I'd be willing to take you up on that bet. It would be suicide -- the number of people buying Macbooks (particularly Macbook Pros) would plummet. I use one because I like having a Unix with a tarty windowing system. Take that away and I put Linux on the machine instead and live with KDE or XFCE, and *everyone* working with me will do the same because we need the GNU toolchain to do our work and the ability to install niche software that's unlikely to appear in the App Store.
This is a very good point. When I play GTA3, for example, I find myself not caring about the game and just stalking the streets at 3AM finding old ladies to kick to death. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that very much if it looked real.
Wait, you mean.... the majority of people aren't computer savvy????? STOP THE PRESSES!
I'm not sure why people find this so hard to understand. Most people in this world a) Don't understand computers b) Don't really give a shit about understanding computers c) Simply just don't care
That goes whether they're running Windows or Mac -- and for those who use a Linux their more computer-savvy relatives installed on their computer. And these days I strongly expect more and more Linux users to be computer un-savvy. That's the whole point behind Canonical's ethos is to grow beyond people who enjoy recompiling kernels, after all.
Likewise. I'm finding myself playing games on DOSBox and emulated Megadrives/SNESs/Game Gears/Sinclair Spectrums on the infrequent occasions that I play much. The last console I bought for myself was a GameCube and it sits almost unused alongside my DreamCast and a second-hand XBox. (I do still play Perfect Dark on my N64 a lot though.)
To be honest I even still play Warcraft 1 a lot. That gets replay value not so much from multiplayer but from the fun of utterly annihilating the opposition by camping fifty archers on the path from their village to yours and then building an enormous city with a ludicrously large army. Warcraft had its flaws but for me it's still the most fun "strategy" game I've played.
I'm going to go and play that now, actually.
(Also, I want to play Thief again. I might set up a Win98 virtual machine simply to be able to play it...)
Hence your problem. People are *busy*, they don't have the time to sit and do all that work. They're not quitters for saying "Fuck this", they're basically saying "This is pointless and my time is worth more than arguing with some 15 year old".
"Being a PhD in one subject doesn't imply anything about your fluency in another (though it sometimes make you *think* otherwise), so even a 'privileged contributor' status of sorts would have to be implemented carefully I think"
Very important point. It would be very hard to implement something like this, but it would have to be done. Just because I've got a PhD in cosmology and am therefore qualified to write about relativity, high-energy physics and cosmology - and I'm trained to a similar level in statistical mechanics and so on - I've got absolutely no right to even write about condensed matter physics which is extremely close to my own field. Even though I can guarantee I know a lot more about it than the average man on the street (or someone with a PhD in, say, biology) I know virtually nothing compared to actual experts in the field. How Wikipedia could be expected to implement something that finely-grained I don't know.
Unfortunately for me, cosmology and theoretical physics get that kind of attention because there's a host of teenagers who read a couple of books by Brian Greene and now think they're experts and go and camp on those pages and revert anything that argues with what they misunderstood from their limited reading. If Wikipedia didn't stamp down on Creationism as hard as it does the problem would be even worse...
The analogy does go further, too. There's a strong level of self-selection in democracy, too. The crack addict is extremely unlikely to vote, while the guy energised about a topic will do. This isn't always necessarily *good* -- the rise of the far right in Europe is probably linked more with the passion of their voters compared with the apathy of the general public more than an actual increase in far right views -- but it happens the whole time.
(Or you get situations like the presidential elections in France in 2003 or 2004, when Le Pen got through the first round because all his voters came out and voted for him - and they're not *that* numerous - while the voters on the left were both apathetic *and* split between multiple candidates. So a lot of the left didn't even bother voting, and those that did were diffuse. So Le Pen made it through and the left were horrified and came out to vote in large numbers and found themselves unhappily voting for Chirac, who then absolutely crushed Le Pen.)
I'm not a professor but I am a post-doc and I've had this happen to me on topics that I've got a PhD and six years of post-doc research experience in. You correct some gross misconception or, more often, rebalance a serious bias on a page, add in as many citations as seem sensible, and then some 15 year old without the slightest clue reverts your edits for no reason and then camps on the page. So you just give up because it's totally pointless to go any further, and then you go off across Wikipedia adding "citation needed" after every dubious sentence (which is *every single fucking sentence* on most articles) until you get banned. There are parts of Wikipedia that are still useful even for research scientists, but there's absolutely no point trying to edit much because "everyone can edit" has the unfortunate corrollary that it means experts are weighted the same as the ignorant or extremely biased, while those with enormous amounts of time to burn have inordinate power regardless of their knowledge.
(I've also run into problems trying to rebalance some of the maths pages. They're normally written at an absurd level, chiefly by someone who took a higher-level undergraduate maths course, or sometimes a graduate level course, and is now trying to show off just how much they know. And it's seriously useless to *anyone* who'd go onto the page. Anyone who could understand that level almost certainly knows it already, and has access to a more suitable source than Wikipedia. Anyone who doesn't understand that level of maths (and in very many cases that includes me, despite my education) is just going to say "Well, that was pointless" and go and look elsewhere. I spent some time rebalancing a couple of pages -- not deleting anything, just adding in a paragraph or two at the start to explain things in a more simple manner, and then a section nearer the end presenting things at a reasonable undergraduate level, and it all just got wiped. So I gave up.)
Easy. Connect an ethernet cable to a computer on the spaceship and to a computer on your orbiter. Send the spaceship in and get it to signal back. If that doesn't work, program it to tug on the cable with a little motor and send signals in Morse code.
Well, exactly. Also, he's 12 for fuck's sake. I love to think that when I was 12 I was a genius, excellent at maths, science, language, creative writing, history, geography and general knowledge. In truth I was simply above average. By the sound of it, this kid is well, well above average. So what if he makes a bundle of mistakes? He's got plenty of time to pursue questions on his own (which even I, totally pedestrian scientist though I am, did - the usual farcical attempts at solving quantum gravity along with a couple of calculations about whether gamma-ray bursters could be electron/positron collisions (they can't, not the way I modelled them) and other things like that) *and* learn from the experience of everyone who's gone before him. So long as he doesn't let all the publicity go to his head and make him insufferably arrogant, to the point where he ignores his lecturers because they're not as smart as him and therefore not worth listening to, I can't see the slightest problem here...
People keep bringing up Feynman, too. Well, perhaps unlike many commentators, I've read through Feynman's lectures on gravity. (Not the lectures on physics, which were undergrad level, but the lectures on gravity which are graduate level.) They're brilliant in many ways, very simply deriving gravity by positing a massless, spin-2 particle and working out what the force it would carry would look like. The answer is "linearised relativity", and it was the first thing I read that made me understand quite why a graviton is slightly more than just an arbitrary invention. But they're also flawed. For one thing, Feynman believed that because it was so easy to derive relativity from introducing a graviton, quantising it would be easy. Obviously this is something he absolutely failed to do. Worse, there's a chapter on massive stars in his book on gravity. Interesting, well-reasoned, entertaining -- and totally wrong. Feynman had sat there and decided to derive everything himself, and because he didn't work from others' previous mistakes, he made quite a few of his own. Does that make Feynman any less of a genius? God, no. Even though it was flawed, what he did on massive stars, pretty much in isolation, is impressive. Moreover, making a mistake - even a big one - doesn't take anything away from all the rest of his achievements, which were very profound. So he went wrong going through something on his own? So what...?
The same applies here - with the added point that this kid is *twelve*.
You're not the first to suggest that possibility... I can't remember where I first heard it but it always sounded persuasive to me. Either he was mistaken (there is no way on Earth he proved it the way we now do, and a simpler proof would have come to light before now) or he was trolling us all. I like the idea that he was trolling us, to be honest. It would reaffirm my faith in humanity.
Nah, it doesn't really. The "big bang" theory only applies when general relativity applies (and the universe can be taken to be totally smooth and homogeneous). General relativity breaks down on quantum scales -- it must do, not least because it would contradict something like quantum electrodynamics which has been tested to a precision gravitational theorists can only dream about. The best guess of the scale where it breaks down is the "Planck" scale, which is extremely small but still finite. That would basically be a minimum scale at which gravity should become quantum in nature. So, running time backwards, as soon as the universe begins to approach the Planck scale the big bang theory cannot be trusted anymore. QM gravity effects would totally alter cosmology.
So basically the big bang theory just says "given that at some time the observable universe was a picometre across and had *this* nature, whatever that nature was, this is what we'd see now". Extrapolating it back any further is extremely dubious given the antagonism between relativity and quantum mechanics.
The best studies I've seen of what might happen instead come from loop quantum gravity, which at heart is a much more conservative (and hence realistic) approach to quantum gravity than string theory. People (Bojowald was the first, I believe) have argued what modifications to cosmology should come out from the micostructure of loop quantum gravity. The result is a theory that contains a "bounce" -- there never was a big bang, if you believe loop quantum cosmology. Of course, then you're left with the question "so what came before that, then? If there was a universe before all this?" and the more subtle but enormously more troubling question "Why is the universe's entropy so low if there were cycles beforehand, during which entropy only continued to grow?", but we're always going to be left with some unknown questions.
You can even go further and simply say that the phrase "dark energy" just says "the universe appears to be accelerating" and the phrase "dark matter" means "there appears to be more gravitating matter around than we see". Those "appears" are very important. So it's not really inventing some substance to patch a hole; it's more simply naming an exceedingly puzzling observation. Dark energy is far the more disturbing of the two of them, and a myriad of solutions have been suggested. These range from vacuum energy - the same thing that gives rise to the Casimir force and therefore experimentally observed, in principle... extending that to cosmology is, shall we say, non-trivial - to changing our cosmological model from its currently over-approximated condition and introducing no physics, all the way to modifying the laws of gravity itself. In the midst of all these sit the "generally accepted" models, which are either vacuum energy or dynamical scalar fields arbitrarily introduced basically in lieu of anything better to introduce. Constraints on their parameters at least tell you how your ignorance should behave. I don't think anyone is genuinely and seriously believing their scalar field model of dark energy; it's just phenomenology to give us a handle on how something behaves. In very many ways, that's no different to the 19th century physicists and chemists who developed thermodynamics which is nothing more than a phenomenology giving sketchy hints to the underlying behaviour.
I don't dual-boot much either, but I also don't play many games any more. The ones I do run happily under emulation -- DOSBox and 8 bit and 16 bit computers and consoles, which rather betrays my age. But it's not quite chicken/egg; I've never really bought this "Linux has no games ergo people run Windows" argument. I think the people running Linux will run it anyway, and they'll hit the web with it. When they do their system gets logged... and it's penetration seems to be well under a percent. Spin it however you like, even if *none* of them dual-booted, it's still an insignificant part of the market, and too insignificant to let it derail an attempt to improve the experience for the rest of the market.
As you say, it's because he's a businessman. I'd say he's still a programming guru, he's just also wanting to make money, and personally I don't blame him. If things change - when Android smartphones become ubiquitous enough to command a good amount of the gaming market, he'll happily swap. He might say, "There were features of Direct3D I wish were in OpenGL," but it won't stop him producing on OpenGL, because it'll be the best tool available to him for a market he thinks significant.
Indie developers may be doing fine, but generally indie developers are running in a different league entirely. Not meaning to demean them at all, just that it's a different game they're playing. Even the rules are different and only the very basic aim (get people buying my game) is the same. I agree that's how the future gaming scene will look -- multi-platform -- but it'll take a while to get there and it'll be smartphones and browsers driving it more than OSs. Which is a horrible idea, in so many ways...
Hey, it's not my precious PC market, it's just that's the market he's got to aim at. When the PC platform dies he'll be swapping onto Android and the iPhone perfectly happily, because that's the market he'll aim at. I'm not evangelising for any platform -- quite the opposite. And when he does it's likely that, at least at first, OpenGL will be the best tool available to him, so he'll use it again -- the biggest smartphone gaming market is not very likely to be running a version of Windows that can handle Direct3D.....
Oh my God! So you mean he'll be missing out on the 0.5% Linux gaming market?? Of which a rough guess of about 90% will happily dual-boot into Windows for gaming purposes? Linux is simply totally insignificant in the gaming industry. Carmac isn't going to develop for Linux if it harms his Windows business (or impedes its progress), because Windows is the platform where something like 95% or more of the desktop gaming market are sitting. The rest of them, on Linux and OSX boxes, can almost all dual-boot and, if they're gamers, probably do.
What's in it for him to hamstring himself with a set of APIs that are slower than DirectX if not doing so affects less than a percent of his market? He'll go for what's best. He's a businessman, not an OSS fanatic.
He's clearly talking about desktop environments, given that this is a thread about DirectX which is not renowned for its heavy usage on servers, and his phrase "general use". On the desktop even the most hardcore Linux enthusiast would have to admit that the sub-1% penetration is pretty lacklustre, compared to OSX let alone Windows.
Yes, there are plenty of things even in my flat that run Linux that aren't desktops/laptops; yes, Linux on the server is much bigger than Linux on the desktop is. But in penetrating the general market, Firefox has made much greater inroads against IE than Linux has against Windows. By that metric, Firefox is a lot more succesful than Linux. By other metrics you might say something different... and in assessing the general market you'd have to accept that Linux is still very much a minority interest. (Unlike perhaps parts of the GNU toolchain which with Linux and OSX combined is now hitting between 5% and 10% of the general market, depending on what figures you believe. They'd also be a candidate for "most succesful" if such a thing is at all meaningful.)
Fair enough. I guess I'm just feeling a bit protective of them. I mean, they've just made a pretty embarrassing cock-up on the world stage... It's perhaps worth us remembering what the project's even actually designed for, which is weight in numbers. They've made themselves look silly in something that wasn't their primary aim, a bit like a kid in a spelling bee wearing non-matching socks.
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I'd be willing to take you up on that bet. It would be suicide -- the number of people buying Macbooks (particularly Macbook Pros) would plummet. I use one because I like having a Unix with a tarty windowing system. Take that away and I put Linux on the machine instead and live with KDE or XFCE, and *everyone* working with me will do the same because we need the GNU toolchain to do our work and the ability to install niche software that's unlikely to appear in the App Store.
This is a very good point. When I play GTA3, for example, I find myself not caring about the game and just stalking the streets at 3AM finding old ladies to kick to death. I'm not sure I'd enjoy that very much if it looked real.
Wait, you mean.... the majority of people aren't computer savvy????? STOP THE PRESSES!
I'm not sure why people find this so hard to understand. Most people in this world
a) Don't understand computers
b) Don't really give a shit about understanding computers
c) Simply just don't care
That goes whether they're running Windows or Mac -- and for those who use a Linux their more computer-savvy relatives installed on their computer. And these days I strongly expect more and more Linux users to be computer un-savvy. That's the whole point behind Canonical's ethos is to grow beyond people who enjoy recompiling kernels, after all.
Likewise. I'm finding myself playing games on DOSBox and emulated Megadrives/SNESs/Game Gears/Sinclair Spectrums on the infrequent occasions that I play much. The last console I bought for myself was a GameCube and it sits almost unused alongside my DreamCast and a second-hand XBox. (I do still play Perfect Dark on my N64 a lot though.)
To be honest I even still play Warcraft 1 a lot. That gets replay value not so much from multiplayer but from the fun of utterly annihilating the opposition by camping fifty archers on the path from their village to yours and then building an enormous city with a ludicrously large army. Warcraft had its flaws but for me it's still the most fun "strategy" game I've played.
I'm going to go and play that now, actually.
(Also, I want to play Thief again. I might set up a Win98 virtual machine simply to be able to play it...)
Yes, that's exactly how rhyming works.
She has? Over what?
Yep. It's rhyming slang rather than general abuse (unless you take offense at being called a yank, of course, which I guess quite a few people could).
"It takes some work on my part"
Hence your problem. People are *busy*, they don't have the time to sit and do all that work. They're not quitters for saying "Fuck this", they're basically saying "This is pointless and my time is worth more than arguing with some 15 year old".
"Being a PhD in one subject doesn't imply anything about your fluency in another (though it sometimes make you *think* otherwise), so even a 'privileged contributor' status of sorts would have to be implemented carefully I think"
Very important point. It would be very hard to implement something like this, but it would have to be done. Just because I've got a PhD in cosmology and am therefore qualified to write about relativity, high-energy physics and cosmology - and I'm trained to a similar level in statistical mechanics and so on - I've got absolutely no right to even write about condensed matter physics which is extremely close to my own field. Even though I can guarantee I know a lot more about it than the average man on the street (or someone with a PhD in, say, biology) I know virtually nothing compared to actual experts in the field. How Wikipedia could be expected to implement something that finely-grained I don't know.
Unfortunately for me, cosmology and theoretical physics get that kind of attention because there's a host of teenagers who read a couple of books by Brian Greene and now think they're experts and go and camp on those pages and revert anything that argues with what they misunderstood from their limited reading. If Wikipedia didn't stamp down on Creationism as hard as it does the problem would be even worse...
The analogy does go further, too. There's a strong level of self-selection in democracy, too. The crack addict is extremely unlikely to vote, while the guy energised about a topic will do. This isn't always necessarily *good* -- the rise of the far right in Europe is probably linked more with the passion of their voters compared with the apathy of the general public more than an actual increase in far right views -- but it happens the whole time.
(Or you get situations like the presidential elections in France in 2003 or 2004, when Le Pen got through the first round because all his voters came out and voted for him - and they're not *that* numerous - while the voters on the left were both apathetic *and* split between multiple candidates. So a lot of the left didn't even bother voting, and those that did were diffuse. So Le Pen made it through and the left were horrified and came out to vote in large numbers and found themselves unhappily voting for Chirac, who then absolutely crushed Le Pen.)
I'm not a professor but I am a post-doc and I've had this happen to me on topics that I've got a PhD and six years of post-doc research experience in. You correct some gross misconception or, more often, rebalance a serious bias on a page, add in as many citations as seem sensible, and then some 15 year old without the slightest clue reverts your edits for no reason and then camps on the page. So you just give up because it's totally pointless to go any further, and then you go off across Wikipedia adding "citation needed" after every dubious sentence (which is *every single fucking sentence* on most articles) until you get banned. There are parts of Wikipedia that are still useful even for research scientists, but there's absolutely no point trying to edit much because "everyone can edit" has the unfortunate corrollary that it means experts are weighted the same as the ignorant or extremely biased, while those with enormous amounts of time to burn have inordinate power regardless of their knowledge.
(I've also run into problems trying to rebalance some of the maths pages. They're normally written at an absurd level, chiefly by someone who took a higher-level undergraduate maths course, or sometimes a graduate level course, and is now trying to show off just how much they know. And it's seriously useless to *anyone* who'd go onto the page. Anyone who could understand that level almost certainly knows it already, and has access to a more suitable source than Wikipedia. Anyone who doesn't understand that level of maths (and in very many cases that includes me, despite my education) is just going to say "Well, that was pointless" and go and look elsewhere. I spent some time rebalancing a couple of pages -- not deleting anything, just adding in a paragraph or two at the start to explain things in a more simple manner, and then a section nearer the end presenting things at a reasonable undergraduate level, and it all just got wiped. So I gave up.)
Sure, if you're happy with the idea of a negative speed*. The rest of us will carry on taking the positive root, thanks.
* Speed, not velocity. Speed is by definition greater than or equal to zero. That's the speed of light appearing there.
dude, he's 12
Easy. Connect an ethernet cable to a computer on the spaceship and to a computer on your orbiter. Send the spaceship in and get it to signal back. If that doesn't work, program it to tug on the cable with a little motor and send signals in Morse code.
Well, exactly. Also, he's 12 for fuck's sake. I love to think that when I was 12 I was a genius, excellent at maths, science, language, creative writing, history, geography and general knowledge. In truth I was simply above average. By the sound of it, this kid is well, well above average. So what if he makes a bundle of mistakes? He's got plenty of time to pursue questions on his own (which even I, totally pedestrian scientist though I am, did - the usual farcical attempts at solving quantum gravity along with a couple of calculations about whether gamma-ray bursters could be electron/positron collisions (they can't, not the way I modelled them) and other things like that) *and* learn from the experience of everyone who's gone before him. So long as he doesn't let all the publicity go to his head and make him insufferably arrogant, to the point where he ignores his lecturers because they're not as smart as him and therefore not worth listening to, I can't see the slightest problem here...
People keep bringing up Feynman, too. Well, perhaps unlike many commentators, I've read through Feynman's lectures on gravity. (Not the lectures on physics, which were undergrad level, but the lectures on gravity which are graduate level.) They're brilliant in many ways, very simply deriving gravity by positing a massless, spin-2 particle and working out what the force it would carry would look like. The answer is "linearised relativity", and it was the first thing I read that made me understand quite why a graviton is slightly more than just an arbitrary invention. But they're also flawed. For one thing, Feynman believed that because it was so easy to derive relativity from introducing a graviton, quantising it would be easy. Obviously this is something he absolutely failed to do. Worse, there's a chapter on massive stars in his book on gravity. Interesting, well-reasoned, entertaining -- and totally wrong. Feynman had sat there and decided to derive everything himself, and because he didn't work from others' previous mistakes, he made quite a few of his own. Does that make Feynman any less of a genius? God, no. Even though it was flawed, what he did on massive stars, pretty much in isolation, is impressive. Moreover, making a mistake - even a big one - doesn't take anything away from all the rest of his achievements, which were very profound. So he went wrong going through something on his own? So what...?
The same applies here - with the added point that this kid is *twelve*.
You're not the first to suggest that possibility... I can't remember where I first heard it but it always sounded persuasive to me. Either he was mistaken (there is no way on Earth he proved it the way we now do, and a simpler proof would have come to light before now) or he was trolling us all. I like the idea that he was trolling us, to be honest. It would reaffirm my faith in humanity.
Nah, it doesn't really. The "big bang" theory only applies when general relativity applies (and the universe can be taken to be totally smooth and homogeneous). General relativity breaks down on quantum scales -- it must do, not least because it would contradict something like quantum electrodynamics which has been tested to a precision gravitational theorists can only dream about. The best guess of the scale where it breaks down is the "Planck" scale, which is extremely small but still finite. That would basically be a minimum scale at which gravity should become quantum in nature. So, running time backwards, as soon as the universe begins to approach the Planck scale the big bang theory cannot be trusted anymore. QM gravity effects would totally alter cosmology.
So basically the big bang theory just says "given that at some time the observable universe was a picometre across and had *this* nature, whatever that nature was, this is what we'd see now". Extrapolating it back any further is extremely dubious given the antagonism between relativity and quantum mechanics.
The best studies I've seen of what might happen instead come from loop quantum gravity, which at heart is a much more conservative (and hence realistic) approach to quantum gravity than string theory. People (Bojowald was the first, I believe) have argued what modifications to cosmology should come out from the micostructure of loop quantum gravity. The result is a theory that contains a "bounce" -- there never was a big bang, if you believe loop quantum cosmology. Of course, then you're left with the question "so what came before that, then? If there was a universe before all this?" and the more subtle but enormously more troubling question "Why is the universe's entropy so low if there were cycles beforehand, during which entropy only continued to grow?", but we're always going to be left with some unknown questions.
You can even go further and simply say that the phrase "dark energy" just says "the universe appears to be accelerating" and the phrase "dark matter" means "there appears to be more gravitating matter around than we see". Those "appears" are very important. So it's not really inventing some substance to patch a hole; it's more simply naming an exceedingly puzzling observation. Dark energy is far the more disturbing of the two of them, and a myriad of solutions have been suggested. These range from vacuum energy - the same thing that gives rise to the Casimir force and therefore experimentally observed, in principle... extending that to cosmology is, shall we say, non-trivial - to changing our cosmological model from its currently over-approximated condition and introducing no physics, all the way to modifying the laws of gravity itself. In the midst of all these sit the "generally accepted" models, which are either vacuum energy or dynamical scalar fields arbitrarily introduced basically in lieu of anything better to introduce. Constraints on their parameters at least tell you how your ignorance should behave. I don't think anyone is genuinely and seriously believing their scalar field model of dark energy; it's just phenomenology to give us a handle on how something behaves. In very many ways, that's no different to the 19th century physicists and chemists who developed thermodynamics which is nothing more than a phenomenology giving sketchy hints to the underlying behaviour.
I don't dual-boot much either, but I also don't play many games any more. The ones I do run happily under emulation -- DOSBox and 8 bit and 16 bit computers and consoles, which rather betrays my age. But it's not quite chicken/egg; I've never really bought this "Linux has no games ergo people run Windows" argument. I think the people running Linux will run it anyway, and they'll hit the web with it. When they do their system gets logged... and it's penetration seems to be well under a percent. Spin it however you like, even if *none* of them dual-booted, it's still an insignificant part of the market, and too insignificant to let it derail an attempt to improve the experience for the rest of the market.
As you say, it's because he's a businessman. I'd say he's still a programming guru, he's just also wanting to make money, and personally I don't blame him. If things change - when Android smartphones become ubiquitous enough to command a good amount of the gaming market, he'll happily swap. He might say, "There were features of Direct3D I wish were in OpenGL," but it won't stop him producing on OpenGL, because it'll be the best tool available to him for a market he thinks significant.
Indie developers may be doing fine, but generally indie developers are running in a different league entirely. Not meaning to demean them at all, just that it's a different game they're playing. Even the rules are different and only the very basic aim (get people buying my game) is the same. I agree that's how the future gaming scene will look -- multi-platform -- but it'll take a while to get there and it'll be smartphones and browsers driving it more than OSs. Which is a horrible idea, in so many ways...
Hey, it's not my precious PC market, it's just that's the market he's got to aim at. When the PC platform dies he'll be swapping onto Android and the iPhone perfectly happily, because that's the market he'll aim at. I'm not evangelising for any platform -- quite the opposite. And when he does it's likely that, at least at first, OpenGL will be the best tool available to him, so he'll use it again -- the biggest smartphone gaming market is not very likely to be running a version of Windows that can handle Direct3D.....
Oh my God! So you mean he'll be missing out on the 0.5% Linux gaming market?? Of which a rough guess of about 90% will happily dual-boot into Windows for gaming purposes? Linux is simply totally insignificant in the gaming industry. Carmac isn't going to develop for Linux if it harms his Windows business (or impedes its progress), because Windows is the platform where something like 95% or more of the desktop gaming market are sitting. The rest of them, on Linux and OSX boxes, can almost all dual-boot and, if they're gamers, probably do.
What's in it for him to hamstring himself with a set of APIs that are slower than DirectX if not doing so affects less than a percent of his market? He'll go for what's best. He's a businessman, not an OSS fanatic.
He's clearly talking about desktop environments, given that this is a thread about DirectX which is not renowned for its heavy usage on servers, and his phrase "general use". On the desktop even the most hardcore Linux enthusiast would have to admit that the sub-1% penetration is pretty lacklustre, compared to OSX let alone Windows.
Yes, there are plenty of things even in my flat that run Linux that aren't desktops/laptops; yes, Linux on the server is much bigger than Linux on the desktop is. But in penetrating the general market, Firefox has made much greater inroads against IE than Linux has against Windows. By that metric, Firefox is a lot more succesful than Linux. By other metrics you might say something different... and in assessing the general market you'd have to accept that Linux is still very much a minority interest. (Unlike perhaps parts of the GNU toolchain which with Linux and OSX combined is now hitting between 5% and 10% of the general market, depending on what figures you believe. They'd also be a candidate for "most succesful" if such a thing is at all meaningful.)
Fair enough. I guess I'm just feeling a bit protective of them. I mean, they've just made a pretty embarrassing cock-up on the world stage... It's perhaps worth us remembering what the project's even actually designed for, which is weight in numbers. They've made themselves look silly in something that wasn't their primary aim, a bit like a kid in a spelling bee wearing non-matching socks.