There's no argument that Linux and OS/X gaming options are far smaller than Windows. I've been a Linux user for everything/but/ gaming for about 7 years. Over that time I've seen a fair number of changes in the number of options available. There still isn't a huge amount of choice, but things have been slowly, steadily, improving. Examples:
id software has made Linux clients available for their games since before I got serious about Linux.
Loki Games made a promising start, but failed apparently due primarily due to mismanagement.
The Unreal Tournament series has always had Linux clients.
America's Army, based on the Unreal 2 engine, started with Windows, OS/X, and Linux clients. A while back the Army's developers decided to drop support for OS/X and Linux despite the fact that there was evidence that up to 20% of their player base at that time were either Linux or OS/X. That was obviously a HUGE disappointment for a lot of players. There are still people playing the last version to support Linux (2.5).
Savage and Savage 2 both have Linux clients.
X2:The Threat and X3:Reunion Linux clients were released a couple of years after the Windows clients.
Others have mentioned using wine and Cedega to play games as well. My personal experience includes games based on HL and HL2 engines and Civ 4. They all played quite smoothly. A more notable success at the moment is WoW, which, as someone else has pointed out, has led to some number of people dropping Windows in favor of Ubuntu once they found out that they could indulge their addiction.
So, no, there isn't a huge ocean of commercial Linux games yet. In fact, I'd still characterize it as not much more than a puddle. However, it's a puddle that's on the verge of becoming a small pool.:)
And you neither (a) RTFA or (b) bothered to read/any/ of the links that others have posted showing you are wrong. In addition, you clearly don't know anything about just how small nuclear munitions can be made. The Army used to have nuclear artillery rounds, for heaven's sake!
I would argue that particular problem isn't limited to American commercial TV, though. PBS, our publicly funded foundation, would also have trouble finding the money to keep a series going for 5 years. A 5 year story arc is/hard/ to find funding for. It's doubly difficult when you're doing it for a series that is at the cutting edge of special effects.
For example, I've watched a fair sampling of what the BBC, ITN, and Channel 4 send across the Atlantic. I can't recall a single 5 year planning arc for any series that I've seen. The closest that I can come up with are the old Blackadder series, and in that case each year's plotline was completely self contained. Can you come up with any counter examples?
You/clearly/ haven't had to pay turnpike tolls, looked for parking downtown, or sat in a NY traffic jam. Believe me, cabbies would be making a good living in NY, NY even if they painstakingly explained their routing decisions to every single passenger.:)
Actually, I think it's more accurate to say that the labels have been using singles to sell albums, for oh, I don't know, since music first started to be played on the radio? Maybe even earlier.
However, the OP is right. If a band is truly worth listening to, then their albums will be full of songs that are true gems. I haven't bought a CD, album, or tape in probably 15 years, so much of my experience is pretty dated. Still, I'd stack up any song from any album by Pink Floyd, Aerosmith before 1978, the Beatles, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Nazareth, Blackmore's Rainbow, Guns 'n Roses, the Outlaws, Beethoven, Bach, the "Swan Lake" ballet, anything by Gilbert and Sullivan, Handel's "Water Music" and "Music for the Royal Fireworks", etc. against just about any current Top 40 single that you care to name. About the only two reasonably current acts that I'm familiar with that seem to put as much work into writing and producing a solid album as they do a single song would be Linkin Park and Pink.
Because the coders of FOSS applications have writing ever cleaner code as one of their primary motivations. A study published for the European Commission (page 49) last year showed that approximately 50% of the code in the Debian repository had been replaced at least every 5 years. Cleaner code leads inevitably to more efficient code, so over time the applications tend to become more efficient even as they add features. Therefore, the machines running a majority of FOSS code tend to become more stable over time and also tend to take longer to become limited by their hardware when compared to closed source apps.
In addition, the pool of available FOSS code is doubling every 18 to 24 months/even while/ the existing codebase is being completely rewritten every 10 years or so. I'd love to see a comparison to closed source code. I'd be willing to bet that there's no way that COTS code comes close to those kinds of numbers.
Closed source apps designs are primarily driven by a need to meet a ship date in order to satisfy marketing. Patching such code after the fact has to deal with grafting on to whatever is currently in place. Rewriting code frequently simply isn't an option.
He said crackheads throwing a party on his property because they knew it would take forever for the cops to show up. You still comfortable with an unarmed woman home alone under similar circumstances? I'm not, and I'll guarantee you most women wouldn't be either.
I know a lot of people disagree with this, but I find a lot of OSX's UI broken, at least for how I use my system. I find the window management to be frustrating, the Dock to be very limited, and the lack of decent app launching & management to be very frustrating
THANK YOU! I was beginning to think that a buddy of mine and I were the only two people didn't like OS/X's UI. Apple's UI design decisions have driven me crazy since the first time I sat down at the keyboard of an original Mac.
To any Mac fans still reading this deep in the thread, I don't mean this as a slam of your beloved Apple. I just don't like the UI and therefore choose another platform for my personal use. Before Dell announced their Linux program I was recommending Macs for most people who asked me what to buy.
You are the _only_ Tivo owner that I've ever talked to or read a post from who has complained about this. This includes Series 1, 2, and 3 owners. Everyone else has Tivos who automatically purge material to make room for new choices. Heck, it was one of Tivo's original selling points!
If you really experienced this issue then you should have returned your box immediately for a replacement. It was definitely not performing to spec.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Great piece of satire, buddy! Let me see if I can continue in the same vein:
There's no way that all of the protocols and all of the standards that the Internet relies upon were built without Microsoft. And there's no way that the Internet would ever have been used by any business, government, or institution of higher learning before Microsoft made sure that every Wintel desktop would have a browser on it.
That whole canard about how Web browsing was invented by one guy at CERN just isn't true, after all.
The only time it's point to point is if you are connecting to an SMTP server that is going to take that email and stick it directly in an inbox (i.e. sending mail to a local user in your org).
Which is the way that, based upon a quick inspection of the huge stack of emails in my Inbox, I'd conservatively estimate 99%+ of my email is currently routed. Well, discounting SMTP gateways at company firewall boundaries, that is. It's all point to point in terms of organization to organization. The days of routing SMTP through multiple hops of multiple organizations for anything other than overflow are long gone.
If you work for a CIO who/doesn't/ know what a service pack is (or its rough equivalent on other platforms), I strongly advise you to find a job working for a more clueful individual as fast as you can. If you don't, I can pretty much guarantee that particularly incompetent manager will be sure to shift blame on you as fast as s/he can the next time you have a systems meltdown.
If you're interested in Python Web development, you'll find a host of network and Web specific frameworks. I suggest checking out Twisted, Zope, Plone, and Django for examples. You may also find some other goodies when you explore the Python Cheese Shop.
Of course, no mention of Python can pass by without someone bringing up Ruby on Rails, so I'll just do that right now.:) However, I have no experience with it whatsoever, so I'll withhold any opinion.
As a potential customer, the single biggest problem that I have with your tool is the necessity to physically deploy it to every end device. When you're dealing with 10s of thousands of servers and desktops, this is far too painful an exercise for the benefit received. Organizations with as many hosts as we have also already have automated inventory systems. Give us some way of checking those, please, and we'll be very happy indeed.:)
I hate to respond to myself but I just realized that my statement came out pretty rude. It was an honest question, not an attempt to attack you. Sorry about that.
No, the main difference was the ability to bring the perpetrators to justice. Or are you suggesting that the U.S. should have attacked the Soviet Union to take out Stalin?
Off topic a bit: I've got a friend with a T43. He told me that suspend/resume worked fine under Edgy but broken under Fiesty. He recently went back to Edgy and it started working again.
He struggled with his wireless card too, as I recall. He had an older Broadcom card that never worked well even with ndiswrapper, I think.
The kernel team has never been loath to replace code when necessary, and never slow to handle the job, no matter how large the item to be replaced. Just look at the replacement of Bitkeeper with "git", a big job that took a ground-up rewrite and yet was working in five weeks. So, code belonging to GPL3-objectors would be swiftly dealt with.
Get it now? If Linus made the kind of commitment that Bruce is talking about, the kernel team would simply write out all the code from the people who can't be found or object to release under the GPLv2.
Oh? What about warehouse floors? Ancient buildings where you can't pull new cable for a reasonable cost? Service in open areas?
WiFi is just another technology that has its uses. The problem is that people rarely think about its limitations. However, that problem is not exactly limited to any particular technology, is it?:)
Hmmm, let's see. That means you're at least passingly familiar with a sampling of European explorers:
Evidence of early Roman, Carthaginian, and Norse explorations of the New World
John (or Jean) Cabot
Hernando De Soto
Father Hennepin
You've read or are at least familiar with
"The Federalist Papers" and understand their impact on the debates surrounding how our government was formed,
"Declaration of Independence" and understand how its publication in Europe was a factor in the French Revolution,
"Democracy in America" by Alexis de Toqueville and understand how its publication in Europe influenced local moves to more democratic societies
"The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783" and its global impact on commerce and naval strategy
"Future Shock" and "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler
You understand why and how the U.S.'s banking regulations were formed and their impact on global commerce.
I could go on, if you'd like. The fact is that we live in a world that is interconnected in ways that our ancestors could never have anticipated. It's also a fact that U.S. history and culture is inextricably intertwined first with Europe, Canada, and Mexico, second with Asia, and then with the rest of the world. I see this overall as a very good thing, personally.:)
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There's no argument that Linux and OS/X gaming options are far smaller than Windows. I've been a Linux user for everything /but/ gaming for about 7 years. Over that time I've seen a fair number of changes in the number of options available. There still isn't a huge amount of choice, but things have been slowly, steadily, improving. Examples:
:)
id software has made Linux clients available for their games since before I got serious about Linux.
Loki Games made a promising start, but failed apparently due primarily due to mismanagement.
The Unreal Tournament series has always had Linux clients.
America's Army, based on the Unreal 2 engine, started with Windows, OS/X, and Linux clients. A while back the Army's developers decided to drop support for OS/X and Linux despite the fact that there was evidence that up to 20% of their player base at that time were either Linux or OS/X. That was obviously a HUGE disappointment for a lot of players. There are still people playing the last version to support Linux (2.5).
Savage and Savage 2 both have Linux clients.
X2:The Threat and X3:Reunion Linux clients were released a couple of years after the Windows clients.
Others have mentioned using wine and Cedega to play games as well. My personal experience includes games based on HL and HL2 engines and Civ 4. They all played quite smoothly. A more notable success at the moment is WoW, which, as someone else has pointed out, has led to some number of people dropping Windows in favor of Ubuntu once they found out that they could indulge their addiction.
So, no, there isn't a huge ocean of commercial Linux games yet. In fact, I'd still characterize it as not much more than a puddle. However, it's a puddle that's on the verge of becoming a small pool.
And you neither (a) RTFA or (b) bothered to read /any/ of the links that others have posted showing you are wrong. In addition, you clearly don't know anything about just how small nuclear munitions can be made. The Army used to have nuclear artillery rounds, for heaven's sake!
I would argue that particular problem isn't limited to American commercial TV, though. PBS, our publicly funded foundation, would also have trouble finding the money to keep a series going for 5 years. A 5 year story arc is /hard/ to find funding for. It's doubly difficult when you're doing it for a series that is at the cutting edge of special effects.
For example, I've watched a fair sampling of what the BBC, ITN, and Channel 4 send across the Atlantic. I can't recall a single 5 year planning arc for any series that I've seen. The closest that I can come up with are the old Blackadder series, and in that case each year's plotline was completely self contained. Can you come up with any counter examples?
Thus why Microsoft is sweating.
You /clearly/ haven't had to pay turnpike tolls, looked for parking downtown, or sat in a NY traffic jam. Believe me, cabbies would be making a good living in NY, NY even if they painstakingly explained their routing decisions to every single passenger. :)
Actually, I think it's more accurate to say that the labels have been using singles to sell albums, for oh, I don't know, since music first started to be played on the radio? Maybe even earlier.
:)
However, the OP is right. If a band is truly worth listening to, then their albums will be full of songs that are true gems. I haven't bought a CD, album, or tape in probably 15 years, so much of my experience is pretty dated. Still, I'd stack up any song from any album by Pink Floyd, Aerosmith before 1978, the Beatles, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Nazareth, Blackmore's Rainbow, Guns 'n Roses, the Outlaws, Beethoven, Bach, the "Swan Lake" ballet, anything by Gilbert and Sullivan, Handel's "Water Music" and "Music for the Royal Fireworks", etc. against just about any current Top 40 single that you care to name. About the only two reasonably current acts that I'm familiar with that seem to put as much work into writing and producing a solid album as they do a single song would be Linkin Park and Pink.
Yeah, I know. I've got eclectic tastes.
Anyone else remember the Doom based sysadmin front end? :)
Because the coders of FOSS applications have writing ever cleaner code as one of their primary motivations. A study published for the European Commission (page 49) last year showed that approximately 50% of the code in the Debian repository had been replaced at least every 5 years. Cleaner code leads inevitably to more efficient code, so over time the applications tend to become more efficient even as they add features. Therefore, the machines running a majority of FOSS code tend to become more stable over time and also tend to take longer to become limited by their hardware when compared to closed source apps.
In addition, the pool of available FOSS code is doubling every 18 to 24 months /even while/ the existing codebase is being completely rewritten every 10 years or so. I'd love to see a comparison to closed source code. I'd be willing to bet that there's no way that COTS code comes close to those kinds of numbers.
Closed source apps designs are primarily driven by a need to meet a ship date in order to satisfy marketing. Patching such code after the fact has to deal with grafting on to whatever is currently in place. Rewriting code frequently simply isn't an option.
He said crackheads throwing a party on his property because they knew it would take forever for the cops to show up. You still comfortable with an unarmed woman home alone under similar circumstances? I'm not, and I'll guarantee you most women wouldn't be either.
Been to Switzerland lately? How about Finland? Norway? Sweden? etc. etc. etc.
THANK YOU! I was beginning to think that a buddy of mine and I were the only two people didn't like OS/X's UI. Apple's UI design decisions have driven me crazy since the first time I sat down at the keyboard of an original Mac.
To any Mac fans still reading this deep in the thread, I don't mean this as a slam of your beloved Apple. I just don't like the UI and therefore choose another platform for my personal use. Before Dell announced their Linux program I was recommending Macs for most people who asked me what to buy.
You are the _only_ Tivo owner that I've ever talked to or read a post from who has complained about this. This includes Series 1, 2, and 3 owners. Everyone else has Tivos who automatically purge material to make room for new choices. Heck, it was one of Tivo's original selling points!
If you really experienced this issue then you should have returned your box immediately for a replacement. It was definitely not performing to spec.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Thanks, I needed a good laugh. Great piece of satire, buddy! Let me see if I can continue in the same vein:
There's no way that all of the protocols and all of the standards that the Internet relies upon were built without Microsoft. And there's no way that the Internet would ever have been used by any business, government, or institution of higher learning before Microsoft made sure that every Wintel desktop would have a browser on it.
That whole canard about how Web browsing was invented by one guy at CERN just isn't true, after all.
Wait. You were serious?
From Merriam-Webster's online dictionary (used because the OED requires a subscription):
amoral
being neither moral nor immoral; specifically : lying outside the sphere to which moral judgments apply
immoral
not moral; broadly : conflicting with generally or traditionally held moral principles
See the difference?
If you work for a CIO who /doesn't/ know what a service pack is (or its rough equivalent on other platforms), I strongly advise you to find a job working for a more clueful individual as fast as you can. If you don't, I can pretty much guarantee that particularly incompetent manager will be sure to shift blame on you as fast as s/he can the next time you have a systems meltdown.
This isn't just a US issue. Microsoft is doing this all over the world. They've already stacked the deck in Portugal, for Ghu's sake!
If you're interested in Python Web development, you'll find a host of network and Web specific frameworks. I suggest checking out Twisted, Zope, Plone, and Django for examples. You may also find some other goodies when you explore the Python Cheese Shop.
Of course, no mention of Python can pass by without someone bringing up Ruby on Rails, so I'll just do that right now. :) However, I have no experience with it whatsoever, so I'll withhold any opinion.
As a potential customer, the single biggest problem that I have with your tool is the necessity to physically deploy it to every end device. When you're dealing with 10s of thousands of servers and desktops, this is far too painful an exercise for the benefit received. Organizations with as many hosts as we have also already have automated inventory systems. Give us some way of checking those, please, and we'll be very happy indeed. :)
I hate to respond to myself but I just realized that my statement came out pretty rude. It was an honest question, not an attempt to attack you. Sorry about that.
No, the main difference was the ability to bring the perpetrators to justice. Or are you suggesting that the U.S. should have attacked the Soviet Union to take out Stalin?
Off topic a bit: I've got a friend with a T43. He told me that suspend/resume worked fine under Edgy but broken under Fiesty. He recently went back to Edgy and it started working again.
He struggled with his wireless card too, as I recall. He had an older Broadcom card that never worked well even with ndiswrapper, I think.
Please re-read this paragraph:
Get it now? If Linus made the kind of commitment that Bruce is talking about, the kernel team would simply write out all the code from the people who can't be found or object to release under the GPLv2.
Oh? What about warehouse floors? Ancient buildings where you can't pull new cable for a reasonable cost? Service in open areas?
:)
WiFi is just another technology that has its uses. The problem is that people rarely think about its limitations. However, that problem is not exactly limited to any particular technology, is it?
Hmmm, let's see. That means you're at least passingly familiar with a sampling of European explorers:
:)
Evidence of early Roman, Carthaginian, and Norse explorations of the New World
John (or Jean) Cabot
Hernando De Soto
Father Hennepin
You've read or are at least familiar with
"The Federalist Papers" and understand their impact on the debates surrounding how our government was formed,
"Declaration of Independence" and understand how its publication in Europe was a factor in the French Revolution,
"Democracy in America" by Alexis de Toqueville and understand how its publication in Europe influenced local moves to more democratic societies
"The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 1660-1783" and its global impact on commerce and naval strategy
"Future Shock" and "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler
You understand why and how the U.S.'s banking regulations were formed and their impact on global commerce.
I could go on, if you'd like. The fact is that we live in a world that is interconnected in ways that our ancestors could never have anticipated. It's also a fact that U.S. history and culture is inextricably intertwined first with Europe, Canada, and Mexico, second with Asia, and then with the rest of the world. I see this overall as a very good thing, personally.