Hey, I personally don't understand the bitchings about bundling I.E. either. Yeah, it's annoying that you can't uninstall it completely, but bleh! It's an operating system distribution, it's SUPPOSED to come with doodads to get you on the net, play sound/video and other software to use your computer's facilities.
So Active Directory comes with Windows Server.. yeah that's what Windows Server is for. Do you sue your landlord when you rent a house because it comes with a kitchen sink ?
If anyone wants to use non-default software, they're free to freaking buy/download it and setup their computer whichever way they like.
Chum, you just don't get the whole idea of philanthropy, well.. the honest idea, before it gets all munged up by americanism.
It's not about turning a profit. It's not about creating jobs for the lazy techies who reload Slashdot 72 times a day. It's not about fortifying the walls around our society. It's about coming to the realisation that bringing everyone to the same level will mean we won't be fighting over what the others have. It's about balancing out the entire human race. There is a fixed amount of resources in the world, it makes no sense that most of those resources are controlled by a handful of "superpowers" while everyone else withers in poverty. Overpopulation makes the problem even worse.
Helping the advancement of other nations is just one step in the grand scheme of unity.
I think it would be fantastic if AOL would stick with their own "internet" and keep their lusers out of our hair. Having a bunch of AOLers on broadband just means there will me a zillion more idiot posts on the Torrent forums.
"WoW uR l33+ gimme woopi goldburg sexxx tape dudududud"
The biggest complaint I've heard as a system builder is that Windows is so freaking expensive. We have 300$ PC's but XP costs another 200$ (canadian dollars). If Microsoft could release Windows Idiot Edition for 50 bucks that just lets them surf/email/WoW, those cheapasses would stop whining.
The best part is when they bring in their PC for service because "Windows Update is broken". Then after 5 minutes of lies they finally admit they used a warezed OS, and so I slap them with 2 hours labour PLUS the cost of Windows. It's my job after all, but it's all Microsoft's fault. How much did Win95 cost back in the day ? 70-80$ maybe.. I can't remember but it was little more than the common game or app. Granted, XP does a lot more stuff than 95, but how many people really care about these features ? XP Pro for power users, that's fine, but there needs to be something "lower" than XP Home for the majority of non-techies.
1. you are a software developer with big clients such as US banks 2. you must submit your source code to a 3rd party auditor 3. you think slashdot is a good source of advice
Well, seeing as you're in business I'll assume #3 is just a temporary brain fart on your behalf. If you're really worried about your code falling into the wrong hands, then have a lawyer write up a nice contract that expressly forbids the bank and any other party from using the code for purposes other than security auditing, and throw in a time limit while you're at it. That way you have a leg to stand on if your code were to be spread. This is called protecting your work and intellectual property.
Just name any big software company, and try to figure out what they would do if their code was stolen. Yeah, they'd sue your ass into the ground. Why should your company be any different ?
Like anything in this jealous world, if you get too big, someone wants to take you down.
If you had "copy-parties" so big that the cops knew about them, then you have too many "friends". If you were just handing copies of NHL 2000 to your mates for some late night multiplayer goodness, you flew under the radar, but if you're inviting the whole state to your "party" (a party without liquor nor women:P), then I have a dunce hat that's just your size.
The only thing high-end about this whole thing is the president's nose. The advantage of faculty computer labs is that you can control the platform (assuming you pay your sysadmins what they deserve). Every PC can be locked down to the exact same hardware and software, everyone gets the same level of performance and reliability, plus you can probably get a nice deal from Dell/Apple for buying a truckload of desktops (and support contracts). Student PC's will be virus-ridden, unreliable, damaged from being hauled all over the place (and stepped/slept on after big unholy parties with unsafe sex and drugs and all that lovely jesus-raping stuff). Plus you'll get a handful of not-so-wealthy folks screaming at you for enforcing yet another unjust expense. I mean come on, education already costs an arm, leg and testicle for what effectively amounts to high-level pats on the back.
Keep your own PC's, and tell your prez to put the crack pipe down. He brings NOTHING to the table.
Man grows balls, hires an investigator and takes the bitch to the bank for all she's got. Then spends a portion of his out-of-court settlement on thugs to squelch said bitch for good.
Or moves to the tropics and gets freaky deaky with the locals:)
Either way, life's problems have solutions, but the biggest problem of them all is apathy.
Is it just me or does the Sony vs Korea article sound errily like a recording contract ? Publisher finances project, publisher decides ultimate fate of product, publisher controls distribution, publisher takes all revenue until "expenses" are paid, then splits the "profits".
Won't this lead to beautiful garbage in the market, as game houses have their jobs and investment secured by Sony and KIPA funding (at least in the short term) ?
I haven't bothered sifting through the rumours over the Revolution, but will it offer any sort of improvement over the original when running GC titles ? Sort of like some gameboy carts had enhanced graphics when used in a GBA or if anyone remembers the Super Game Boy for SNES.
I'd tend to think that Nintendo will build Revolution-exclusive content into the GC disc, to offer a little "bonus" for console buyers. For some people, this little extra would be enough to justify the hardware upgrade.
For backups, can't you just do a conventional "export" into Insert statements ? Sure, it's inefficient compared to a binary copy, but it works without taking anything down. Mind you, my largest Mysql DB is only 4gb's on disk (around 6 gb in Insert form). For all my uses, this method works just fine.
I'm still using a GeForce 4, and can play both Doom 3 and Painkiller with no framerate issues.
Of course you can "play" Doom 3. I "played" it on my notebook with a Geforce-Go 4200 and it was "playable" at 30-40 fps, but it looked more like Quake 2 with less baddies because that GPU doesn't support all the high-end lighting effects that Doom 3 transpires. One time I had some dude bring in a Celeron 566 with 256mb of ram and a TNT2-M64. He wanted to "play" Age Of Empires 3. Sure, give it 5 minutes to load the first map, then suffer annoying pauses every time you issue a command, but it played.
The problem with PC's is there are too many different configurations. Hell, there are too many preferences! You can run a PC game at varying resolutions, with/without surround sound, joystick/mouse/keyboard/speedpad etc etc etc. The game designer plans for his/her preferred configuration, and that is how the game is MEANT to be played. Hey, I can run F.E.A.R. on my old Radeon 9600. It's fugly, looks like Duke 3D minus the cheesy zingers, and isn't that entertaining. Then I fire it up on a brand new Athlon64 rig with a Geforce 7800GT and it's a whole different experience, it's actually pleasant to watch and sometimes I take a moment to admire the painstaking detail the developers carved into this game.
You can buy a 500$ car that will carry you to/from work just fine. You can also buy a 50'000$ car that will give you chills and thrills. Try doing that with the cheapo car and I assure you it won't be nearly as fun. Different strokes for different folks.
Ahh this seems to be the topic of the week on my patch of dirt. I live in a city where half the workforce is government, and the other half is retail. It's the capital of ass kissing, and I'm the reverend of bad attitude! Why is it that people will bend over backwards for a measly dollar ? Why is it that irate people always end up getting what they want ? Yes, sometimes companies (and their minimum wage reintegration-subsidy employees) make mistakes, and there is a need to fix those mistakes, but more often than not people will just make a scene out of sheer greed. Then you hear about these "amazing scientific breakthroughs" that never amount to anything useful, they just make press releases to secure more funding. This society is trapped in a child mind and these hungry starving attention-whoring "children" far outnumber the few people who actually have the skills and determination to make a positive difference.
I think a good chunk of your problems came from having a Dell. The biggest issue with games of the mid-90's was sound support. If you didn't have a true SoundBlaster or maybe a Gravis Ultrasound, you were SOL. There was no such thing as "updated drivers" back then, so either you bought a big name card, or you slumped along with zero support. I still have my old 486 from those days, and a year ago I fired it up, loaded Dos 6.22 and took a trip down memory lane playing all my old Dos games. Dosbox/VMware ain't got nuthin on this!
-Knock Knock -Who's there? -Zonk. -Zonk who ? -Zonk the guy who has breaking news about the Intel Core Duo -Zonk the guy who's always 2 weeks behind CowboyNeal ? -*grunt* Yes, THAT Zonk. -Well in that case why don't you fark right off mate!
I remember trying out OS/2 Warp 4 a decade ago. Big whoop. It was like Windows NT3, but better. It was like Linux+X11, but with a nicer installer. It was like a lot of things done a little cleaner than usual, but nothing really stood out much. It ran Dos apps, it ran a few Windows apps. A few of my BBS'ing friends ran Maximus on it because it multitasked smoother than a Dos box in Windows. That's about it.
Why haven't these people moved on to greater things ? IBM may have officially dropped OS/2 a year ago, but in spirit they abandoned it before it even had a chance to flourish. They lost all hope when Windows 95 was released. These people should be moving to Linux/BSD.. they should have done that years ago.
PC Gaming was great a decade ago when everyone had a 486 or Pentium and graphic capabilities were rather standard across the board. You could make a fun game for relatively little investment and not too many headaches on the compatibility side. They were also generally aimed at a different market than console games of the time. No-brained action games were on consoles, lengthy strategic games were on the PC. Nowadays the PC has to directly compete with late consoles, except it costs a crapload of money to have a decent gaming PC. Blowing $900 on the latest NVidia card isn't enough, now you need two to get the full experience, don't forget a $500 processor and a couple gigs of ram to go with it. I've built pure gaming rigs that totaled $6k without the monitor.. it's absurd!
If Apple switches over to Windows, why the hell would anyone buy an Apple ? They would become another Dell, except one with lots more deadweight and much less experience in the PC world.
Methinks Dvorak should get out of the spotlight and go hide in a lab somewhere before everyone figures out he's a loony. I've never touched a Mac in my life, yet I've been dying to play around with OSX ever since it came out. Heck, Vista is trying to emulate some of that look and feel YEARS after OSX did it on common graphics hardware. I'm not saying I'd use it as my main desktop because I do enjoy a casual game of NFS or GTA every now and then, but it's just too sexy to ignore.
It doesn't matter what they do.. people is people. Torture the torturers, silence the silencers. In a nation where you can't outwit your enemies, you just have to outnumber them. In the end everyone's just a piece of meat, doesn't matter how much money or power they have.
I'm obviously not a heavy linux desktop advocate.. servers yes, desktops no. Do you really need a bleeding-edge gaming machine to run Linux ? Yes, it would certainly be nice if the gaming industry could release more native Linux builds of their games, but that doesn't seem to be happening for various reasons, one that comes to mind is that Linux is not "stable", and by stable I don't mean crashing, I mean the codebase. When you design a game for Windows XP, you know everyone's got the same base, and you can install any needed libraries in a predictable manner. You also get commercial support from MS and the graphics card manufacturers to make it work smoothly. With linux, you could be running any of two dozen kernels with a number of custom mods and tweaks. 3D-accelerated graphics drivers are poorly supported (if at all). Really the only orgasmic thing about Linux from a game developer's perspective is networking.
The other great barrier to entry is DirectX. Oh sure, I hear you all shouting "use OpenGL instead", okay so that covers graphics. What about audio, controls, networking, etc ? DirectX is a complete multimedia framework, while OpenGL is just a graphics language. SDL ain't bad but it isn't the #1 and never will be.
It always boils down to the same sad problem: Money. The Linux gaming community isn't yet large enough to warrant a non-negligible investment on behalf of the graphics giants NVidia and ATI. We either have to bite the bullet and wait until the community reaches critical mass, or we're going to have to bend over and play nice with the other team.
Obtaining alcohol from corn/cane sugar (never understood why Americans love getting their sugar from corn, blech!) costs far more in energy to run the harvesting/transport/refining equipment than you get out of the alcohol in the end
So it costs a lot of MONEY.. so what ? We don't need money, we need energy. Money can be made up on a piece of paper, money is an abstract resource. Energy is not. Energy is the true currency of the 21st century. At one point if we run out of energy, it won't matter if it costs a million dollars to produce one barrel of oil. It's only money, some cracked out concept that may only exist in the minds of bankers one day. It may even reach a point where driving a gas powered vehicle becomes a high luxury. Some fools might work for months to save up just for the "privilege" of driving around in a '68 Mustang. That's what your dollar is worth.
All this talk about helping the Chinese punch through their firewall is nice, but why can't these people stand up to their government and make things happen ? If enough people over there stand up for their freedoms eventually they will overpower their government, no ? I don't know much about the country unfortunately, but it seems to me they have the population to get the ball rolling and dig themselves out of this federally mandated mindf*ck.
I hate to yank everyone back to reality here, but if you can't get your favorite Windoze games to run with Cedega, and you REALLY want to play those games, why not dedicate a true gaming PC running XP and not munge your clean Linux system with all this patchy crap ? Yes it costs money, but Cedega costs money, and games cost money. You have to pay to play. Either that or invest in an Xbox/Playstation.
They could build backdoors into Solitaire for all I care, it'll just be a backdoor leading to a brick wall as long as there's a firewall in front of it.
This is, once again, an example of "those who don't know, don't care". If you're using the built-in Windows Firewall, then it will silently let these sneak attacks through, and most people using the defaults just don't care about these things, nor are they likely to be the target of a government investigation. Anyone who DOES have something to hide or protect, will load an aftermarket firewall or even set up a linux box in the middle to block intruders and keep the secrets from leaking outside.
Those who are targetted by big brother AND don't cover their tracks are incompetents that should be ensnared and exposed to discourage others. There's good honest people who stay in line, good crooks who stay out of my backyard, and lousy schmucks who screw it all up for everyone.
I'm not a member of Netflix nor their canadian analog Zip, but methinks if you rent 3 movies, then return them the same day you're either NUTS or just plain ripping/burning them. Now we can't paint everyone as a horrible, horrible pirate so maybe offer a slightly pricier plan for these extremists, so that Netflix can stop losing money on the nutjobs and pirates.
I think what pisses me off about these things, is I know people who chew threw 50+ DVD-R discs in a day thanks to online rentals, then sell the copies on the street... AND cash a welfare cheque:P I guess I have a similar attitude to the pirate groups: I can turn a blind eye to someone copying for personal use, but making profit from someone else's work should be capital offense. As a bonus, we'd have a lot less welfare to pay out:D
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I personally don't understand the bitchings about bundling I.E. either. Yeah, it's annoying that you can't uninstall it completely, but bleh! It's an operating system distribution, it's SUPPOSED to come with doodads to get you on the net, play sound/video and other software to use your computer's facilities.
So Active Directory comes with Windows Server.. yeah that's what Windows Server is for. Do you sue your landlord when you rent a house because it comes with a kitchen sink ?
If anyone wants to use non-default software, they're free to freaking buy/download it and setup their computer whichever way they like.
Chum, you just don't get the whole idea of philanthropy, well.. the honest idea, before it gets all munged up by americanism.
It's not about turning a profit. It's not about creating jobs for the lazy techies who reload Slashdot 72 times a day. It's not about fortifying the walls around our society. It's about coming to the realisation that bringing everyone to the same level will mean we won't be fighting over what the others have. It's about balancing out the entire human race. There is a fixed amount of resources in the world, it makes no sense that most of those resources are controlled by a handful of "superpowers" while everyone else withers in poverty. Overpopulation makes the problem even worse.
Helping the advancement of other nations is just one step in the grand scheme of unity.
I think it would be fantastic if AOL would stick with their own "internet" and keep their lusers out of our hair. Having a bunch of AOLers on broadband just means there will me a zillion more idiot posts on the Torrent forums.
"WoW uR l33+ gimme woopi goldburg sexxx tape dudududud"
*reaching for the squirt gun*
The biggest complaint I've heard as a system builder is that Windows is so freaking expensive. We have 300$ PC's but XP costs another 200$ (canadian dollars). If Microsoft could release Windows Idiot Edition for 50 bucks that just lets them surf/email/WoW, those cheapasses would stop whining.
The best part is when they bring in their PC for service because "Windows Update is broken". Then after 5 minutes of lies they finally admit they used a warezed OS, and so I slap them with 2 hours labour PLUS the cost of Windows. It's my job after all, but it's all Microsoft's fault. How much did Win95 cost back in the day ? 70-80$ maybe.. I can't remember but it was little more than the common game or app. Granted, XP does a lot more stuff than 95, but how many people really care about these features ? XP Pro for power users, that's fine, but there needs to be something "lower" than XP Home for the majority of non-techies.
Let's review real quick:
1. you are a software developer with big clients such as US banks
2. you must submit your source code to a 3rd party auditor
3. you think slashdot is a good source of advice
Well, seeing as you're in business I'll assume #3 is just a temporary brain fart on your behalf. If you're really worried about your code falling into the wrong hands, then have a lawyer write up a nice contract that expressly forbids the bank and any other party from using the code for purposes other than security auditing, and throw in a time limit while you're at it. That way you have a leg to stand on if your code were to be spread. This is called protecting your work and intellectual property.
Just name any big software company, and try to figure out what they would do if their code was stolen. Yeah, they'd sue your ass into the ground. Why should your company be any different ?
Like anything in this jealous world, if you get too big, someone wants to take you down.
:P), then I have a dunce hat that's just your size.
If you had "copy-parties" so big that the cops knew about them, then you have too many "friends". If you were just handing copies of NHL 2000 to your mates for some late night multiplayer goodness, you flew under the radar, but if you're inviting the whole state to your "party" (a party without liquor nor women
The only thing high-end about this whole thing is the president's nose. The advantage of faculty computer labs is that you can control the platform (assuming you pay your sysadmins what they deserve). Every PC can be locked down to the exact same hardware and software, everyone gets the same level of performance and reliability, plus you can probably get a nice deal from Dell/Apple for buying a truckload of desktops (and support contracts). Student PC's will be virus-ridden, unreliable, damaged from being hauled all over the place (and stepped/slept on after big unholy parties with unsafe sex and drugs and all that lovely jesus-raping stuff). Plus you'll get a handful of not-so-wealthy folks screaming at you for enforcing yet another unjust expense. I mean come on, education already costs an arm, leg and testicle for what effectively amounts to high-level pats on the back.
Keep your own PC's, and tell your prez to put the crack pipe down. He brings NOTHING to the table.
Man grows balls, hires an investigator and takes the bitch to the bank for all she's got. Then spends a portion of his out-of-court settlement on thugs to squelch said bitch for good.
:)
Or moves to the tropics and gets freaky deaky with the locals
Either way, life's problems have solutions, but the biggest problem of them all is apathy.
Is it just me or does the Sony vs Korea article sound errily like a recording contract ? Publisher finances project, publisher decides ultimate fate of product, publisher controls distribution, publisher takes all revenue until "expenses" are paid, then splits the "profits".
Won't this lead to beautiful garbage in the market, as game houses have their jobs and investment secured by Sony and KIPA funding (at least in the short term) ?
I haven't bothered sifting through the rumours over the Revolution, but will it offer any sort of improvement over the original when running GC titles ? Sort of like some gameboy carts had enhanced graphics when used in a GBA or if anyone remembers the Super Game Boy for SNES.
I'd tend to think that Nintendo will build Revolution-exclusive content into the GC disc, to offer a little "bonus" for console buyers. For some people, this little extra would be enough to justify the hardware upgrade.
For backups, can't you just do a conventional "export" into Insert statements ? Sure, it's inefficient compared to a binary copy, but it works without taking anything down. Mind you, my largest Mysql DB is only 4gb's on disk (around 6 gb in Insert form). For all my uses, this method works just fine.
I'm still using a GeForce 4, and can play both Doom 3 and Painkiller with no framerate issues.
Of course you can "play" Doom 3. I "played" it on my notebook with a Geforce-Go 4200 and it was "playable" at 30-40 fps, but it looked more like Quake 2 with less baddies because that GPU doesn't support all the high-end lighting effects that Doom 3 transpires. One time I had some dude bring in a Celeron 566 with 256mb of ram and a TNT2-M64. He wanted to "play" Age Of Empires 3. Sure, give it 5 minutes to load the first map, then suffer annoying pauses every time you issue a command, but it played.
The problem with PC's is there are too many different configurations. Hell, there are too many preferences! You can run a PC game at varying resolutions, with/without surround sound, joystick/mouse/keyboard/speedpad etc etc etc. The game designer plans for his/her preferred configuration, and that is how the game is MEANT to be played. Hey, I can run F.E.A.R. on my old Radeon 9600. It's fugly, looks like Duke 3D minus the cheesy zingers, and isn't that entertaining. Then I fire it up on a brand new Athlon64 rig with a Geforce 7800GT and it's a whole different experience, it's actually pleasant to watch and sometimes I take a moment to admire the painstaking detail the developers carved into this game.
You can buy a 500$ car that will carry you to/from work just fine. You can also buy a 50'000$ car that will give you chills and thrills. Try doing that with the cheapo car and I assure you it won't be nearly as fun. Different strokes for different folks.
Ahh this seems to be the topic of the week on my patch of dirt. I live in a city where half the workforce is government, and the other half is retail. It's the capital of ass kissing, and I'm the reverend of bad attitude! Why is it that people will bend over backwards for a measly dollar ? Why is it that irate people always end up getting what they want ? Yes, sometimes companies (and their minimum wage reintegration-subsidy employees) make mistakes, and there is a need to fix those mistakes, but more often than not people will just make a scene out of sheer greed. Then you hear about these "amazing scientific breakthroughs" that never amount to anything useful, they just make press releases to secure more funding. This society is trapped in a child mind and these hungry starving attention-whoring "children" far outnumber the few people who actually have the skills and determination to make a positive difference.
Sensationalism will be the death of our world.
I think a good chunk of your problems came from having a Dell. The biggest issue with games of the mid-90's was sound support. If you didn't have a true SoundBlaster or maybe a Gravis Ultrasound, you were SOL. There was no such thing as "updated drivers" back then, so either you bought a big name card, or you slumped along with zero support. I still have my old 486 from those days, and a year ago I fired it up, loaded Dos 6.22 and took a trip down memory lane playing all my old Dos games. Dosbox/VMware ain't got nuthin on this!
-Knock Knock
-Who's there?
-Zonk.
-Zonk who ?
-Zonk the guy who has breaking news about the Intel Core Duo
-Zonk the guy who's always 2 weeks behind CowboyNeal ?
-*grunt* Yes, THAT Zonk.
-Well in that case why don't you fark right off mate!
I remember trying out OS/2 Warp 4 a decade ago. Big whoop. It was like Windows NT3, but better. It was like Linux+X11, but with a nicer installer. It was like a lot of things done a little cleaner than usual, but nothing really stood out much. It ran Dos apps, it ran a few Windows apps. A few of my BBS'ing friends ran Maximus on it because it multitasked smoother than a Dos box in Windows. That's about it.
Why haven't these people moved on to greater things ? IBM may have officially dropped OS/2 a year ago, but in spirit they abandoned it before it even had a chance to flourish. They lost all hope when Windows 95 was released. These people should be moving to Linux/BSD.. they should have done that years ago.
PC Gaming was great a decade ago when everyone had a 486 or Pentium and graphic capabilities were rather standard across the board. You could make a fun game for relatively little investment and not too many headaches on the compatibility side. They were also generally aimed at a different market than console games of the time. No-brained action games were on consoles, lengthy strategic games were on the PC. Nowadays the PC has to directly compete with late consoles, except it costs a crapload of money to have a decent gaming PC. Blowing $900 on the latest NVidia card isn't enough, now you need two to get the full experience, don't forget a $500 processor and a couple gigs of ram to go with it. I've built pure gaming rigs that totaled $6k without the monitor.. it's absurd!
If Apple switches over to Windows, why the hell would anyone buy an Apple ? They would become another Dell, except one with lots more deadweight and much less experience in the PC world.
Methinks Dvorak should get out of the spotlight and go hide in a lab somewhere before everyone figures out he's a loony. I've never touched a Mac in my life, yet I've been dying to play around with OSX ever since it came out. Heck, Vista is trying to emulate some of that look and feel YEARS after OSX did it on common graphics hardware. I'm not saying I'd use it as my main desktop because I do enjoy a casual game of NFS or GTA every now and then, but it's just too sexy to ignore.
It doesn't matter what they do.. people is people. Torture the torturers, silence the silencers. In a nation where you can't outwit your enemies, you just have to outnumber them. In the end everyone's just a piece of meat, doesn't matter how much money or power they have.
I'm obviously not a heavy linux desktop advocate.. servers yes, desktops no. Do you really need a bleeding-edge gaming machine to run Linux ? Yes, it would certainly be nice if the gaming industry could release more native Linux builds of their games, but that doesn't seem to be happening for various reasons, one that comes to mind is that Linux is not "stable", and by stable I don't mean crashing, I mean the codebase. When you design a game for Windows XP, you know everyone's got the same base, and you can install any needed libraries in a predictable manner. You also get commercial support from MS and the graphics card manufacturers to make it work smoothly. With linux, you could be running any of two dozen kernels with a number of custom mods and tweaks. 3D-accelerated graphics drivers are poorly supported (if at all). Really the only orgasmic thing about Linux from a game developer's perspective is networking.
The other great barrier to entry is DirectX. Oh sure, I hear you all shouting "use OpenGL instead", okay so that covers graphics. What about audio, controls, networking, etc ? DirectX is a complete multimedia framework, while OpenGL is just a graphics language. SDL ain't bad but it isn't the #1 and never will be.
It always boils down to the same sad problem: Money. The Linux gaming community isn't yet large enough to warrant a non-negligible investment on behalf of the graphics giants NVidia and ATI. We either have to bite the bullet and wait until the community reaches critical mass, or we're going to have to bend over and play nice with the other team.
Obtaining alcohol from corn/cane sugar (never understood why Americans love getting their sugar from corn, blech!) costs far more in energy to run the harvesting/transport/refining equipment than you get out of the alcohol in the end
So it costs a lot of MONEY.. so what ? We don't need money, we need energy. Money can be made up on a piece of paper, money is an abstract resource. Energy is not. Energy is the true currency of the 21st century. At one point if we run out of energy, it won't matter if it costs a million dollars to produce one barrel of oil. It's only money, some cracked out concept that may only exist in the minds of bankers one day. It may even reach a point where driving a gas powered vehicle becomes a high luxury. Some fools might work for months to save up just for the "privilege" of driving around in a '68 Mustang. That's what your dollar is worth.
All this talk about helping the Chinese punch through their firewall is nice, but why can't these people stand up to their government and make things happen ? If enough people over there stand up for their freedoms eventually they will overpower their government, no ? I don't know much about the country unfortunately, but it seems to me they have the population to get the ball rolling and dig themselves out of this federally mandated mindf*ck.
I hate to yank everyone back to reality here, but if you can't get your favorite Windoze games to run with Cedega, and you REALLY want to play those games, why not dedicate a true gaming PC running XP and not munge your clean Linux system with all this patchy crap ? Yes it costs money, but Cedega costs money, and games cost money. You have to pay to play. Either that or invest in an Xbox/Playstation.
They could build backdoors into Solitaire for all I care, it'll just be a backdoor leading to a brick wall as long as there's a firewall in front of it.
This is, once again, an example of "those who don't know, don't care". If you're using the built-in Windows Firewall, then it will silently let these sneak attacks through, and most people using the defaults just don't care about these things, nor are they likely to be the target of a government investigation. Anyone who DOES have something to hide or protect, will load an aftermarket firewall or even set up a linux box in the middle to block intruders and keep the secrets from leaking outside.
Those who are targetted by big brother AND don't cover their tracks are incompetents that should be ensnared and exposed to discourage others. There's good honest people who stay in line, good crooks who stay out of my backyard, and lousy schmucks who screw it all up for everyone.
I'm not a member of Netflix nor their canadian analog Zip, but methinks if you rent 3 movies, then return them the same day you're either NUTS or just plain ripping/burning them. Now we can't paint everyone as a horrible, horrible pirate so maybe offer a slightly pricier plan for these extremists, so that Netflix can stop losing money on the nutjobs and pirates.
:P I guess I have a similar attitude to the pirate groups: I can turn a blind eye to someone copying for personal use, but making profit from someone else's work should be capital offense. As a bonus, we'd have a lot less welfare to pay out :D
I think what pisses me off about these things, is I know people who chew threw 50+ DVD-R discs in a day thanks to online rentals, then sell the copies on the street... AND cash a welfare cheque