I tried out onLive a while back via a free trial offer. I played a single-player game, and while the lag wasn't absolutely game-breaking, I could definitely notice it and did not enjoy dealing with it (note that this was on a 30Mbps connection in the US, so I probably have a better connection than what their average customer would have).
I don't think Linux (as in the kernel) needs or would really benefit from mainstream awareness. Your average Windows user is unaware of the NT kernel, and your average Mac user is unaware of the Mach kernel. Its success on mobile through Android (despite consumer ignorance that it's there) in my opinion does more to validate Linux than mainstream success would.
Really, other than perhaps the driver support from hardware vendors that would be brought in through mainstream desktop use, and better games support, I don't see what benefits mainstream adoption of Linux as an OS would bring. Developers know how useful and versatile the kernel is, and that's why it's done so well on servers, Android, and other embedded devices. For those who want to use it as a desktop operating system (such as myself), it's available for use there and works great for pretty much everything I want to do with it (like I mentioned above, I would love to have better gaming options, but I don't spend as much time playing games as I used to, so keeping a Windows partition around for that isn't terrible).
Linux as an operating system has built up a great ecosystem centered around developers and tinkerers, despite Canonical's attempts to make it mainstream. While I think the world could benefit from mainstream Linux adoption (think free software being used in government, enterprise, and the accessibility for developing nations as opposed to vendor control), I don't think that Linux has anything to gain from it.
Pretty much anyone who has done any 2D graphics programming and tried to keep it portable has probably used SDL. Even libraries such as PyGame for Python are really just wrappers for SDL for the most part. It was created by Sam Latinga (Loki, Blizzard, and now Valve) and is a fantastic, but low level library.
You have to enjoy what you do. I don't work at home, but once I leave work I generally have no problem focusing on a coding project for a couple hours in the evening. Sometimes there is temptation to do other things (like playing games), but a bit of discipline helps overcome those temptations.
They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
I'm sorry, but in the internet age this is not necessarily true. There are very good coders (and software engineers) out there with little or no formal college education who still have enough interest in computer science to study on their own. For a motivated individual, the only benefit education-wise of getting a 4-year degree at a university is the opportunity to surround yourself with people of similar interests.
No he didn't. Ransom Olds was using assembly line mass production in 1901 for the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, over 10 years before Henry Ford began using it for the Model T. Your argument keeps falling apart (and I'm not an Apple fan and have never purchased an Apple product).
I'm not an Apple fan, and generally believe that they are over-hyped and over-credited, however I guess I was never aware that the concept of a home button was new to the iPhone. If what you are saying is true, then that is indeed quite a useful addition to smart phones that has now been universally adopted (even the Nintendo 3DS has a home button). The one thing that keeps me from truly believing you that this was an Apple invented feature is that both the Xbox 360 and Wii controllers (and I'm assuming the PS3) had home buttons long before the iPhone was released. Even so, if Apple was the first to add that to smart phones then I will have to reluctantly give them credit.
I see this complaint a lot on Slashdot, perhaps it's country specific (the US?) but in my experience it's completely and utterly false in the UK and is merely an excuse for people who just don't cut it, and simply haven't kept their skills uptodate, or are merely just crap employees
I live (and work as a software engineer) in the US, and I see the same thing as you. Several of the best (and best paid) programmers I've worked with were 50+. The secret to their success is that they kept up-to-date, not expecting their COBOL skills to keep them employed throughout their careers.
Also, if you expect to stay relevant strictly from doing your job, the reality of it is that you will only be qualified for the job you have. Programmers are generally paid well, and I believe that part of the reason for that is the expectation that you will continuously bring more value to your employer through self-study and side projects. If spending at least 5 or so hours of your free time each week improving sounds like too much to you, then yes, you will be unemployable by the time you're 40.
Not very user-friendly when a system is so easy to frustrate the person using it. BTW on windows you can switch back from 640x400. Because Microsucks actually took the time to make sure their GUI did not leave their users trapped in deadend states. Linux developers don't seem to care. ("If you don't know the sudo command to switch the screen resolution, then it sucks to be you. Go back to windows," is the typical response.)
I'm not sure where you're going for help, but I've never seen any truth to that tired old line of Linux users hating you for not knowing. From my experience if you do your homework when looking for help and don't expect people to drop their lives in order to give you a response, most forums are very helpful. That is the experience I had while learning (and to be truthful I'm still a relative novice, but I can generally find what I need much quicker now).
Also, your problem with "Linux developers" not caring is just plain stupid. _You_ could be a Linux developer if you'd like.
If the solution to Linux's "problem" is to turn it into the crappy OS that it absolutely strives not to be, then I would rather stick with the "problem." I think most of the Linux community would agree with that.
From TFA, the analogy is made of a hamburger vendor being able to be sued for causing damages. There is a big difference here between a hamburger vendor on the corner and a software developer. For one, at least in the US there are some pretty specific regulations about how that hamburger vendor can prepare and serve food. If a hamburger makes you sick and the vendor was not following those regulations properly, that's when you can sue. To open up the ability to sue software developers for insecure software, we first would need specific regulations showing minimum security requirements of software.
These people must be completely ignorant to the issue of recidivism. How do you expect someone to rehabilitate and become a functioning member of society when you punish them by treating them like an animal? Not to mention, unless you're in a very low-security prison, you won't be learning anything productive or developing useful job skills. Once these prisoners get out, how are they expected to care for themselves in a society that will forever hate them? I, as an American, also have a problem with how much we spend on our prison system, but not because we're giving prisoners basic life support, but because of how ridiculously large our prison system has become.
That has been one of my dreams regarding self-driving cars. Perhaps these cars could communicate with other cars nearby so that each car has a map of all of their neighbors in memory. When the velocity of the car in front of you changes, each car could react almost instantaneously in changing its own velocity, eliminating a lot of the accordion effect that occurs during rush hour (car slows down to let car entering the highway in, other cars start bunching up behind it, then slowly each of those cars returns to the speed of traffic one-by-one). It would also remove the selfish-driver element of city driving, where one rude driver running a red light or hogging their spot in their lane causes greater traffic issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried out onLive a while back via a free trial offer. I played a single-player game, and while the lag wasn't absolutely game-breaking, I could definitely notice it and did not enjoy dealing with it (note that this was on a 30Mbps connection in the US, so I probably have a better connection than what their average customer would have).
According to Valve, they've been cooperative with supplying better drivers as Valve has needed them for porting Steam and Source games to Linux.
Heh, and don't forget taxes!
Derp, I'm dumb. I just now realized that you were referring to the hourly rate for someone making $100/day playing music on the street.
Even if you meant "a day", that's still much more than you could ever make flipping burgers ($12.50/hour after taxes).
Where do you live, where you can make $12.50/hour for flipping burgers?! Those must be some seriously skilled burger flippers!
Really, other than perhaps the driver support from hardware vendors that would be brought in through mainstream desktop use, and better games support, I don't see what benefits mainstream adoption of Linux as an OS would bring. Developers know how useful and versatile the kernel is, and that's why it's done so well on servers, Android, and other embedded devices. For those who want to use it as a desktop operating system (such as myself), it's available for use there and works great for pretty much everything I want to do with it (like I mentioned above, I would love to have better gaming options, but I don't spend as much time playing games as I used to, so keeping a Windows partition around for that isn't terrible).
Linux as an operating system has built up a great ecosystem centered around developers and tinkerers, despite Canonical's attempts to make it mainstream. While I think the world could benefit from mainstream Linux adoption (think free software being used in government, enterprise, and the accessibility for developing nations as opposed to vendor control), I don't think that Linux has anything to gain from it.
This would actually be really hilarious/interesting to see someone do.
Pretty much anyone who has done any 2D graphics programming and tried to keep it portable has probably used SDL. Even libraries such as PyGame for Python are really just wrappers for SDL for the most part. It was created by Sam Latinga (Loki, Blizzard, and now Valve) and is a fantastic, but low level library.
We need some sort of unification for Linux to be competitive with Windows, and Mac's
I've seen this argument several times, but nobody has bothered to suggest why Linux needs to compete with proprietary OSs.
You have to enjoy what you do. I don't work at home, but once I leave work I generally have no problem focusing on a coding project for a couple hours in the evening. Sometimes there is temptation to do other things (like playing games), but a bit of discipline helps overcome those temptations.
They have huge blind spots that CS grads don't have.
I'm sorry, but in the internet age this is not necessarily true. There are very good coders (and software engineers) out there with little or no formal college education who still have enough interest in computer science to study on their own. For a motivated individual, the only benefit education-wise of getting a 4-year degree at a university is the opportunity to surround yourself with people of similar interests.
No he didn't. Ransom Olds was using assembly line mass production in 1901 for the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, over 10 years before Henry Ford began using it for the Model T. Your argument keeps falling apart (and I'm not an Apple fan and have never purchased an Apple product).
I'm not an Apple fan, and generally believe that they are over-hyped and over-credited, however I guess I was never aware that the concept of a home button was new to the iPhone. If what you are saying is true, then that is indeed quite a useful addition to smart phones that has now been universally adopted (even the Nintendo 3DS has a home button). The one thing that keeps me from truly believing you that this was an Apple invented feature is that both the Xbox 360 and Wii controllers (and I'm assuming the PS3) had home buttons long before the iPhone was released. Even so, if Apple was the first to add that to smart phones then I will have to reluctantly give them credit.
Did anyone else notice that upload speeds were labeled as "Averge Upload" for every chart?
you're just another armchair general
FTFY
Submitter needs to turn in his geek card for confusing Mb with MB multiple times in the summary.
Nothing to see here, people; just another shill. This is a brand new account and this comment was posted the same time as the story.
I see this complaint a lot on Slashdot, perhaps it's country specific (the US?) but in my experience it's completely and utterly false in the UK and is merely an excuse for people who just don't cut it, and simply haven't kept their skills uptodate, or are merely just crap employees
I live (and work as a software engineer) in the US, and I see the same thing as you. Several of the best (and best paid) programmers I've worked with were 50+. The secret to their success is that they kept up-to-date, not expecting their COBOL skills to keep them employed throughout their careers.
Also, if you expect to stay relevant strictly from doing your job, the reality of it is that you will only be qualified for the job you have. Programmers are generally paid well, and I believe that part of the reason for that is the expectation that you will continuously bring more value to your employer through self-study and side projects. If spending at least 5 or so hours of your free time each week improving sounds like too much to you, then yes, you will be unemployable by the time you're 40.
Not very user-friendly when a system is so easy to frustrate the person using it. BTW on windows you can switch back from 640x400. Because Microsucks actually took the time to make sure their GUI did not leave their users trapped in deadend states. Linux developers don't seem to care. ("If you don't know the sudo command to switch the screen resolution, then it sucks to be you. Go back to windows," is the typical response.)
I'm not sure where you're going for help, but I've never seen any truth to that tired old line of Linux users hating you for not knowing. From my experience if you do your homework when looking for help and don't expect people to drop their lives in order to give you a response, most forums are very helpful. That is the experience I had while learning (and to be truthful I'm still a relative novice, but I can generally find what I need much quicker now).
Also, your problem with "Linux developers" not caring is just plain stupid. _You_ could be a Linux developer if you'd like.
If the solution to Linux's "problem" is to turn it into the crappy OS that it absolutely strives not to be, then I would rather stick with the "problem." I think most of the Linux community would agree with that.
*whoosh!* ...look for the misspelling of "addiction"...
From TFA, the analogy is made of a hamburger vendor being able to be sued for causing damages. There is a big difference here between a hamburger vendor on the corner and a software developer. For one, at least in the US there are some pretty specific regulations about how that hamburger vendor can prepare and serve food. If a hamburger makes you sick and the vendor was not following those regulations properly, that's when you can sue. To open up the ability to sue software developers for insecure software, we first would need specific regulations showing minimum security requirements of software.
These people must be completely ignorant to the issue of recidivism. How do you expect someone to rehabilitate and become a functioning member of society when you punish them by treating them like an animal? Not to mention, unless you're in a very low-security prison, you won't be learning anything productive or developing useful job skills. Once these prisoners get out, how are they expected to care for themselves in a society that will forever hate them? I, as an American, also have a problem with how much we spend on our prison system, but not because we're giving prisoners basic life support, but because of how ridiculously large our prison system has become.
Perhaps it has something to do with Iceland's ~100km^2 land area as opposed to the US's ~10m km^2 land area...
That has been one of my dreams regarding self-driving cars. Perhaps these cars could communicate with other cars nearby so that each car has a map of all of their neighbors in memory. When the velocity of the car in front of you changes, each car could react almost instantaneously in changing its own velocity, eliminating a lot of the accordion effect that occurs during rush hour (car slows down to let car entering the highway in, other cars start bunching up behind it, then slowly each of those cars returns to the speed of traffic one-by-one). It would also remove the selfish-driver element of city driving, where one rude driver running a red light or hogging their spot in their lane causes greater traffic issues.