I stand corrected, prices are indeed in USD. Not sure why I thought it was AUD. Maybe I was confused with some other store - it's been over 2 years since I looked at the steam store - I stopped after filing a complaint with the ACCC about their failure to comply with Australian consumer protection laws.
But my other point stands: if they're selling a cut-down version of Left 4 Dead 2 to Australians to comply with our censorship laws, they're targeting Australians.
Further to this, the Australian laws don't automatically apply whenever you buy from somebody overseas, they only apply when the seller is targeting Australians.
Valve are clearly targeting Australians: they charge in $AUD, and they have special cut-down versions of games specifically to comply with Australian laws.
Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu has done a lot of great things and overall they've been a very positive thing for the Linux world, but they're not all awesome and they're far from perfect.
This. I haven't had a single piece of hardware not work in at least 5 years. In fact, I can't remember the last time something didn't work. Last time I checked, Linux supported more hardware than Windows. I've been using Linux for well over 10 years now and I've never recompiled the kernel. And I've never researched what hardware I buy, either.
firefox could be effectively shutdown if Mozilla cooperated with the Ad Industry and Content Providers in such a way that prevented their add-on(s) from working.
I know people who say Javascript is much improved over what it used to be but I do get the feeling that a lot of these people have never really used any other language in depth.
Don't misunderstand: Open-sourcing stuff is definitely a step in the right direction. And if they keep it up and demonstrate good faith for 15 years or so I might even begin to trust them. Let's chat in 2030.
"you" having reservations about Microsoft and opensource doesnt mean "people" have reservations
kbg has reservations. I have reservations. Now, "people" have reservations. Thanks for playing!
I have yet to see Embrace, Extend and Extinguish in real life
So you haven't been around for very long then? It took me about 3 seconds to find Examples. See also: Exchange / outlook / email standards (the "extinguish" step failed here, but they gave it a good try), and for something more recent, the whole "open" document format fiasco.
.Net is awesome
This is some strange new usage of the word "awesome" with which I'm not familiar. Or did you misspell "horrific"? Damn autocorrect, eh?
MS is releasing stuff as open source left right and centre
Centre, huh? Get back to me when they open source DirectX. Then I might - might - care.
care to actually tell me how MS acting as gatekeeper for their project is any different from any of the other projects I mentioned? You cant
I can:
The projects you mention are managed by communities of people who have an interest in producing good open source software, and the convention is to use public mailing lists for discussion, where anybody can challenge the decisions of the ruling body. Some of these projects may even have a committee which votes on changes/direction, and a charter/code of conduct/set of rules which even the highest-level members of the community will be bound by.
This project is managed by a company with an interest in selling proprietary software and a history of open hostility to open source in addition to using illegal tactics to abuse its dominant position. How transparent is their vetting process? Do they have a code of conduct/charter/set of rules they're bound by? How does one go about challenging the decisions of Microsoft with regards to contributions and the direction of the project? Are they using a public mailing list where all discussion is publicly available?
Further, most of the projects you list are under a GPL-style license where there is a guarantee that submitted code will remain open. The ones which aren't under such a license have a multi-year history of good faith with regards to keeping things open. By licensing this under the MIT license, I presume that all contributions will also be MIT licensed, meaning that it can be closed off at any point at the whim of the company mentioned above.
just how long do I have to wait to be "extended" or "extinguished"? Another 5 years? 10? Am I going to die of old age first?
You probably have already, it's just that it was spoon-fed to you as an "upgrade" and you bought the marketing line (and, coincidentally, a bunch of new software. Strange coincidence, huh? Those marketing guys sure are slick!). You rewrote some huge and perfectly functional codebase, wasting countless hours, or you upgraded something (likely requiring replacement of perfectly functional hardware) because "new features!" (which you didn't actually use), not because the old thing was obsoleted, right?
1. Moving things around without asking me 2. Stupid fucking hamburger menu button which I want nothing to do with and which periodically comes back all by itself, forcing me to continually re-customize and remove it. Which is helpful, because my constantly removing it is obviously accidental. I must want the hamburger menu, I just don't know it yet. While we're explaining what's so terrible about things, I'd love to hear what's so terrible about a hierarchical menu system. 3. Curvy chrome-alike tabs which uselessly take up more space, not good when you have many tabs open. 4. Removal of the status bar, meaning that the icons for the fuckton of addons I have installed all got migrated to the main (only) toolbar, making it a huge mess 5. Most importantly, no option to revert all this insanity. Going from something customizable to something which isn't. It's a step backwards.
If you want Firefox to look different then use Classic Theme Restorer
That's an excellent suggestion, and exactly what I did. It's also really helpful because I didn't think I had enough addons installed, and firefox wasn't using enough memory or CPU time.
I've been living without ads just fine for about 10 years now. I don't miss them at all. In fact, when I'm at a friend's place and they're watching TV (or youtube on their playstation), I find the ads intolerable.
I keep abreast of movies I'm interested in by using the internet and word of mouth. It's great - I can go to a sci-fi movie website and look at news about movies which I'm likely to be interested in. Then I can go to youtube and watch the previews for any that I'm interested in. It's immensely superior to ads for movies which I have no interest in bombarding me in the middle of something I'm trying to watch.
Yes, there are movies that I've missed and only heard about via word of mouth later, but given that my home experience is almost on par with a cinema experience, missing a movie while it's in the cinema isn't a big deal like it used to be.
When I need a product, I know that I need it, so I go looking for it. I use reviews and feature lists to make a comparison and decision.
I have zero need for advertising, and ads boil my blood. No advertising is awesome
Mr. Burns: I see. Well, I-...Oh, that reminds me, it is time for your annual contribution. How much should I give? Male Admissions Officer: Well frankly, test scores like Larry's would merit a very generous donation. A score of 400 would require new football uniforms. 300 would require a new dormitory. And in Larry's case? We'd need an international airport. Female Admissions Officer: Yale could use an international airport, Mr. Burns.
If only I had mod points today. This is probably the best rebuttal to the old "GNU/Linux" whinge I've ever heard. Bravo!
While I do use GNU tools every day, I also use steam and apache and a bunch of other software every day. Maybe I should be calling it Xine/Audacious/Apache/MySQL/XOrg/Eclipse/Steam/GNU/Linux.
As you say it's getting better for the bigger titles. Here are some of the bigger games you forgot to mention: * Borderlands 2 * Borderlands The Pre-sequel (linux version on launch day!) * XCOM: Enemy Unknown * All the valve games (Half-Life + all addons, HL2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, counterstrike, portal 1+2, etc etc) * KOTOR 2 got a port not long ago * Shadow Warrior (the reboot/remake thing, it's awesome) * Serious Sam 3 * Saints Row 4 (announced, I can't wait) Also the ones you mention: Civ 5, Bioshock Infinite, X3, etc
Also the next Crysis engine will have Linux support, as does Unreal Engine 4 and the new Unreal Tournament (which is open source and community built! You can sign up, clone the git tree, and compile it now).
There are also a bunch of really great not-so-huge titles: * Oddworld: New & Tasty * Grim Fandango Remastered * Postal 1+2 (available before steam) * Duke Nukem 3D * Shadow Warrior (original) * Psychonauts (available before steam) * Goat Simulator * Spec Ops: The Line * Kerbal Space Program (I think this just might be the best game ever made)
As an exclusive Linux user, I have a huge backlog of games I haven't gotten around to playing yet. It's awesome!
yep, SPF and DKIM records make a big difference. Also a PTR record (so that your IP resolves to e.g hostname.yourdomain.com rather than youraccount.yourwebhost.com) helps.
1) Quit being such an OS bigot. I am bilingual, two languages is definitively better than one... I can get work done on a computer as long as it is not a Mac
I'm entitled to express my opinion and somewhat qualified to have one: I've run large windows networks, written tens of thousands of lines of code for windows, and had productive work environments on windows. I've run large websites on many flavours of Linux and I don't particularly care what distro I'm using. I've administered BSD and Solaris machines. I have administered ancient legacy government UNIX servers that everyone else was afraid to touch. I can even get stuff done on a Mac and I'm familiar with mac servers. I've configured and administered just about every type of server you can imagine - database, web, mail, LDAP, VPN, DNS, proxies, routers, firewalls, etc etc - even active directory. I've built a secure government network (which involved defending my design against a panel of technical/security people asking hard questions). I've worked with huge ESX clusters and even a small beowulf. I've used just about every toy OS out there (minix, ReactOS, AROS, Morphos, MenuetOS, etc). I can use OS/2 and AmigaOS, CP/M and DOS v2. And these are just the ones that spring to mind immediately. I can use pretty much any desktop/server OS. I'm qualified to have an opinion. Granted, I'm not qualified to talk about supercomputers...but who rules that niche again?
In my (limited) experience and (not very professional) opinion, windows is the worst of them all (except maybe some of the toy ones). If having an opinion based on 25+ years of experience makes me a bigot then so be it. If you haven't managed to get butthurt over anything then congratulations. I suspect you're not doing anything particularly complicated or important, and/or you're not doing anything MS hasn't anticipated, or being a "big Linux guy" you're doing everything important elsewhere). Or perhaps you're just not very passionate. I endured a lot before I vowed never to touch it again. I could give you a list of things to get butthurt about but I don't have the next decade free for typing and I'm sure slashdot has some kind of size limit on posts.
But my point when I said "We don't really care what you use that much" is that I really don't care what you use, because I don't - they're your computers and you can run what you like on them. If you like windows, then use it, more power to you. But do not complain at me when you do inevitably get butthurt, because I will have zero sympathy. And don't spread FUD.
(not being able to move the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the right side of the window? really?).
This is particularly funny given that windows has no option to move the titlebar buttons either. Hence my use of the term "unconfigurable".
2) Quit spreading anti-M$ FUD.
Everything I said is true and has nothing to do with being anti-MS or FUD. It's horrible, it's unconfigurable, and it's spyware. Granted, the first is an opinion, but the rest is demonstrable. Granted, I am anti-MS, but it took about 10-15 years of their abuse for that to happen.
M$ makes stuff that works
Sure, it works. For you. At the moment. And it will just as long as MS supports solving the problem you're trying to solve. And as long as you don't run into arbitrary restrictions based on the license you have. And assuming you have something in place to deal with rebooting every time you install an update. And assuming that the next update/version doesn't remove features you rely on. And as long as you pay. Every couple of years.
heck I am even impressed with Windows 10 and I never have nice things to say about M$
Contradiction much?
If you're impressed with windows 10 you're either not paying attention to the news (e.g articles like this one), or...you're not paying attention to the news (e.g articles like this one). Or
Slashdot Mirror
I stand corrected, prices are indeed in USD. Not sure why I thought it was AUD. Maybe I was confused with some other store - it's been over 2 years since I looked at the steam store - I stopped after filing a complaint with the ACCC about their failure to comply with Australian consumer protection laws.
But my other point stands: if they're selling a cut-down version of Left 4 Dead 2 to Australians to comply with our censorship laws, they're targeting Australians.
Further to this, the Australian laws don't automatically apply whenever you buy from somebody overseas, they only apply when the seller is targeting Australians.
Valve are clearly targeting Australians: they charge in $AUD, and they have special cut-down versions of games specifically to comply with Australian laws.
It has to be as described and do whatever you were led to believe it would do. The term is actually "fit for purpose".
The other issue with valve is refusing to comply with the Australian consumer protection laws - refusing to give refunds for a nonworking product.
oh, well, that's different then. The archive only has 600 or so arcade games. And Admittedly searching for "atari" only gives about 40 results.
And they have the DOS versions of of Hard drivin and Hard Drivin II.
Wow, 100 Atari games?!? For only $15?!? The easiest way possible?
And here I was thinking that the 500+ free Atari games playable for free in your browser on archive.org was the easiest possible way.
they always deliver on their promises
Like this one?
Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu has done a lot of great things and overall they've been a very positive thing for the Linux world, but they're not all awesome and they're far from perfect.
This. I haven't had a single piece of hardware not work in at least 5 years. In fact, I can't remember the last time something didn't work. Last time I checked, Linux supported more hardware than Windows. I've been using Linux for well over 10 years now and I've never recompiled the kernel. And I've never researched what hardware I buy, either.
You're not talking about the Boing Ball are you? A demo for the Amiga written to show off its graphics capabilities.
firefox could be effectively shutdown if Mozilla cooperated with the Ad Industry and Content Providers in such a way that prevented their add-on(s) from working.
FTFY
I adore the response to:
I know people who say Javascript is much improved over what it used to be but I do get the feeling that a lot of these people have never really used any other language in depth.
which includes:
JS has improved a lot over the past few years
Gave me a chuckle.
hugs. If only I had mod points today.
Don't misunderstand: Open-sourcing stuff is definitely a step in the right direction. And if they keep it up and demonstrate good faith for 15 years or so I might even begin to trust them. Let's chat in 2030.
"you" having reservations about Microsoft and opensource doesnt mean "people" have reservations
kbg has reservations. I have reservations. Now, "people" have reservations. Thanks for playing!
I have yet to see Embrace, Extend and Extinguish in real life
So you haven't been around for very long then? It took me about 3 seconds to find Examples. See also: Exchange / outlook / email standards (the "extinguish" step failed here, but they gave it a good try), and for something more recent, the whole "open" document format fiasco.
.Net is awesome
This is some strange new usage of the word "awesome" with which I'm not familiar. Or did you misspell "horrific"? Damn autocorrect, eh?
MS is releasing stuff as open source left right and centre
Centre, huh?
Get back to me when they open source DirectX. Then I might - might - care.
care to actually tell me how MS acting as gatekeeper for their project is any different from any of the other projects I mentioned? You cant
I can:
The projects you mention are managed by communities of people who have an interest in producing good open source software, and the convention is to use public mailing lists for discussion, where anybody can challenge the decisions of the ruling body. Some of these projects may even have a committee which votes on changes/direction, and a charter/code of conduct/set of rules which even the highest-level members of the community will be bound by.
This project is managed by a company with an interest in selling proprietary software and a history of open hostility to open source in addition to using illegal tactics to abuse its dominant position. How transparent is their vetting process? Do they have a code of conduct/charter/set of rules they're bound by? How does one go about challenging the decisions of Microsoft with regards to contributions and the direction of the project? Are they using a public mailing list where all discussion is publicly available?
Further, most of the projects you list are under a GPL-style license where there is a guarantee that submitted code will remain open. The ones which aren't under such a license have a multi-year history of good faith with regards to keeping things open. By licensing this under the MIT license, I presume that all contributions will also be MIT licensed, meaning that it can be closed off at any point at the whim of the company mentioned above.
just how long do I have to wait to be "extended" or "extinguished"? Another 5 years? 10? Am I going to die of old age first?
You probably have already, it's just that it was spoon-fed to you as an "upgrade" and you bought the marketing line (and, coincidentally, a bunch of new software. Strange coincidence, huh? Those marketing guys sure are slick!). You rewrote some huge and perfectly functional codebase, wasting countless hours, or you upgraded something (likely requiring replacement of perfectly functional hardware) because "new features!" (which you didn't actually use), not because the old thing was obsoleted, right?
Isn't there an app that does that?
the ESA is surrounded by assholes
Clearly. I can't even find a shop on the ESA website. I was looking to buy some merchandise.
They should get into that, it's where the real money is made.
Generally this is true, but every rule has an exception. Iggy Pop is one. I'm sure he's actually a robot sent back from the future.
They're going for that segment of the market which really likes chrome but think it's too fast and doesn't use enough memory.
Not "best", "least-worst".
1. Moving things around without asking me
2. Stupid fucking hamburger menu button which I want nothing to do with and which periodically comes back all by itself, forcing me to continually re-customize and remove it. Which is helpful, because my constantly removing it is obviously accidental. I must want the hamburger menu, I just don't know it yet. While we're explaining what's so terrible about things, I'd love to hear what's so terrible about a hierarchical menu system.
3. Curvy chrome-alike tabs which uselessly take up more space, not good when you have many tabs open.
4. Removal of the status bar, meaning that the icons for the fuckton of addons I have installed all got migrated to the main (only) toolbar, making it a huge mess
5. Most importantly, no option to revert all this insanity. Going from something customizable to something which isn't. It's a step backwards.
If you want Firefox to look different then use Classic Theme Restorer
That's an excellent suggestion, and exactly what I did. It's also really helpful because I didn't think I had enough addons installed, and firefox wasn't using enough memory or CPU time.
no advertising is bad as well
I've been living without ads just fine for about 10 years now. I don't miss them at all. In fact, when I'm at a friend's place and they're watching TV (or youtube on their playstation), I find the ads intolerable.
I keep abreast of movies I'm interested in by using the internet and word of mouth. It's great - I can go to a sci-fi movie website and look at news about movies which I'm likely to be interested in. Then I can go to youtube and watch the previews for any that I'm interested in. It's immensely superior to ads for movies which I have no interest in bombarding me in the middle of something I'm trying to watch.
Yes, there are movies that I've missed and only heard about via word of mouth later, but given that my home experience is almost on par with a cinema experience, missing a movie while it's in the cinema isn't a big deal like it used to be.
When I need a product, I know that I need it, so I go looking for it. I use reviews and feature lists to make a comparison and decision.
I have zero need for advertising, and ads boil my blood. No advertising is awesome
Mr. Burns: I see. Well, I- ...Oh, that reminds me, it is time for your annual contribution. How much should I give?
Male Admissions Officer: Well frankly, test scores like Larry's would merit a very generous donation. A score of 400 would require new football uniforms. 300 would require a new dormitory. And in Larry's case? We'd need an international airport.
Female Admissions Officer: Yale could use an international airport, Mr. Burns.
If only I had mod points today. This is probably the best rebuttal to the old "GNU/Linux" whinge I've ever heard. Bravo!
While I do use GNU tools every day, I also use steam and apache and a bunch of other software every day. Maybe I should be calling it Xine/Audacious/Apache/MySQL/XOrg/Eclipse/Steam/GNU/Linux.
As you say it's getting better for the bigger titles. Here are some of the bigger games you forgot to mention:
* Borderlands 2
* Borderlands The Pre-sequel (linux version on launch day!)
* XCOM: Enemy Unknown
* All the valve games (Half-Life + all addons, HL2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, counterstrike, portal 1+2, etc etc)
* KOTOR 2 got a port not long ago
* Shadow Warrior (the reboot/remake thing, it's awesome)
* Serious Sam 3
* Saints Row 4 (announced, I can't wait)
Also the ones you mention: Civ 5, Bioshock Infinite, X3, etc
Also the next Crysis engine will have Linux support, as does Unreal Engine 4 and the new Unreal Tournament (which is open source and community built! You can sign up, clone the git tree, and compile it now).
There are also a bunch of really great not-so-huge titles:
* Oddworld: New & Tasty
* Grim Fandango Remastered
* Postal 1+2 (available before steam)
* Duke Nukem 3D
* Shadow Warrior (original)
* Psychonauts (available before steam)
* Goat Simulator
* Spec Ops: The Line
* Kerbal Space Program (I think this just might be the best game ever made)
As an exclusive Linux user, I have a huge backlog of games I haven't gotten around to playing yet. It's awesome!
yep, SPF and DKIM records make a big difference. Also a PTR record (so that your IP resolves to e.g hostname.yourdomain.com rather than youraccount.yourwebhost.com) helps.
1) Quit being such an OS bigot. I am bilingual, two languages is definitively better than one... I can get work done on a computer as long as it is not a Mac
I'm entitled to express my opinion and somewhat qualified to have one: I've run large windows networks, written tens of thousands of lines of code for windows, and had productive work environments on windows. I've run large websites on many flavours of Linux and I don't particularly care what distro I'm using. I've administered BSD and Solaris machines. I have administered ancient legacy government UNIX servers that everyone else was afraid to touch. I can even get stuff done on a Mac and I'm familiar with mac servers. I've configured and administered just about every type of server you can imagine - database, web, mail, LDAP, VPN, DNS, proxies, routers, firewalls, etc etc - even active directory. I've built a secure government network (which involved defending my design against a panel of technical/security people asking hard questions). I've worked with huge ESX clusters and even a small beowulf. I've used just about every toy OS out there (minix, ReactOS, AROS, Morphos, MenuetOS, etc). I can use OS/2 and AmigaOS, CP/M and DOS v2. And these are just the ones that spring to mind immediately. I can use pretty much any desktop/server OS. I'm qualified to have an opinion. Granted, I'm not qualified to talk about supercomputers...but who rules that niche again?
In my (limited) experience and (not very professional) opinion, windows is the worst of them all (except maybe some of the toy ones). If having an opinion based on 25+ years of experience makes me a bigot then so be it. If you haven't managed to get butthurt over anything then congratulations. I suspect you're not doing anything particularly complicated or important, and/or you're not doing anything MS hasn't anticipated, or being a "big Linux guy" you're doing everything important elsewhere). Or perhaps you're just not very passionate. I endured a lot before I vowed never to touch it again. I could give you a list of things to get butthurt about but I don't have the next decade free for typing and I'm sure slashdot has some kind of size limit on posts.
But my point when I said "We don't really care what you use that much" is that I really don't care what you use, because I don't - they're your computers and you can run what you like on them. If you like windows, then use it, more power to you. But do not complain at me when you do inevitably get butthurt, because I will have zero sympathy. And don't spread FUD.
(not being able to move the minimize/maximize/close buttons to the right side of the window? really?).
This is particularly funny given that windows has no option to move the titlebar buttons either. Hence my use of the term "unconfigurable".
2) Quit spreading anti-M$ FUD.
Everything I said is true and has nothing to do with being anti-MS or FUD. It's horrible, it's unconfigurable, and it's spyware. Granted, the first is an opinion, but the rest is demonstrable. Granted, I am anti-MS, but it took about 10-15 years of their abuse for that to happen.
M$ makes stuff that works
Sure, it works. For you. At the moment. And it will just as long as MS supports solving the problem you're trying to solve. And as long as you don't run into arbitrary restrictions based on the license you have. And assuming you have something in place to deal with rebooting every time you install an update. And assuming that the next update/version doesn't remove features you rely on. And as long as you pay. Every couple of years.
heck I am even impressed with Windows 10 and I never have nice things to say about M$
Contradiction much?
If you're impressed with windows 10 you're either not paying attention to the news (e.g articles like this one), or...you're not paying attention to the news (e.g articles like this one). Or