided to milk UO for a little while, and quietly axed UO2 before it became too much of a threat. *Sigh* EA.com are evil. Nothing less. Anyone want to start an antitrust lawsuit? They're a lot more deserving than Microsoft, and that's saying something.
There doesn't seem to be much missing. A little bit of DVD stuff, a few other small bits. In theory, they should do a free update when they've properly finished it :)
But being a long-suffering Windows user I wouldn't expect that. Microsoft would re-package the "full" version, call it Second Edition and charge $70 for the upgrade. Is this the kind of thing Apple would do, or would they make it free?
Faulty research on my part, you *can* buy a license to disable the adverts. So what does it matter then? Either pay and put up with it (or whine about it not being GPLd), or put your hand in your pocket and be free of ads :)
Before anyone says it should be GPL or else etc... Opera Software are probably a bunch of guys who don't have any other job to make money. So support em durnit!
The likes of Getright and Eudora only have adverts if you don't want to pay. If you want rid of the banners, you pay them a couple of bucks and they give you a code to get rid of them. I can't see why Opera don't seem to do this! In principle I don't mind banners. Not all software authors are nice enough to go GPL and give everything away - some would like to make money. That's fair enough, we all need to make it somehow! But why not let us pay to have them removed? They will make far more from me paying them to remove the ads than they will ever get from me clicking them :)
I've personally never found Linux books (or any computer books for that matter) to be terribly helpful. It's probably the way I learn, but I find it much easier either getting a geek friend to teach you, going on a course (if you can find one that isn't too much BS) or just learning by experimentation. Asking around in newsgroups also helps, as long as the question isn't tooo dumb :)