Again, you're completely failing to recognize/acknowledge that this scenario has nothing at all to do with the working lives of vast numbers of people.
You know, I have a proprietary piece of software I work with at my job. Occasionally it breaks in some obscure way. I call my rep at the company, and they work with me to resolve the problem. It's not magic. And it doesn't take 7 days either.
I use "closed" software, and I use "free" software. I use what serves my needs best. What's most reliable, or has the features I need, or I choose the cheapest of several alternatives if they all work more or less equally well. I have never noticed a particular correlation between the underlying philosophy/business model of the software, and the satifaction/effectiveness I get from them as a user.
The users I support don't either. Give me the tool that works. I don't care about the underlying politics. EvilComHugeCo, GranolaFreedomWerks, some high school kid in Sweden. Whatever.
I mean, imagine locking yourself into proprietary software and then being forced into expensive upgrades that you can't afford, or not being able to fix a show-stopper bug because you can't get access to the source code.
The number of users who could fix a showstopper bug even if they had access to the source code is unbelievably miniscule. The number of organizations who can do so is still very small.
Most people aren't programmers. Or developers. Or hackers, crackers, or anything of the sort. And they have no interest in learning any of those things, and they shouldn't be expected to. Too many Linux/Free Softwware advocates either don't get that, or assign it a huge negative moral value as if such people are terrible sheep who don't deserve to get to touch a computer.
1. Apparently it just keeps loading and loading and loading image thumbnails. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. All on one page. Madness. With no good quality way to flip back and forth between image 10 and image 500, except by slogging through 11-499.
2. A Google image search result will tell you right up front the size, dimensions, and originating page for an image. You can also set it to filter (roughly) by size, so you don't get huge or tiny results that are useless to your needs. With MS, you only get image info if you hover over the individual image (and even that doesn't work reliably). So instead of being able to scan a page and immediately know the useful result, you have to hunt and peck individually and hope you luck across a useful one.
"See, for example, the continued success of The Sims and it's many, many expansions over far better games."
What "far better games" do you want these people to be buying?
Games where you shoot zombies? Again?
Or games where you shoot ripoffs of Geiger's Alien ? Again?
Or games where you storm Omaha Beach? Again?
Tolkien Derivative Fantasy RPG #3750?
Blowing Shit Up X-Treme 2005?
Crappy Movie License: The Game?
The PC game industry makes about 5 different games, over and over and over. And most of the people I know who love the Sims don't happen to give a rat's ass about those 5 games, no matter how great the lighting is or how realistic the blood splatter physics are or how many vehicles you can drive.
They tend to be pretty happy about the Nintendogs or Katamari Damancy's of the world, but those quirky games tend to be console/portable titles. On the PC side? The Sims. What else is there for them (aside from Popcap/Yahoo Games stuff, which is also hugely popular)?
"So that answers why they were having so much trouble with StarOffice. They weren't. They were having trouble working with everybody else using Microsoft Office."
They said it was difficult to configure and they got superior vendor support from MS.
I love it when "They use a product you don't like" or "They found a different product suited there needs better" gets translated by people like you into "They're incompetent" and "They shouldn't be using the product to begin with."
"Dual-booting is the province of geeks who like tinkering with their machines. It's not a viable solution for the majority of users with needs which span platforms."
You're forgetting one significant home market segment: Gamers. In my personal circle of friends are a dozen people who would gladly run a dual boot machine, preserving the OSX environment for "real work" and XP just for a few hours of gaming in the evenings or weekends.
I would submit that While Westwood happeed to have made a milestone RTS game with Dune 2, the Dune universe is not inherently a particularly good one from which to attempt to construct an RTS experience. Mostly because the focus of both the books and the filmed versions were more political and philosophical conflict, not open warfare, though of course there was some.
I would submit that a game which happens to embody more of a Dune-style experience would be Alpha Centauri. Various factions competing to control a planet, check. Story structure dealing with a poorly understood, psionically powerful local worm species, check. Conflict driven by political/social/religious differences more than anything else, check.
Change the in-game art, re-write the storyline a bit, and the basic structure of Alpha Centauri provides a pretty Dune-like gaming experience. IMO, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, you're completely failing to recognize/acknowledge that this scenario has nothing at all to do with the working lives of vast numbers of people.
You know, I have a proprietary piece of software I work with at my job. Occasionally it breaks in some obscure way. I call my rep at the company, and they work with me to resolve the problem. It's not magic. And it doesn't take 7 days either.
I use "closed" software, and I use "free" software. I use what serves my needs best. What's most reliable, or has the features I need, or I choose the cheapest of several alternatives if they all work more or less equally well. I have never noticed a particular correlation between the underlying philosophy/business model of the software, and the satifaction/effectiveness I get from them as a user.
The users I support don't either. Give me the tool that works. I don't care about the underlying politics. EvilComHugeCo, GranolaFreedomWerks, some high school kid in Sweden. Whatever.
The number of users who could fix a showstopper bug even if they had access to the source code is unbelievably miniscule. The number of organizations who can do so is still very small.
Most people aren't programmers. Or developers. Or hackers, crackers, or anything of the sort. And they have no interest in learning any of those things, and they shouldn't be expected to. Too many Linux/Free Softwware advocates either don't get that, or assign it a huge negative moral value as if such people are terrible sheep who don't deserve to get to touch a computer.
I tried doing some image searches.
1. Apparently it just keeps loading and loading and loading image thumbnails. Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. All on one page. Madness. With no good quality way to flip back and forth between image 10 and image 500, except by slogging through 11-499.
2. A Google image search result will tell you right up front the size, dimensions, and originating page for an image. You can also set it to filter (roughly) by size, so you don't get huge or tiny results that are useless to your needs. With MS, you only get image info if you hover over the individual image (and even that doesn't work reliably). So instead of being able to scan a page and immediately know the useful result, you have to hunt and peck individually and hope you luck across a useful one.
"See, for example, the continued success of The Sims and it's many, many expansions over far better games."
What "far better games" do you want these people to be buying?
Games where you shoot zombies? Again?
Or games where you shoot ripoffs of Geiger's Alien ? Again?
Or games where you storm Omaha Beach? Again?
Tolkien Derivative Fantasy RPG #3750?
Blowing Shit Up X-Treme 2005?
Crappy Movie License: The Game?
The PC game industry makes about 5 different games, over and over and over. And most of the people I know who love the Sims don't happen to give a rat's ass about those 5 games, no matter how great the lighting is or how realistic the blood splatter physics are or how many vehicles you can drive.
They tend to be pretty happy about the Nintendogs or Katamari Damancy's of the world, but those quirky games tend to be console/portable titles. On the PC side? The Sims. What else is there for them (aside from Popcap/Yahoo Games stuff, which is also hugely popular)?
"So that answers why they were having so much trouble with StarOffice. They weren't. They were having trouble working with everybody else using Microsoft Office."
They said it was difficult to configure and they got superior vendor support from MS.
I love it when "They use a product you don't like" or "They found a different product suited there needs better" gets translated by people like you into "They're incompetent" and "They shouldn't be using the product to begin with."
Your optimism is...nice, I guess. But Loki serves a small niche within a small niche. I just can't see it.
I would submit that While Westwood happeed to have made a milestone RTS game with Dune 2, the Dune universe is not inherently a particularly good one from which to attempt to construct an RTS experience. Mostly because the focus of both the books and the filmed versions were more political and philosophical conflict, not open warfare, though of course there was some. I would submit that a game which happens to embody more of a Dune-style experience would be Alpha Centauri. Various factions competing to control a planet, check. Story structure dealing with a poorly understood, psionically powerful local worm species, check. Conflict driven by political/social/religious differences more than anything else, check. Change the in-game art, re-write the storyline a bit, and the basic structure of Alpha Centauri provides a pretty Dune-like gaming experience. IMO, of course.