The problem is that with the low-end 3D cards so cheap, there really isn't a market for people like you. Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with what you say - there are plenty of machines, from desktops that are never used for 3D stuff to servers, that have no need of anything as remotely powerful as even the cheapest of currently-available cards.
But the thing is that those cards are so cheap already that the profit on them must be next to nothing. Making cheaper cards probably wouldn't be cost effective in the slightest. Even ignoring manufacturing costs, there's transportation, storage, etc - if you're only making a tiny profit on each card, you'd have to sell an awful lot more to cover your costs. I don't think that there's anything like enough people in the market for that sort of card to make it worthwhile.
It probably doesn't make a great deal of difference if a card can "only" run Q3 at 200fps rather 300.
The card that can run it at 300fps, though, stands a better chance of running a new game at an acceptable frame rate than the slower card does. That's the point, really - chances are if you're a gamer, the last card you bought was benchmarked against Q3, so when shopping for a new one, you can do some comparisons based on that. Of course, the system used now is completely different, so you can't really compare, but I digress...
The point is that a card that can run, say, UT2k3 at high settings at 50+fps is going to have no problems with Q3. One that only gets 50fps on Q3, though, is probably going to struggle on UT2k3 or similar. The problem is not so much the card manufacturers, as the tests used to benchmark the cards; Q3 really ought to have been retired long ago, imho.
All of that, to upgrade a machine from Windows to Linux?
Still, perhaps you actually meant it that way round - while I've never had a virus or worm on my Linux boxes, I've never had one on my Windows boxes, either.
It was once said that if you save a mans life, you are forever responsible for him and his actions therefore. Why doesn't this apply to children.
Because it's bullshit - I cannot possibly know what that man will do from the moment I save him to the day that he dies. At least with my kid, I'm responsible for her upbringing, and so have some degree of control over how she turns out. So I'm not entirely diagreeing with you - just calling bullshit on that quote. I'd also like to point out that after a certain age, a person has to be responsible for their own actions. Where would you draw the line? Lock them up, their parents, their relatives, friends, teachers? They all have a hand in their development, after all.
But tell me where there ever is a justified reason to steal someones vehicle
No, you tell me what justification there can be for killing someone just for stealing a car.
True, but (unless I'm mistaken) both the Linux and the Windows version of OO are provided by the same people, namely OO.org.
In this case, the fact that the source is available to anyone who wants it is largely immaterial, as it wasn't anyone else that did the port. (I'm not daying that others didn't help, of course, but OO.org weren't relying on them for the work to be done)
the end user does not even see nor are they accessable to the end user unless they have the source.
Which, of course, they have every right to demand under the terms of the GPL. That's ignoring the fact that every distro I've used (several, but by no means all of them) ship the kernel source on the install media anyway.
No. My phone runs Symbian; good luck porting OO to it, source or not. Making something run on any given OS is not the main reason for making something open source; it's not even a particularly compelling one, usually. (More of a nice to have, than something that's actually important, unless you happen to run an obscure OS - but by definition that's not the norm)
Because/. is primarily a US site, and that is apparently the majority opinion in the US (at least, it appears that way to an outsider). Hell, it's worse than you say - anything even vaguly critical of Israel (or even pro-Palestinian) is often decried as being anti-Semitic.
It's a sad state of affairs when reasoned debate is rendered impossible by that sort of thing.
I guess you missed the bit where I said that the developer was "too lazy" to port - I know about Cygwin, and was including that in the laziness factor:-)
I also wasn't being entirely serious; it's perfectly possible (theoretically, at least) to write portable C code using (eg) Trolltech's QT libraries on Windows, and have an essentially effortless port to Linux. My point was that you can't blame MS for developers writing stuff in MS-specific ways, as MS do not and can not force you to do so.
You've answered your own question - there's a distinction between free (as in beer) and Free (as in libre).
When it comes right down to it, an awful lot more people care about the former than the latter, even here. I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing - given a choice between expensive, but complete with source I'll probably never even look at, or free, I know which I personally would choose most often.
Well, I for one have never heard the word collective used in connection with Communism, and there's no mention of a connection at m-w.com.
Besides which, not everyone considers a link with Communismn to automatically be a bad thing; some of the basic ideas are fine, it's just that every implementation so far has failed badly.
As far as I know, the best proof it's possible is Microsoft
So, you have proof that MS has been involved in "technology theft" then? If so, please let us see it, and then explain how you came to have it if MS is proof that it's possible to get away with it without erasing people's memories of doing it.
Either you're wrong in that they're successfully covering up after themselves, or you're wrong in that they're doing it. Either way, you're talking crap.
Then there's ActiveX. A Microsoft concoction designed to appeal to lazy developers. They develop stuff in ActiveX, and if you want to use it on a non-IE browser, you're SOL. That's lock-in.
So, if a developer codes something for Linux, and is too lazy to port it to Windows, is that lock-in, too?
You can't blame MS for shit developers; you get them with every platform and every tech.
Shouldn't the right-thinking person feel a little silly testing a 64 bit OS with a word processor?
That depends. I could write you a heavy number-crunching simulation app (eg a realistic gas, n-body gravitational system, laser-plasma interaction, etc), complete with 3D GUI to represent the current state of the system, which would put any realistic system through its paces. Measure fps of the GUI, steps/second of the simulation, maximum precision, runtime for given starting conditions, whatever.
But if the end user is going to use the system primarily for word processing, the test would be useless.
That may have another underlying cause, other than a debatable superiority of console games: there are more consoles avialable now than there were a couple of years ago.
Now, there's the PSOne/PSX, PS2, GBA, GameCube and XBox. A few years ago, there was basically just the PSOne/PSX and one or two others. The shops (at least the ones I've been going in) haven't gotten any bigger, but now they have more platforms to cater for. Of course they're stocking fewer PC games - they're running out of space to stock them!
Well, I'm not a console gamer, so I may well be completely out of touch, but here in the UK the original PlayStation has been called the PSOne ever since the PS2 came out.
(And obviously, by "original PS" I mean the once you can actually buy)
Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine.
That's only true if you are talking about games. If you're talking about video encoding, or simulation work, or other real number-crunching stuff, then an increase of 50% might see your run times cut from 24 hours to 18 hours. That may well be worth the money, depending on how often you're performing those runs.
That said, you appear to be talking specifically about games, in which case I pretty-much agree with you. For what it's worth, my two major upgrades have been Celeron 266 -> P3 700, then P3 700 -> P4 2400. I don't see myself holding out for a 7.2GHz processor before my next upgrade, though:-)
Re:Virus are on Border of living and Dead Matter .
on
Smallpox From The Past
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· Score: 1
I think that you want to be thinking "live" as in ammunition, rather than "live" as in animal.
What do they have to gain? At best, they'd probably cut a week or two's worth of development time off whatver it is they incorporated the code into. With a sizeable team and/or a tight deadline, that's a non-trivial amount of time, but still the sort of time that can often be made up over the course of a project.
Now, what do they risk, if they're caught out?
1) Being successfully sued 2) Lots of bad press 3) The sheer corporate embarrassment of being caught lifting code from a supposedly inferior competing product
1) is probably the worst. Being successfully sued for copyright infringement of that sort is nasty - you're looking at an injunction to prevent any further sales of the product, recall (from stores/OEMs) and destruction of existing media, rewriting or removing the functionality to remove the infringing code, putting the whole thing through QA and testing again, remastering, reduplication and redistribution of the install media, and, if the change alters functionality/stability/published APIs enough, possibly retraining of customers with special contracts, renegotiation of support contracts and SLAs, etc. Plus, on top of that, punitive damages.
I'm not an expert, but I can't see it being worth the risk in the vast majority of cases. Much more likely is what we've seen happen a few times, where a company bases their product on Linux, and fails to make the source available. That could be down to a misunderstanding of the GPL, or a belief that they've found a loophole, etc.
But MS? No; no company that has studied the GPL that closely (and they will have had teams of lawyers looking at it) would ever be that stupid.
Indeed - my Philips DVD player won't let me skip over previews to the menu on some DVDs. Luckily, I've yet to find one that won't let me use the "chapter skip" buttons to skip them.
I've yet to find a way to skip the fucking THX or Dolby adverts, though; bastards. Like I care that the film I'm about to watch (when they decide to let me) is "a THX certified feature" - it's not going to influence my purchasing decisions one bit. If anything, if they piss me off often enough, it'll make me *not* buy THX-certified DVDs.
I cannot think of any negative phrase which isn't true of Java...
How about, the design of the language makes it extremely easy to unintentionally write code that contains possible buffer overflow exploits? (In fact, all arrays, strings, etc are bounds checked at runtime, whehter you want it or not, making such exploitable code all-but impossible to write)
How about a firdge that detects that you're getting low on milk, or beer, or whatever, and automatically adds it to your shopping list for you, or perhaps even places an order for more?
Networked computers aren't just about surfing the web, you know.
Please, enlighten us. I'm not trolling, incidently - I'm a Java programmer professionally, although I admit that I've not really looked too deeply into Java's bytecode, but I'm training myself in C# and.NET - I have a genuine interest.
Anyways, why are there a bunch of Java programmers, ignorant of.NET architecture and capabilities, who are so intent on slandering.NET? If people criticize something, shouldn't they at least understand that thing first?
Same reason you get C/C++/Perl programmers slandering Java, and Linux zealots slandering Windows, Windows zealots slandering Linux, vi users slandering emacs, etc, ad nauseum - people around here have a tendency to either hate what they don't know, or try it once, hate it, and never touch it again, remaining ignorant of how it has improved since.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that with the low-end 3D cards so cheap, there really isn't a market for people like you. Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with what you say - there are plenty of machines, from desktops that are never used for 3D stuff to servers, that have no need of anything as remotely powerful as even the cheapest of currently-available cards.
But the thing is that those cards are so cheap already that the profit on them must be next to nothing. Making cheaper cards probably wouldn't be cost effective in the slightest. Even ignoring manufacturing costs, there's transportation, storage, etc - if you're only making a tiny profit on each card, you'd have to sell an awful lot more to cover your costs. I don't think that there's anything like enough people in the market for that sort of card to make it worthwhile.
It probably doesn't make a great deal of difference if a card can "only" run Q3 at 200fps rather 300.
The card that can run it at 300fps, though, stands a better chance of running a new game at an acceptable frame rate than the slower card does. That's the point, really - chances are if you're a gamer, the last card you bought was benchmarked against Q3, so when shopping for a new one, you can do some comparisons based on that. Of course, the system used now is completely different, so you can't really compare, but I digress...
The point is that a card that can run, say, UT2k3 at high settings at 50+fps is going to have no problems with Q3. One that only gets 50fps on Q3, though, is probably going to struggle on UT2k3 or similar. The problem is not so much the card manufacturers, as the tests used to benchmark the cards; Q3 really ought to have been retired long ago, imho.
All of that, to upgrade a machine from Windows to Linux?
Still, perhaps you actually meant it that way round - while I've never had a virus or worm on my Linux boxes, I've never had one on my Windows boxes, either.
It was once said that if you save a mans life, you are forever responsible for him and his actions therefore. Why doesn't this apply to children.
Because it's bullshit - I cannot possibly know what that man will do from the moment I save him to the day that he dies. At least with my kid, I'm responsible for her upbringing, and so have some degree of control over how she turns out. So I'm not entirely diagreeing with you - just calling bullshit on that quote. I'd also like to point out that after a certain age, a person has to be responsible for their own actions. Where would you draw the line? Lock them up, their parents, their relatives, friends, teachers? They all have a hand in their development, after all.
But tell me where there ever is a justified reason to steal someones vehicle
No, you tell me what justification there can be for killing someone just for stealing a car.
There's a page on the Nasa site here that contains links to some downloads. I've not tried any of it yet, though, as I'm at work at the moment...
True, but (unless I'm mistaken) both the Linux and the Windows version of OO are provided by the same people, namely OO.org.
In this case, the fact that the source is available to anyone who wants it is largely immaterial, as it wasn't anyone else that did the port. (I'm not daying that others didn't help, of course, but OO.org weren't relying on them for the work to be done)
the end user does not even see nor are they accessable to the end user unless they have the source.
Which, of course, they have every right to demand under the terms of the GPL. That's ignoring the fact that every distro I've used (several, but by no means all of them) ship the kernel source on the install media anyway.
It's for use on EVERY operating system
(that's what the source is there for)
No. My phone runs Symbian; good luck porting OO to it, source or not. Making something run on any given OS is not the main reason for making something open source; it's not even a particularly compelling one, usually. (More of a nice to have, than something that's actually important, unless you happen to run an obscure OS - but by definition that's not the norm)
Because /. is primarily a US site, and that is apparently the majority opinion in the US (at least, it appears that way to an outsider). Hell, it's worse than you say - anything even vaguly critical of Israel (or even pro-Palestinian) is often decried as being anti-Semitic.
It's a sad state of affairs when reasoned debate is rendered impossible by that sort of thing.
Cygwin which allows us to port to Windows easily
:-)
I guess you missed the bit where I said that the developer was "too lazy" to port - I know about Cygwin, and was including that in the laziness factor
I also wasn't being entirely serious; it's perfectly possible (theoretically, at least) to write portable C code using (eg) Trolltech's QT libraries on Windows, and have an essentially effortless port to Linux. My point was that you can't blame MS for developers writing stuff in MS-specific ways, as MS do not and can not force you to do so.
we want everything to be open source and free
You've answered your own question - there's a distinction between free (as in beer) and Free (as in libre).
When it comes right down to it, an awful lot more people care about the former than the latter, even here. I'm not saying that that's necessarily a bad thing - given a choice between expensive, but complete with source I'll probably never even look at, or free, I know which I personally would choose most often.
Well, I for one have never heard the word collective used in connection with Communism, and there's no mention of a connection at m-w.com.
Besides which, not everyone considers a link with Communismn to automatically be a bad thing; some of the basic ideas are fine, it's just that every implementation so far has failed badly.
As far as I know, the best proof it's possible is Microsoft
So, you have proof that MS has been involved in "technology theft" then? If so, please let us see it, and then explain how you came to have it if MS is proof that it's possible to get away with it without erasing people's memories of doing it.
Either you're wrong in that they're successfully covering up after themselves, or you're wrong in that they're doing it. Either way, you're talking crap.
I think I've played a demo - at least, it all looks very familiar. If so, then yeah, it's a great little game.
:-)
It's a sequel though, and so doesn't answer the poster's question
Then there's ActiveX. A Microsoft concoction designed to appeal to lazy developers. They develop stuff in ActiveX, and if you want to use it on a non-IE browser, you're SOL. That's lock-in.
So, if a developer codes something for Linux, and is too lazy to port it to Windows, is that lock-in, too?
You can't blame MS for shit developers; you get them with every platform and every tech.
Shouldn't the right-thinking person feel a little silly testing a 64 bit OS with a word processor?
That depends. I could write you a heavy number-crunching simulation app (eg a realistic gas, n-body gravitational system, laser-plasma interaction, etc), complete with 3D GUI to represent the current state of the system, which would put any realistic system through its paces. Measure fps of the GUI, steps/second of the simulation, maximum precision, runtime for given starting conditions, whatever.
But if the end user is going to use the system primarily for word processing, the test would be useless.
Game stores are stocking fewer and fewer PC games
That may have another underlying cause, other than a debatable superiority of console games: there are more consoles avialable now than there were a couple of years ago.
Now, there's the PSOne/PSX, PS2, GBA, GameCube and XBox. A few years ago, there was basically just the PSOne/PSX and one or two others. The shops (at least the ones I've been going in) haven't gotten any bigger, but now they have more platforms to cater for. Of course they're stocking fewer PC games - they're running out of space to stock them!
Well, I'm not a console gamer, so I may well be completely out of touch, but here in the UK the original PlayStation has been called the PSOne ever since the PS2 came out.
(And obviously, by "original PS" I mean the once you can actually buy)
Until you are talking about performance games of roughly 300%, or one machine being 3x as fast as another machine - it isn't worth replacing the machine.
:-)
That's only true if you are talking about games. If you're talking about video encoding, or simulation work, or other real number-crunching stuff, then an increase of 50% might see your run times cut from 24 hours to 18 hours. That may well be worth the money, depending on how often you're performing those runs.
That said, you appear to be talking specifically about games, in which case I pretty-much agree with you. For what it's worth, my two major upgrades have been Celeron 266 -> P3 700, then P3 700 -> P4 2400. I don't see myself holding out for a 7.2GHz processor before my next upgrade, though
I think that you want to be thinking "live" as in ammunition, rather than "live" as in animal.
Hmmm...how much Linux code is in WindowsXP?
At a guess, I'd say absolutely none.
What do they have to gain? At best, they'd probably cut a week or two's worth of development time off whatver it is they incorporated the code into. With a sizeable team and/or a tight deadline, that's a non-trivial amount of time, but still the sort of time that can often be made up over the course of a project.
Now, what do they risk, if they're caught out?
1) Being successfully sued
2) Lots of bad press
3) The sheer corporate embarrassment of being caught lifting code from a supposedly inferior competing product
1) is probably the worst. Being successfully sued for copyright infringement of that sort is nasty - you're looking at an injunction to prevent any further sales of the product, recall (from stores/OEMs) and destruction of existing media, rewriting or removing the functionality to remove the infringing code, putting the whole thing through QA and testing again, remastering, reduplication and redistribution of the install media, and, if the change alters functionality/stability/published APIs enough, possibly retraining of customers with special contracts, renegotiation of support contracts and SLAs, etc. Plus, on top of that, punitive damages.
I'm not an expert, but I can't see it being worth the risk in the vast majority of cases. Much more likely is what we've seen happen a few times, where a company bases their product on Linux, and fails to make the source available. That could be down to a misunderstanding of the GPL, or a belief that they've found a loophole, etc.
But MS? No; no company that has studied the GPL that closely (and they will have had teams of lawyers looking at it) would ever be that stupid.
Indeed - my Philips DVD player won't let me skip over previews to the menu on some DVDs. Luckily, I've yet to find one that won't let me use the "chapter skip" buttons to skip them.
I've yet to find a way to skip the fucking THX or Dolby adverts, though; bastards. Like I care that the film I'm about to watch (when they decide to let me) is "a THX certified feature" - it's not going to influence my purchasing decisions one bit. If anything, if they piss me off often enough, it'll make me *not* buy THX-certified DVDs.
I cannot think of any negative phrase which isn't true of Java...
How about, the design of the language makes it extremely easy to unintentionally write code that contains possible buffer overflow exploits? (In fact, all arrays, strings, etc are bounds checked at runtime, whehter you want it or not, making such exploitable code all-but impossible to write)
Yes; IHBT, IHL, IWHAND.
How about a firdge that detects that you're getting low on milk, or beer, or whatever, and automatically adds it to your shopping list for you, or perhaps even places an order for more?
Networked computers aren't just about surfing the web, you know.
Please, enlighten us. I'm not trolling, incidently - I'm a Java programmer professionally, although I admit that I've not really looked too deeply into Java's bytecode, but I'm training myself in C# and .NET - I have a genuine interest.
.NET architecture and capabilities, who are so intent on slandering .NET? If people criticize something, shouldn't they at least understand that thing first?
Anyways, why are there a bunch of Java programmers, ignorant of
Same reason you get C/C++/Perl programmers slandering Java, and Linux zealots slandering Windows, Windows zealots slandering Linux, vi users slandering emacs, etc, ad nauseum - people around here have a tendency to either hate what they don't know, or try it once, hate it, and never touch it again, remaining ignorant of how it has improved since.