The big question is how many of these games run on Linux ? And I am not talking of running them using emulation like Wine. But natively. Me being a linux user, will start buying them when they start supporting linux .
" Now your local grocer is out of business and you pay continually higher prices for lower quality foodstuffs. Good plan...
Now there are no more local stores, just mega-corporations with gigantic warehouse style storefronts and lower levels of employment available to the masses.
That's right, you are directly responsible for the downfall of modern western civilization."
Not really. The groccer is not out of business and what is more when he saw that he was losing business, he decided to pull up his act once and for all and became more customer friendly. After all, it is in the groccer's interest too that people come and buy products from him.
BTW, it was only an analogy. The real fact is that microsoft is the monopolist and linux is the underdog. And I am sure many will agree that they like the underdog to succeed.
I still remember the time when my neighbourhood groccer stopped stocking my favourate cereals. I switched to shopping for what I want from the supermarket. Even though it was a bit further from my home and needed a drive by car, I still got what I wanted and was happy in the process. On a similar note,
If Vista don't allow playing of encoded DVDs on old DVD drives, then it is the right time to give Linux a try. It will allow you to play encrypted DVDs and more. And the good thing is Linux is not at all fussy at all and is very user friendly.
When there is high speed internet connection and an excellent set of web browsers, why would some one use RSS ?
RSS has its advantages in places where people access the net using dial up connection. It loses its purpose where people jump on the net for pure entertainment and killing time.
I am a very heavy user of del.icio.us not only in bookmarking sites but also to search for valuable content. What sets del.icio.us apart from the other bookmarking tools is its simplicity. Now that yahoo has taken over del.icio.us, I hope, they do not mess with its basic structure and looks which I believe is its USP.
Switch to Linux. Lets force all these companies to go opensource.
I thought Vim was a finished project
on
Vim 6.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have been a ardent fan of this editor and have been using it consistently for over 3 years now. And I really feel that vim has reached a maturity level where no more development is necessary. And if it lacks a feature, just write a plugin for the same. If you ask me this is how softwares must be developed - in a fully modular manner.
Kudos to vim developers:)
GIMP is becoming a real threat for Photoshop
on
First Look at GIMP 2.4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I have been a GIMP user for the past few years. I started using GIMP first on windows and then when I switched over to linux, it became my graphics package of choice. I think GIMP will become a real threat to Photoshop in the near future. The only thing stopping it is CMYK support which (most probably) will be added in the next version.
I think it pays to use open source or GPLed software.
I have been an avid blogger for the past one year. And I started it as a hobby, something I enjoy doing as well as some place to keep track of my notes and the likes. And the biggest satisfaction that a blogger can get is for others who visit his blog to leave honest and useful comments related to what he has written.
Ofcourse, generating some income from the blogs also helps - atleast to pay the internet bills. But for a blog to succeed, three things have to be there -
1) Genuine interest in what you are writing about. 2) A desire to share your thoughts and honest opinion about the topic you write. 3) Knowledge about your subject.
If these three qualities gel, then you have a popular blog repeatedly visited by users because they like what they read.
The yet to be released IE 7.0 has a lot of features. Majority of them stolen from firefox. And it was amusing to see that it looked just like firefox in appearance.
Should be a stepping stone to the move to Linux
on
Pepping Up Windows
·
· Score: 1
Let's face it. Linux is more user friendly than windows. When it comes to productivity, opensource softwares leave all other closed source alternatives far behind. And what is more, all these softwares installed by default on Linux.
So my suggestion as a user of Linux is that use of opensource and GPLed softwares in windows should be a stepping stone to a shift towards eventual embrace of Linux as the OS platform. And you will emerge with better knowledge about your computer too in the process.
With multi-million dollar companies of the likes of IBM and Oracle aggresively backing Linux, I think it is only a matter of time before there is a mass exodus towards Linux. Already hardware companies like Acer are providing laptops and PCs pre-installed with linux. And the $100 laptop being build by MIT is going to be powered by Linux.
My cousin has emigrated to USA (houston to be exact) and he is making a whooping 200k a year. But he is paying a good percentage as taxes. I was really amazed when he told me that even if a person is a bachelor having no dependents, one has to pay education tax. And the amount of tax one pays depends on the locality one is living in. He is paying $6000/year as education tax . Ofcourse there is a long list of other taxes he has to pay.
I some times wonder if these Americans are not stretching it a bit when they do everything on a grand scale - big earnings and even bigger spendings (which includes paying taxes too).
It is like old times. The technology with the best marketing team gets accepted as a standard. To heck with technological superiority and other crap. This is how windows became the defacto in the operating system arena. Even though there were better alternatives like OS/2 and MAC.
The fact of the matter is that Is it enforcable? I take a simple example. Today, I got an email from a guy who asked me permission for using the articles I wrote for my website. I promptly replied that I have published it with Creative Commons licence and if he is using it to please insert a link back to my website.
Now how am I going to enforce this requirement ? I can't go to his place and snoop around can I? And suppose I do catch him red handed, what can I do at the most (as an individual)? I could again send him an email reminding him of the licence and request him not to misuse it. Here I have to rely on his sense of fairplay. Similarly, what is keeping anybody from using a GPLed code in their propritery software and keeping quite about the same ? On this note alone, I think that GPL cannot be enforced. But I fancy GPL because it has strong social undertones and teaches people to share with others.
I have never understood the difference between different versions of GPL. Now we have GPL ver 1, ver 2 , ver 3. Not to speak of LGPL.
What the heck? Can't we stick with a single version? And does it matter so much?
Even RMS has stated in an interview that it is really difficult to monitor the misuse of GPL. So how will having 3 different versions of it help ? It will only muddy the water more. I suspect a lot of these corporations are sneeking in GPLed code to create closed source propritery softwares.
But I am really excited about the $100 laptops. This is the right way to go if you want to bring computing to the masses. Infact, in India, we had a project called simputer (a palm top device which can also be connected to the internet). But it was bogged down by hiccups and never really took off. And the price was more than $100.
I wonder, why microsoft can't do what apple did to mac OS. That is, why can't microsoft take FreeBSD code base and build added features into it to create a robust OS ? They could also include hooks in it so that MSOffice and other software suites will run only in their OS like apple is doing to Mac OS. This could make their job a lot easier and could get them more patrons for their OS.
But microsoft has always been good at making even simple things seem very complex.
Hello,
I congragulate the slashdot team in moving to CSS. But the web page shows some quirks while loading in firefox browser - not all the time, but some of the time.
And I was expecting a design change. Isn't it high time for a design change for slashdot?
What if Intel buys over Apple? I am sure intel won't be interested in making money out of selling OSX. It will be the leader in the PC industry because every computer assembler will be mooting for intel chips instead of AMD. And intel can make it even more pursuasive by making OSX run optimally only in a PC with intel chips.
I think that there is a lot going on in the technology front in India - an example being the just released $200 laptop in India. But all this technology is really used by people living in the cities (who have studied in English medium schools) which is a minority. The majority of people who live in the villages of India do not understand English and so will not be able to use the computer. The government's move to release the open-source software in regional languages is a move to bridge this divide. So that even the people in villages will be able to harness the power of a PC - for example to check the latest price of seeds, check what is the best price they could get for their farm produce, gain knowledge about the best farming practices to increase the crop yield, give better education to their children, get up-to-date weather information (remember, India has a good weather satellite and is one of the few countries capable of launching their own satellites in outer space), send and receive email in their own language - these being only some of the uses that come to my mind that the average Indian living in villages could accomplish by using a computer.
The shift to open-source should not be taken as anti-Microsoft or anti-proprietary. I believe the government took this move because of the ready availability of source code, no license restrictions and freedom to distribute the modified software to the masses free of cost.
But the question is will this trend by the Indian government reverse the tide towards the open-source softwares ? I believe it could significantly increase the use of open source softwares by the people. But for the real movement towards the free software to take place, there should be a significant reduction in the level of piracy of proprietary software happening here. For example, I could just walk into a shop selling PCs and request them for a copy of windows OS (any version),and if there is enough space remaining on the CD maybe put a copy of latest photoshop and Adobe acrobat and they will gladly give it for around Rupees 50 (just over 1 US dollar), with the hope that in the future if I decide to buy any piece of hardware, I will buy it from them - it is the human psychology working here.
I own an NVIDIA graphics card and I use it to play games amoung other things. I have Linux installed on my machine. I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Nvidia website and found that they have excellent support for the linux platform. After downloading and instaling the drivers, I was able to play such classic games like ChromiumBSU and Doom.
Nvidia has gained a permanent supporter in me. I think more and more hardware vendors need to emulate what Nvidia has done and release drivers for multiple OS platforms and not just stick to windows. You can read all about my experiences in using NVIDIA graphics card at http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/05/configuring- linux-to-use-nvidia.html --
I second that opinion. I started blogging about 6 months back and I am already hooked. It feels nice to know what other people think about what you write and share information with others. And blogging is a cheap and effective medium for that. -- http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/
Slashdot Mirror
The big question is how many of these games run on Linux ? And I am not talking of running them using emulation like Wine. But natively. Me being a linux user, will start buying them when they start supporting linux .
" Now your local grocer is out of business and you pay continually higher prices for lower quality foodstuffs. Good plan...
Now there are no more local stores, just mega-corporations with gigantic warehouse style storefronts and lower levels of employment available to the masses.
That's right, you are directly responsible for the downfall of modern western civilization."
Not really. The groccer is not out of business and what is more when he saw that he was losing business, he decided to pull up his act once and for all and became more customer friendly. After all, it is in the groccer's interest too that people come and buy products from him.
BTW, it was only an analogy. The real fact is that microsoft is the monopolist and linux is the underdog. And I am sure many will agree that they like the underdog to succeed.
I still remember the time when my neighbourhood groccer stopped stocking my favourate cereals. I switched to shopping for what I want from the supermarket. Even though it was a bit further from my home and needed a drive by car, I still got what I wanted and was happy in the process. On a similar note,
If Vista don't allow playing of encoded DVDs on old DVD drives, then it is the right time to give Linux a try. It will allow you to play encrypted DVDs and more. And the good thing is Linux is not at all fussy at all and is very user friendly.
When there is high speed internet connection and an excellent set of web browsers, why would some one use RSS ?
RSS has its advantages in places where people access the net using dial up connection. It loses its purpose where people jump on the net for pure entertainment and killing time.
I am a very heavy user of del.icio.us not only in bookmarking sites but also to search for valuable content. What sets del.icio.us apart from the other bookmarking tools is its simplicity.
Now that yahoo has taken over del.icio.us, I hope, they do not mess with its basic structure and looks which I believe is its USP.
Switch to Linux. Lets force all these companies to go opensource.
I have been a ardent fan of this editor and have been using it consistently for over 3 years now. And I really feel that vim has reached a maturity level where no more development is necessary.
:)
And if it lacks a feature, just write a plugin for the same. If you ask me this is how softwares must be developed - in a fully modular manner.
Kudos to vim developers
I have been a GIMP user for the past few years. I started using GIMP first on windows and then when I switched over to linux, it became my graphics package of choice. I think GIMP will become a real threat to Photoshop in the near future. The only thing stopping it is CMYK support which (most probably) will be added in the next version.
I think it pays to use open source or GPLed software.
I have been an avid blogger for the past one year. And I started it as a hobby, something I enjoy doing as well as some place to keep track of my notes and the likes. And the biggest satisfaction that a blogger can get is for others who visit his blog to leave honest and useful comments related to what he has written.
Ofcourse, generating some income from the blogs also helps - atleast to pay the internet bills. But for a blog to succeed, three things have to be there -
1) Genuine interest in what you are writing about.
2) A desire to share your thoughts and honest opinion about the topic you write.
3) Knowledge about your subject.
If these three qualities gel, then you have a popular blog repeatedly visited by users because they like what they read.
This would not have happened if the people at Novell had used Ubuntu Linux. :)
The yet to be released IE 7.0 has a lot of features. Majority of them stolen from firefox. And it was amusing to see that it looked just like firefox in appearance.
Let's face it. Linux is more user friendly than windows. When it comes to productivity, opensource softwares leave all other closed source alternatives far behind. And what is more, all these softwares installed by default on Linux.
So my suggestion as a user of Linux is that use of opensource and GPLed softwares in windows should be a stepping stone to a shift towards eventual embrace of Linux as the OS platform.
And you will emerge with better knowledge about your computer too in the process.
With multi-million dollar companies of the likes of IBM and Oracle aggresively backing Linux, I think it is only a matter of time before there is a mass exodus towards Linux. Already hardware companies like Acer are providing laptops and PCs pre-installed with linux. And the $100 laptop being build by MIT is going to be powered by Linux.
My cousin has emigrated to USA (houston to be exact) and he is making a whooping 200k a year. But he is paying a good percentage as taxes. I was really amazed when he told me that even if a person is a bachelor having no dependents, one has to pay education tax. And the amount of tax one pays depends on the locality one is living in. He is paying $6000/year as education tax . Ofcourse there is a long list of other taxes he has to pay.
I some times wonder if these Americans are not stretching it a bit when they do everything on a grand scale - big earnings and even bigger spendings (which includes paying taxes too).
It is like old times. The technology with the best marketing team gets accepted as a standard. To heck with technological superiority and other crap. This is how windows became the defacto in the operating system arena. Even though there were better alternatives like OS/2 and MAC.
The fact of the matter is that
Is it enforcable? I take a simple example. Today, I got an email from a guy who asked me permission for using the articles I wrote for my website. I promptly replied that I have published it with Creative Commons licence and if he is using it to please insert a link back to my website.
Now how am I going to enforce this requirement ? I can't go to his place and snoop around can I? And suppose I do catch him red handed, what can I do at the most (as an individual)? I could again send him an email reminding him of the licence and request him not to misuse it. Here I have to rely on his sense of fairplay. Similarly, what is keeping anybody from using a GPLed code in their propritery software and keeping quite about the same ? On this note alone, I think that GPL cannot be enforced. But I fancy GPL because it has strong social undertones and teaches people to share with others.
I have never understood the difference between different versions of GPL. Now we have GPL ver 1, ver 2 , ver 3. Not to speak of LGPL.
What the heck? Can't we stick with a single version? And does it matter so much?
Even RMS has stated in an interview that it is really difficult to monitor the misuse of GPL. So how will having 3 different versions of it help ? It will only muddy the water more. I suspect a lot of these corporations are sneeking in GPLed code to create closed source propritery softwares.
This is very old news. Infact, I had blogged about it way back in april. You may read my post here - http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/04/100-laptops- running-linux.html
But I am really excited about the $100 laptops. This is the right way to go if you want to bring computing to the masses. Infact, in India, we had a project called simputer (a palm top device which can also be connected to the internet). But it was bogged down by hiccups and never really took off. And the price was more than $100.
I wonder, why microsoft can't do what apple did to mac OS. That is, why can't microsoft take FreeBSD code base and build added features into it to create a robust OS ? They could also include hooks in it so that MSOffice and other software suites will run only in their OS like apple is doing to Mac OS.
This could make their job a lot easier and could get them more patrons for their OS.
But microsoft has always been good at making even simple things seem very complex.
Hello,
I congragulate the slashdot team in moving to CSS. But the web page shows some quirks while loading in firefox browser - not all the time, but some of the time.
And I was expecting a design change. Isn't it high time for a design change for slashdot?
I think a blue or green color suits it better.
Just a thought...
What if Intel buys over Apple? I am sure intel won't be interested in making money out of selling OSX. It will be the leader in the PC industry because every computer assembler will be mooting for intel chips instead of AMD. And intel can make it even more pursuasive by making OSX run optimally only in a PC with intel chips.
I think that there is a lot going on in the technology front in India - an example being the just released $200 laptop in India. But all this technology is really used by people living in the cities (who have studied in English medium schools) which is a minority. The majority of people who live in the villages of India do not understand English and so will not be able to use the computer. The government's move to release the open-source software in regional languages is a move to bridge this divide. So that even the people in villages will be able to harness the power of a PC - for example to check the latest price of seeds, check what is the best price they could get for their farm produce, gain knowledge about the best farming practices to increase the crop yield, give better education to their children, get up-to-date weather information (remember, India has a good weather satellite and is one of the few countries capable of launching their own satellites in outer space), send and receive email in their own language - these being only some of the uses that come to my mind that the average Indian living in villages could accomplish by using a computer.
The shift to open-source should not be taken as anti-Microsoft or anti-proprietary. I believe the government took this move because of the ready availability of source code, no license restrictions and freedom to distribute the modified software to the masses free of cost.
But the question is will this trend by the Indian government reverse the tide towards the open-source softwares ?
I believe it could significantly increase the use of open source softwares by the people. But for the real movement towards the free software to take place, there should be a significant reduction in the level of piracy of proprietary software happening here.
For example, I could just walk into a shop selling PCs and request them for a copy of windows OS (any version),and if there is enough space remaining on the CD maybe put a copy of latest photoshop and Adobe acrobat and they will gladly give it for around Rupees 50 (just over 1 US dollar), with the hope that in the future if I decide to buy any piece of hardware, I will buy it from them - it is the human psychology working here.
I own an NVIDIA graphics card and I use it to play games amoung other things. I have Linux installed on my machine. I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Nvidia website and found that they have excellent support for the linux platform. After downloading and instaling the drivers, I was able to play such classic games like ChromiumBSU and Doom.
- linux-to-use-nvidia.html
Nvidia has gained a permanent supporter in me. I think more and more hardware vendors need to emulate what Nvidia has done and release drivers for multiple OS platforms and not just stick to windows.
You can read all about my experiences in using NVIDIA graphics card at
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/05/configuring
--
I second that opinion. I started blogging about 6 months back and I am already hooked. It feels nice to know what other people think about what you write and share information with others. And blogging is a cheap and effective medium for that.
--
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/
Why use bloated netscape when you have lean firefox? I for one use firefox and am very happy using it.