Yup. That's an idea, let's break out of the prison of choice into the bright new freedom of the one true windows dictatorship.
Well, ignoring the false dichotomy and overall tone of this, the prison of choice is, in fact, a prison nonetheless even if the walls are painted the colors I like most. So many here want to see real commercial software delivered to the linux platform, yet are not willing to agree on much of anything. How can we expect commercial software developers to want to target a moving object? How is that realistic or financially solvent?
Free software is nice and fits the needs of some, but a lot of the good software out there that people need is just not available for it.
When the popular distributions can not even agree on a single package manager, this is not something that will change. The LSB is selectively followed at best. Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like.tar.gz,.rpm,.deb,.pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?
I just spent the last week with my father-in-law who is a sole proprietor of an engineering company out of New Jersey. We talked about computers a lot, since it is a common interest. One of his very first laments was being strapped to Windows on all of his computers because it is a requirement for Solidworks. This is a man who would love to change his OS because he started with and loves *nix, but cannot because of his software requirements. I asked him about using Pro-E, since I know it supports a few different *nixes, and he said that it never worked right on them, and that graphically it was inferior to Windows.
His software needs? Solidworks Pro-E Lightwave
This is true for everyone that works for him as well. A whole office of people that are strapped to Windows because of the software.
We can lament that it is the software makers fault for only producing for one or two OSs, but the reality is a chunk of graphics and engineering software supports OS X just fine. It's not a question whether they would produce it for *nix then, but a question of how we can make linux attractive as a platform.
One way to absolutely make sure that does NOT happen is to keep moving the targets and to keep living in our prison of choice.
I've used cygwin in windows, it's cool and all but you're relegated to a subdirectory for all your work there.
If you mean that your root / environment is limited to the installation directory, that is no longer the case. You can move outside of the standard root using standard drive letters just like in Windows. You can also bind the/bin and/usr/bin (and more) directories into your path statement as a standard Windows environment PATH variable so that you can use all your UNIX commands from the DOS prompt as well.
To move outside your install directory, use/cygdrive/
Example:
To change to D:\ cd/cygdrive/d/
Then move into standard directories just like you normally would.
cd "Documents and Settings" cd "JoeUser" cd "My Documents" ls
Tab completion works fine. You can do it all in one, or even softlink Windows directories into your standard cygwin environment. I do this regularly.
I ran it on Friday morning with a PuG of SSC/Gruul/Mag geared 71s and 72s. It was not bad. The third boss that has you fighting images of your own party was refreshingly cool.
Good drops in there too. I replaced my T5 priest gloves with one of the boss drops.
Wasn't there a follow-up to this where an entire of group of Borg had achieved "individuality" and were totally lost because they had no sense of purpose in life?
I seem to remember the standard away team having to explain that "nope, this is pretty much it... figure it out yourself"
I just took a massive shit. Streams of liquid feces are streaming out of my asshole. The stench is unbearable. Worst of all, I'm sitting at my desk. At work.
Give the electric companies 2 choices: Fix your own damn shit with your profits or we fix it and lease it back to you or nationalize you.
Sure there are people that are going to bitch because they're used to their handout. But handouts aren't going to help anyone. Make everyone work.
It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than handing it over to a bunch of people who managed to already lose $700b.
[0].M-F you live in work housing or you work 4 - 10s or 7 on 7 off.
I hate to ruin your rant with what we call "facts", but the grid in the United States is not owned by private companies that you can just boss around from your ivory tower of uninformed tripe. It is an amalgamation of state-run and multi-state entities called ISOs (Independent System Operators) that both contract and coordinate with the transmission agencies in concert with privately-owned and state-owned generation assets to produce consistent and reliable power. A grid, in the strictest sense of the word, is a series of transmission lines, owned by multiple companies, that are interlinked and under the complete autonomy of the ISO. Nothing happens without the permission and direction of the ISO or FERC (and NERC as its enforcement arm). The grid is aging, but since the ultimate authority to direct replacement lies with both federal, state, and multi-state agencies, who precisely in your little world bears the fiscal burden?
Get your wife/girlfriend/housemate to hide your key somewhere in your house before you go to bed. The next morning have them make you do a series of tasks such as "the buttering of the twelve slices" and "cleaning up hell's kitchen" in order to earn clues as to their whereabouts. For added realism, upon discovery of your keys, speak to them again and have them give you a pound and some un-useful object such as a hoover nozzle that you may need to use to solve a problem later on in the day.
There you have it, real life two player adventure game!
This is just pure awesome on so many levels. I actually envisioned my fiancee handing me a dollar and a stupid hat I would never use.
No, but I worked 40+ hours a week on top of my high school stuff so that I could help my family pay the bills and have enough to eat. Fast forward 20 years and I still working over 40 hours a week on top of raising a family, dealing with all the ancillary school-related and extracurricular stuff for my son, and wondering what I will do when my company lays me off in a few months.
Everyone has crap they have to deal with. It's called life. I suggest you get used to it.
And it requires supporting Sony, both by purchasing a PS3 and by purchasing the game, which makes it a no-go for any Slashdotter who cares about freedom.
Freedom? You are aware that we are talking about game systems and not malevolent governments that are bent on exterminating entire cultures, right? Right?
- Shadowy ninjas are not watching me from the air vents to see how I use the PS3. - People are not coming into my home and telling me I cannot watch a movie on my PS3. - Every game I have bought for the PS3 has worked and my family even had fun with them. - The PS3 does not, at any point, get up and slap me around. - I am able to eat dinner whenever and wherever I like, even if it is not on the couch in front of the PS3. - No one has tried to kill myself or my family for the PS3. - The PS3 has never tried to kill myself or my family. - I still have the right to turn it off and go outside.
I own a PS3. I can play games on it. I use it as my Blu-Ray player to watch new movies. I use it to watch DivX and XVid encoded movies natively. It plays my MP3 collection on my main stereo using the wireless link to my dekstop PC. I use it to check the web from the comfort of my couch. I even have it crunching numbers for Folding@Home at this very moment while I am at work. It is conceivably the best console I have ever owned and the one device in my house that gets more use than even my desktop PC.
I call that freedom.
Please, get some perspective. This is just a game console, and you are not a Nicaraguan freedom fighter.
I really thought I was the only one that got angry enough to actually yank the signs out of the ground. Thank you so much for that link! It's good to know I am not alone in my neurosis.
I usually just pull them up and leave them on the ground because I don't want to get my car trunk dirty.
I know what I will be catching up on tonight. Now if only we could destroy all the billboards too...
So, you fixed all the crap linux audio layers yourself? You fix compiz crashes and feature instability too? How about Flash? How is that flash working for you on large videos?
Ubuntu zealots are far worse that Apple zealots. At least the Apple ones admit to the problems without backpedaling to "OMG TEH CODEZ" when there have been persistent problems in Ubuntu for years. You haven't really fixed shit. You just trot out the line like a good little group-think conformist.
You want to talk about a moving target... A six month release cycle that breaks as many things as it fixes? Every release comes rife with new issues that could have been avoided with some decent QA.
Be realistic. Ubuntu is a crap distribution, and I will never understand the fanboy elitism around here that surrounds it. At least with Gentoo it made sense back in the day, since there was actual coding, patching, and real optimization in place. Ubuntu is worse than OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, Fedora, Slackware, or even the Debian it sprang forth from. It is the distribution that a generation of mascara-wearing angst-monkeys lives and swears by in the false sense of "sticking it to the man".
HINT: You are not sticking it to the man. No one gives a shit what OS you run on your home computer. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are pining away for that 0.92% of the market share you and your ilk occupy.
I believe you are operating under the assumption that any piece of software that any user would ever need is in the default repos. This is demonstrably incorrect.
Most serious system administrators still compile essential services by hand so that they can control the installation paths, feature-sets, upgrade methods, and can patch security issues without waiting on a central update from a distro vendor.
Dependencies are still an issue for people running very high-availability and critical services.
I've had locksmiths get my key out, and they have a flat piece of metal (cops carry them too) that they can slide down where the window goes and have the door open in five seconds. No need whatever to make a key to open it.
Twenty bucks to come out to the car, a buck fifty for a new key. Yet he's going to go to that trouble to make a key?
How fucking stupid do you think we are?
Hello, and welcome to the Post-80s world! This is a brave new place where car doors are designed for this absolutely not to work any longer, even if you could get past all the crap and to the mechanisms. Also, we have this thing called the "internet" where you can see naked pictures. Oh, and Molly Ringwald is no longer hot.
I never denied it. I took one C and one FORTRAN course 16 years ago in college, but haven't looked at either of them in so long I probably couldn't even swing a Hello World at this point. I use other languages now because they are more appropriate to my work.
The point was never about languages. The point was that being a user of an Operating System should not require programming knowledge of any sort. A user is just that. One who uses a tool to perform a task. If Linux (or any OS, for that matter) has any hope of long-term viability and userbase, then this entry bar must be completely removed.
Every user brings something to the community. Every user has a strength that they can use to contribute to the greater knowledge base. Programming is only one of those strengths and, while vital, should not discount or denigrate the contributions of others. Some of the guys I used to hang around on EFNET:#gentoo with years ago didn't code at all, but they were quick to offer help to others with getting X configured, working with the portage system, or how to set up basic services like Apache or BIND. There is an inherent worth in this.
Demands to have something ported for us usually come from novice users who are not able to port software themselves, and are not aware of the extent to which software is ported by others.
I think labeling users that don't code at that level as 'novice' is disingenuous at best. I have used *nix systems for well over 10 years in my daily life and in my job and have nothing more than a basic understanding of C because the bulk of my work (network engineer) revolves around PERL, AWK, and expect with a healthy dose of Oracle and MySQL. Does that make me a novice user? No, I don't believe so. Users come in all shapes and sizes, and everyone's individual strengths reinforce the community as a whole.
A proper and well-documented OS should be able to support any user that wants to use it without an excessively steep learning curve. Usability of a well-designed tool should never require intimate knowledge of how the tool is constructed.
From time to time I download the newest Ubuntu and check it out to see what all the new fuss is. I am continually disappointed though, and it rarely makes it a week before being purged.
It's not just the bugs and the long app-launch times. It's more than just the gratuitous resource consumption. It's the whole thing... It's bloat on top of eye-candy bloat with a hefty helping of fanboy zealotry.
I love *NIX very much but it is precisely because I love it that I have to point out that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
When did the userbase of linux go so wrong? When did it start? Those of us that have been around for quite a while have watched the rockstar rise and subsequent plummet in the communities surrounding it. 10+ years ago you could jump into IRC type/join #[your distro] and be surrounded by people that truly loved their systems and would help you without being condescending, resorting to ad hominem attacks, or calling other *nix variants crap. A lot of those guys, myself included, were using Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, AIX, etc. during the day and spending some of our evenings just helping out others that were interested in or 'testing the water' with linux. The slackware community was great. Even a little more recently when Gentoo first really got rolling between 1.0 and 1.2 the community on EFNET in #gentoo was a shining example of what a userbase should be. I spent many an hour in there helping people figure out their CFLAGS, configuring their XF86Config, and the like.
With the influx of more and more folks that seem to be vastly more focused on hating Windows, Mac OSX, and even other UNIX variants, the face of linux has changed. People that used to use *NIX as a personal choice did so because they truly loved computers. Now it seems to be the equivalent of a battle standard. Your Operating System is your country, your flag, and your religion. Thousands of angry people focused on their hatred of anything that is unlike themselves. It's GNU/Xenophobia.
The programming ramifications of this have become pervasive throughout many of the more popular distributions. In fact, the fundamental idea of the ideological Bazaar has been replaced by the Cathedral of intolerance. Instead of a focus on excellence and listening to the end-users, more and more developers are dismissive and prone to flame. More time is spent developing completely worthless and unrelated 'features' than in solidifying and optimizing the current code. Instead of, say fixing GNOME's inability to remember where I want my launch icons on the panel, we get wobbly windows that add absolutely nothing to the value of the desktop. Instead of writing just one really, really good IDE for C development, we get oodles of feature-incomplete environments that can't even compete with older Visual Studios or XCode; and this is supposed to be forte of *NIX. As children we are reinforced to eat our meat and vegetables before we get dessert. Yet more and more developers focus on the candy and leave the meat (optimizing) and vegetables (squashing bugs) virtually untouched. It's not as exciting of course, but it is necessary. In *buntu I struggle with yet another audio layer to cover the other layers to figure out why my sound card is doing a darn good impression of a french mime when I try to play some music. Meanwhile, a thousand fanboys upload yet another Youtube video of a spinning desktop cube with a Moby soundtrack.
Perhaps it is the fate of those of us from the previous generation to make way for the new one, but as we do so there should be some guidance, some hope, and some direction given. Reading through the comments in this story really drive home how far this has gone and the need for a gentle hand to remind people not just of the Bazaar, but also that we need to eat our meat and vegetables before we get dessert. This reply has gotten much longer than I originally planned though, but perhaps this conversation can continue in another venue.
Why has this been moderated flamebait? What he's saying is true!
There is a noticeable difference in presenting information in a way that educates and informs the group at large of something that they may or may not realize, and posting the same information with demeaning and inflammatory statements that serve only to convey a false sense of superiority.
This is the latter.
While there might be a nugget of truth buried in there, it's obfuscated by the angry rhetoric.
Can't say I've ever used Helix. Nor that I ever will. Mplayer and VLC do everything I need, so I don't need some company's trash.
The italics in your response really drive in that linux-zealot fealty.
A company produces a viable and actually very decent linux port of one of its applications, and these are the type of reactions it gets in reply. People here whine and bitch about the state of the linux desktop and its negligible marketshare, but then when we see responses like this there is little reason to wonder why. How can we possibly expect anyone to want to work with this potential customer base?
Linux multimedia is a mess. You can't even attempt to navigate a map of the audio layers without a sherpa to guide you. I applaud the efforts of any company or developer that is interested in actually working within this byzantine quagmire to provide linux users with viable software. To denigrate any software that is delivered free (as in beer) to us as a userbase only deepens the divide and sets back the effort.
Ideology has a place and time, but let's not eschew the efforts of others, even if it comes from a corporation, just because it might not fit our narrow view of the world. Some great pieces of code for linux have come out of commercial software houses by paid developers.
Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista is, only faster. Same bling available. Better consistency. Better features than WinXP (though probably not Vista). In fact, using Windows XP makes my ears bleed after only a few minutes.
Stop. You are switching back and forth on your comparison environment. Pick one. Since 2.24 came out today, stick to Vista since that is the most recent. Comparing to XP would necessitate choosing a Gnome from that year. Something I rather imagine you would prefer to avoid.
Gnome has strict accessibility and localization requirements and has since 2.2. Windows wasn't even localized in Thai until Gnome adoption there forced it to be, and even then they just half-assed the "start menu" and nothing else. A generation of Thais learned to do computing in a language they didn't understand.
This is irrelevant to the comparison of desktop features, bugs, and usability.
ESD never had a problem with mixing stuff if you used it instead of OSS or ALSA. It even mixes stuff locally and outputs it to another computer if you want it to. Maybe your problem is that you didn't know what you were doing....
I used Gnome for years, and the inability to maintain consistent audio levels across multiple applications was always frustrating and painful (literally in some cases, thanks totem!)
Don't resort to ad homimem attacks. It cheapens your argument and hides the potential value of any possible truth.
Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.
This is entirely true, but it is still not an excuse for the poor consistency within Gnome and the inability for small things like keeping my taskbar arranged like it was before I logged out. Seriously. That is internal to Gnome and there is no scapegoat here.
Since we're playing this game, these are the places Windows doesn't live up to Gnome:
UI consistency works better in Windows Vista. Actually, it worked better in Windows 98 than Gnome does. When I arrange something in one of those, it stays that way. When I add something to the menu it stays where I left it. When I change my quick launch icons, they remain in the order I put them in. Amazingly, Mac OS X also got this right despite being newer to the market than Gnome as well.
Contextual menus work just fine in Windows. They have for quite a while. They work pretty darn well in Mac OS X. In other news the sun rose in the east this morning. I don't know what you mean or where you were going with this, but righ
I played WoW from initial release until a month ago. The game has fundamentally changed, and not for the better. PVP servers were great back in the day, and there were some really fun evenings spent raiding Orgrimmar and just open warfare in Southshore or Stranglethorn. Then came the instanced PVP and the constant losses on the side of the Alliance. Sure we had instant queues, but we lost pretty much every single match. To be fun, it has to have some semblance of balance. Blizzard failed on this front in every possible way. Arenas included.
The PVE aspect was an endless treadmill of gear rewards that, while imbalanced and a bit of a pain pre-TBC (but still mostly fun), went completely out of control at level 70 when the lucky few people started sporting Sunwell and Hyjal/BT gear. Those of us who didn't raid every night were quickly left in the dust and watching our res timers while trying to farm the 2890478213784290478829 primals needed for that next (less-impressive) tailored item.
Realistically though, it was the decline in the player-base age/maturity that led myself and many of my former guild-mates to throw in the towel finally. Simply, the game became vastly overpopulated with young kids and the world chat channels became their sandbox of inappropriate chat. Once again, Blizzard did nothing to stop the blatant racism, sexism, and rampant spamming.
--
I've been playing Open Beta and Headstart in Warhammer a good bit. It's been a blast. I love my Chosen for both PVE and PVP, and the Disciple of Khain I made just for PVP is a fun break from the normal healer role. Seriously.. a dual-sword-wielding healer that smacks the piss out of people just to heal better. If only Warcraft had made priests this awesome.
Warhammer has, so far, been vastly preferable in terms of player age and conversation. It has a similar feel to WoW when it first came out. People just help you out just for the sake of doing it. Public Quests are fantastic and I love that you just walk up and participate without having to "LFG!". Even if you don't get loot from it, if you stick around and do it again (3 minutes to reset!) you get a roll bonus that stacks each time you play, so just by hanging around you are guaranteed to get something from the chest plus your rep bonus loot from the village.
PVP is fairly straightforward and fun. None of the scenarios are terribly difficult and the balance of winning/losing seems to sway back and forth just like it should. I absolutely love that you gain XP while PVPing, as well as cash and loot drops. This has got to be the most awesome thing ever. I've seen some nice drops during my PVP matches.
Warhammer has done PVP right, and I hope the 'end-game' PVE turns out just as good.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. That's an idea, let's break out of the prison of choice into the bright new freedom of the one true windows dictatorship.
Well, ignoring the false dichotomy and overall tone of this, the prison of choice is, in fact, a prison nonetheless even if the walls are painted the colors I like most. So many here want to see real commercial software delivered to the linux platform, yet are not willing to agree on much of anything. How can we expect commercial software developers to want to target a moving object? How is that realistic or financially solvent?
Free software is nice and fits the needs of some, but a lot of the good software out there that people need is just not available for it.
When the popular distributions can not even agree on a single package manager, this is not something that will change. The LSB is selectively followed at best. Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?
I just spent the last week with my father-in-law who is a sole proprietor of an engineering company out of New Jersey. We talked about computers a lot, since it is a common interest. One of his very first laments was being strapped to Windows on all of his computers because it is a requirement for Solidworks. This is a man who would love to change his OS because he started with and loves *nix, but cannot because of his software requirements. I asked him about using Pro-E, since I know it supports a few different *nixes, and he said that it never worked right on them, and that graphically it was inferior to Windows.
His software needs?
Solidworks
Pro-E
Lightwave
This is true for everyone that works for him as well. A whole office of people that are strapped to Windows because of the software.
We can lament that it is the software makers fault for only producing for one or two OSs, but the reality is a chunk of graphics and engineering software supports OS X just fine. It's not a question whether they would produce it for *nix then, but a question of how we can make linux attractive as a platform.
One way to absolutely make sure that does NOT happen is to keep moving the targets and to keep living in our prison of choice.
I've used cygwin in windows, it's cool and all but you're relegated to a subdirectory for all your work there.
If you mean that your root / environment is limited to the installation directory, that is no longer the case. You can move outside of the standard root using standard drive letters just like in Windows. You can also bind the /bin and /usr/bin (and more) directories into your path statement as a standard Windows environment PATH variable so that you can use all your UNIX commands from the DOS prompt as well.
To move outside your install directory, use /cygdrive/
Example:
To change to D:\ /cygdrive/d/
cd
Then move into standard directories just like you normally would.
cd "Documents and Settings"
cd "JoeUser"
cd "My Documents"
ls
Tab completion works fine. You can do it all in one, or even softlink Windows directories into your standard cygwin environment. I do this regularly.
Example: /cygdrive/e/Code/C/ ~/c-projects
ln -s
Hope that helps.
I ran it on Friday morning with a PuG of SSC/Gruul/Mag geared 71s and 72s. It was not bad. The third boss that has you fighting images of your own party was refreshingly cool.
Good drops in there too. I replaced my T5 priest gloves with one of the boss drops.
Wasn't there a follow-up to this where an entire of group of Borg had achieved "individuality" and were totally lost because they had no sense of purpose in life?
I seem to remember the standard away team having to explain that "nope, this is pretty much it... figure it out yourself"
Come to think of it, that was a crap episode too.
I just took a massive shit. Streams of liquid feces are streaming out of my asshole. The stench is unbearable. Worst of all, I'm sitting at my desk. At work.
Twitter? Is that you?
I didn't say I *wanted* to pay for it. I just said I thought it would be a better option than throwing money at AIG.
To be fair, using it to line the litterbox at my house is a better option than AIG.
PC hardware requirements, coupled with rampant piracy, have killed gaming on that platform. It's a dead horse.
World Of Warcraft
I think that is just about all I need to say there.
Give the electric companies 2 choices: Fix your own damn shit with your profits or we fix it and lease it back to you or nationalize you.
Sure there are people that are going to bitch because they're used to their handout. But handouts aren't going to help anyone. Make everyone work.
It's not perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than handing it over to a bunch of people who managed to already lose $700b.
[0].M-F you live in work housing or you work 4 - 10s or 7 on 7 off.
I hate to ruin your rant with what we call "facts", but the grid in the United States is not owned by private companies that you can just boss around from your ivory tower of uninformed tripe. It is an amalgamation of state-run and multi-state entities called ISOs (Independent System Operators) that both contract and coordinate with the transmission agencies in concert with privately-owned and state-owned generation assets to produce consistent and reliable power. A grid, in the strictest sense of the word, is a series of transmission lines, owned by multiple companies, that are interlinked and under the complete autonomy of the ISO. Nothing happens without the permission and direction of the ISO or FERC (and NERC as its enforcement arm). The grid is aging, but since the ultimate authority to direct replacement lies with both federal, state, and multi-state agencies, who precisely in your little world bears the fiscal burden?
May I suggest for your education:
http://www.ferc.gov/
http://www.nerc.com/
And for ISOs:
http://www.ercot.com/
http://www.caiso.com/
http://www.nyiso.com/public/index.jsp
http://www.pjm.com/index.jsp
http://www.midwestiso.org/home
Find the one that serves your area, and berate them with your uninformed bile since you obviously understand all of this better than anyone else.
Or do you?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates
http://www.debian.org/security/
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories.html
http://www.netbsd.org/support/security/
Don't be a pretentious prick. Every OS out there has to have security updates.
You just posted a Rule 34 for Slashdot? I am admittedly cringing in terror about what would look like.
Get your wife/girlfriend/housemate to hide your key somewhere in your house before you go to bed. The next morning have them make you do a series of tasks such as "the buttering of the twelve slices" and "cleaning up hell's kitchen" in order to earn clues as to their whereabouts. For added realism, upon discovery of your keys, speak to them again and have them give you a pound and some un-useful object such as a hoover nozzle that you may need to use to solve a problem later on in the day.
There you have it, real life two player adventure game!
This is just pure awesome on so many levels. I actually envisioned my fiancee handing me a dollar and a stupid hat I would never use.
It's WoW in my own kitchen.
No, but I worked 40+ hours a week on top of my high school stuff so that I could help my family pay the bills and have enough to eat. Fast forward 20 years and I still working over 40 hours a week on top of raising a family, dealing with all the ancillary school-related and extracurricular stuff for my son, and wondering what I will do when my company lays me off in a few months.
Everyone has crap they have to deal with. It's called life. I suggest you get used to it.
And it requires supporting Sony, both by purchasing a PS3 and by purchasing the game, which makes it a no-go for any Slashdotter who cares about freedom.
Freedom? You are aware that we are talking about game systems and not malevolent governments that are bent on exterminating entire cultures, right? Right?
- Shadowy ninjas are not watching me from the air vents to see how I use the PS3.
- People are not coming into my home and telling me I cannot watch a movie on my PS3.
- Every game I have bought for the PS3 has worked and my family even had fun with them.
- The PS3 does not, at any point, get up and slap me around.
- I am able to eat dinner whenever and wherever I like, even if it is not on the couch in front of the PS3.
- No one has tried to kill myself or my family for the PS3.
- The PS3 has never tried to kill myself or my family.
- I still have the right to turn it off and go outside.
I own a PS3. I can play games on it. I use it as my Blu-Ray player to watch new movies. I use it to watch DivX and XVid encoded movies natively. It plays my MP3 collection on my main stereo using the wireless link to my dekstop PC. I use it to check the web from the comfort of my couch. I even have it crunching numbers for Folding@Home at this very moment while I am at work. It is conceivably the best console I have ever owned and the one device in my house that gets more use than even my desktop PC.
I call that freedom.
Please, get some perspective. This is just a game console, and you are not a Nicaraguan freedom fighter.
I really thought I was the only one that got angry enough to actually yank the signs out of the ground. Thank you so much for that link! It's good to know I am not alone in my neurosis.
I usually just pull them up and leave them on the ground because I don't want to get my car trunk dirty.
I know what I will be catching up on tonight. Now if only we could destroy all the billboards too...
So, you fixed all the crap linux audio layers yourself? You fix compiz crashes and feature instability too? How about Flash? How is that flash working for you on large videos?
Ubuntu zealots are far worse that Apple zealots. At least the Apple ones admit to the problems without backpedaling to "OMG TEH CODEZ" when there have been persistent problems in Ubuntu for years. You haven't really fixed shit. You just trot out the line like a good little group-think conformist.
You want to talk about a moving target... A six month release cycle that breaks as many things as it fixes? Every release comes rife with new issues that could have been avoided with some decent QA.
Be realistic. Ubuntu is a crap distribution, and I will never understand the fanboy elitism around here that surrounds it. At least with Gentoo it made sense back in the day, since there was actual coding, patching, and real optimization in place. Ubuntu is worse than OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, Fedora, Slackware, or even the Debian it sprang forth from. It is the distribution that a generation of mascara-wearing angst-monkeys lives and swears by in the false sense of "sticking it to the man".
HINT: You are not sticking it to the man. No one gives a shit what OS you run on your home computer. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are pining away for that 0.92% of the market share you and your ilk occupy.
I believe you are operating under the assumption that any piece of software that any user would ever need is in the default repos. This is demonstrably incorrect.
Most serious system administrators still compile essential services by hand so that they can control the installation paths, feature-sets, upgrade methods, and can patch security issues without waiting on a central update from a distro vendor.
Dependencies are still an issue for people running very high-availability and critical services.
I call bullshit.
I've had locksmiths get my key out, and they have a flat piece of metal (cops carry them too) that they can slide down where the window goes and have the door open in five seconds. No need whatever to make a key to open it.
Twenty bucks to come out to the car, a buck fifty for a new key. Yet he's going to go to that trouble to make a key?
How fucking stupid do you think we are?
Hello, and welcome to the Post-80s world! This is a brave new place where car doors are designed for this absolutely not to work any longer, even if you could get past all the crap and to the mechanisms. Also, we have this thing called the "internet" where you can see naked pictures. Oh, and Molly Ringwald is no longer hot.
No. We still don't have flying cars.
I never denied it. I took one C and one FORTRAN course 16 years ago in college, but haven't looked at either of them in so long I probably couldn't even swing a Hello World at this point. I use other languages now because they are more appropriate to my work.
The point was never about languages. The point was that being a user of an Operating System should not require programming knowledge of any sort. A user is just that. One who uses a tool to perform a task. If Linux (or any OS, for that matter) has any hope of long-term viability and userbase, then this entry bar must be completely removed.
Every user brings something to the community. Every user has a strength that they can use to contribute to the greater knowledge base. Programming is only one of those strengths and, while vital, should not discount or denigrate the contributions of others. Some of the guys I used to hang around on EFNET:#gentoo with years ago didn't code at all, but they were quick to offer help to others with getting X configured, working with the portage system, or how to set up basic services like Apache or BIND. There is an inherent worth in this.
Demands to have something ported for us usually come from novice users who are not able to port software themselves, and are not aware of the extent to which software is ported by others.
I think labeling users that don't code at that level as 'novice' is disingenuous at best. I have used *nix systems for well over 10 years in my daily life and in my job and have nothing more than a basic understanding of C because the bulk of my work (network engineer) revolves around PERL, AWK, and expect with a healthy dose of Oracle and MySQL. Does that make me a novice user? No, I don't believe so. Users come in all shapes and sizes, and everyone's individual strengths reinforce the community as a whole.
A proper and well-documented OS should be able to support any user that wants to use it without an excessively steep learning curve. Usability of a well-designed tool should never require intimate knowledge of how the tool is constructed.
From time to time I download the newest Ubuntu and check it out to see what all the new fuss is. I am continually disappointed though, and it rarely makes it a week before being purged.
It's not just the bugs and the long app-launch times. It's more than just the gratuitous resource consumption. It's the whole thing... It's bloat on top of eye-candy bloat with a hefty helping of fanboy zealotry.
I love *NIX very much but it is precisely because I love it that I have to point out that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
When did the userbase of linux go so wrong? When did it start? Those of us that have been around for quite a while have watched the rockstar rise and subsequent plummet in the communities surrounding it. 10+ years ago you could jump into IRC type /join #[your distro] and be surrounded by people that truly loved their systems and would help you without being condescending, resorting to ad hominem attacks, or calling other *nix variants crap. A lot of those guys, myself included, were using Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, AIX, etc. during the day and spending some of our evenings just helping out others that were interested in or 'testing the water' with linux. The slackware community was great. Even a little more recently when Gentoo first really got rolling between 1.0 and 1.2 the community on EFNET in #gentoo was a shining example of what a userbase should be. I spent many an hour in there helping people figure out their CFLAGS, configuring their XF86Config, and the like.
With the influx of more and more folks that seem to be vastly more focused on hating Windows, Mac OSX, and even other UNIX variants, the face of linux has changed. People that used to use *NIX as a personal choice did so because they truly loved computers. Now it seems to be the equivalent of a battle standard. Your Operating System is your country, your flag, and your religion. Thousands of angry people focused on their hatred of anything that is unlike themselves. It's GNU/Xenophobia.
The programming ramifications of this have become pervasive throughout many of the more popular distributions. In fact, the fundamental idea of the ideological Bazaar has been replaced by the Cathedral of intolerance. Instead of a focus on excellence and listening to the end-users, more and more developers are dismissive and prone to flame. More time is spent developing completely worthless and unrelated 'features' than in solidifying and optimizing the current code. Instead of, say fixing GNOME's inability to remember where I want my launch icons on the panel, we get wobbly windows that add absolutely nothing to the value of the desktop. Instead of writing just one really, really good IDE for C development, we get oodles of feature-incomplete environments that can't even compete with older Visual Studios or XCode; and this is supposed to be forte of *NIX. As children we are reinforced to eat our meat and vegetables before we get dessert. Yet more and more developers focus on the candy and leave the meat (optimizing) and vegetables (squashing bugs) virtually untouched. It's not as exciting of course, but it is necessary. In *buntu I struggle with yet another audio layer to cover the other layers to figure out why my sound card is doing a darn good impression of a french mime when I try to play some music. Meanwhile, a thousand fanboys upload yet another Youtube video of a spinning desktop cube with a Moby soundtrack.
Perhaps it is the fate of those of us from the previous generation to make way for the new one, but as we do so there should be some guidance, some hope, and some direction given. Reading through the comments in this story really drive home how far this has gone and the need for a gentle hand to remind people not just of the Bazaar, but also that we need to eat our meat and vegetables before we get dessert. This reply has gotten much longer than I originally planned though, but perhaps this conversation can continue in another venue.
Why has this been moderated flamebait? What he's saying is true!
There is a noticeable difference in presenting information in a way that educates and informs the group at large of something that they may or may not realize, and posting the same information with demeaning and inflammatory statements that serve only to convey a false sense of superiority.
This is the latter.
While there might be a nugget of truth buried in there, it's obfuscated by the angry rhetoric.
I think you have confused Bloom County with Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Can't say I've ever used Helix. Nor that I ever will. Mplayer and VLC do everything I need, so I don't need some company's trash.
The italics in your response really drive in that linux-zealot fealty.
A company produces a viable and actually very decent linux port of one of its applications, and these are the type of reactions it gets in reply. People here whine and bitch about the state of the linux desktop and its negligible marketshare, but then when we see responses like this there is little reason to wonder why. How can we possibly expect anyone to want to work with this potential customer base?
Linux multimedia is a mess. You can't even attempt to navigate a map of the audio layers without a sherpa to guide you. I applaud the efforts of any company or developer that is interested in actually working within this byzantine quagmire to provide linux users with viable software. To denigrate any software that is delivered free (as in beer) to us as a userbase only deepens the divide and sets back the effort.
Ideology has a place and time, but let's not eschew the efforts of others, even if it comes from a corporation, just because it might not fit our narrow view of the world. Some great pieces of code for linux have come out of commercial software houses by paid developers.
Comparing Gnome 2.24 to Win2000 is a joke. Heck, comparing it to WinXP is a joke. Gnome 2.24 is a modern desktop just like Windows Vista is, only faster. Same bling available. Better consistency. Better features than WinXP (though probably not Vista). In fact, using Windows XP makes my ears bleed after only a few minutes.
Stop. You are switching back and forth on your comparison environment. Pick one. Since 2.24 came out today, stick to Vista since that is the most recent. Comparing to XP would necessitate choosing a Gnome from that year. Something I rather imagine you would prefer to avoid.
Gnome has strict accessibility and localization requirements and has since 2.2. Windows wasn't even localized in Thai until Gnome adoption there forced it to be, and even then they just half-assed the "start menu" and nothing else. A generation of Thais learned to do computing in a language they didn't understand.
This is irrelevant to the comparison of desktop features, bugs, and usability.
ESD never had a problem with mixing stuff if you used it instead of OSS or ALSA. It even mixes stuff locally and outputs it to another computer if you want it to. Maybe your problem is that you didn't know what you were doing ....
It could be that, or it could be the well recognized and horrifying mess that is the linux soundsystem.
Here is some reading for you:
http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/05/sorry-state-of-sound-in-linux.html
http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5
http://jeffreystedfast.blogspot.com/2008/07/pulseaudio-my-last-post-on-topic.html
I used Gnome for years, and the inability to maintain consistent audio levels across multiple applications was always frustrating and painful (literally in some cases, thanks totem!)
Don't resort to ad homimem attacks. It cheapens your argument and hides the potential value of any possible truth.
Gnome configures everything for Gnome and always has. Since Gnome runs on a large number of operating systems, it doesn't deal withthe underlying system, and you'll have to be specific about which one isn't configurable and take that up with the OS vendor. That's not the job of a cross-platform desktop.
This is entirely true, but it is still not an excuse for the poor consistency within Gnome and the inability for small things like keeping my taskbar arranged like it was before I logged out. Seriously. That is internal to Gnome and there is no scapegoat here.
Since we're playing this game, these are the places Windows doesn't live up to Gnome:
Gnome vs. Win95 or Win2000? Pshaw!
UI consistency works better in Windows Vista. Actually, it worked better in Windows 98 than Gnome does. When I arrange something in one of those, it stays that way. When I add something to the menu it stays where I left it. When I change my quick launch icons, they remain in the order I put them in. Amazingly, Mac OS X also got this right despite being newer to the market than Gnome as well.
Contextual menus work just fine in Windows. They have for quite a while. They work pretty darn well in Mac OS X. In other news the sun rose in the east this morning. I don't know what you mean or where you were going with this, but righ
I played WoW from initial release until a month ago. The game has fundamentally changed, and not for the better. PVP servers were great back in the day, and there were some really fun evenings spent raiding Orgrimmar and just open warfare in Southshore or Stranglethorn. Then came the instanced PVP and the constant losses on the side of the Alliance. Sure we had instant queues, but we lost pretty much every single match. To be fun, it has to have some semblance of balance. Blizzard failed on this front in every possible way. Arenas included.
The PVE aspect was an endless treadmill of gear rewards that, while imbalanced and a bit of a pain pre-TBC (but still mostly fun), went completely out of control at level 70 when the lucky few people started sporting Sunwell and Hyjal/BT gear. Those of us who didn't raid every night were quickly left in the dust and watching our res timers while trying to farm the 2890478213784290478829 primals needed for that next (less-impressive) tailored item.
Realistically though, it was the decline in the player-base age/maturity that led myself and many of my former guild-mates to throw in the towel finally. Simply, the game became vastly overpopulated with young kids and the world chat channels became their sandbox of inappropriate chat. Once again, Blizzard did nothing to stop the blatant racism, sexism, and rampant spamming.
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I've been playing Open Beta and Headstart in Warhammer a good bit. It's been a blast. I love my Chosen for both PVE and PVP, and the Disciple of Khain I made just for PVP is a fun break from the normal healer role. Seriously.. a dual-sword-wielding healer that smacks the piss out of people just to heal better. If only Warcraft had made priests this awesome.
Warhammer has, so far, been vastly preferable in terms of player age and conversation. It has a similar feel to WoW when it first came out. People just help you out just for the sake of doing it. Public Quests are fantastic and I love that you just walk up and participate without having to "LFG!". Even if you don't get loot from it, if you stick around and do it again (3 minutes to reset!) you get a roll bonus that stacks each time you play, so just by hanging around you are guaranteed to get something from the chest plus your rep bonus loot from the village.
PVP is fairly straightforward and fun. None of the scenarios are terribly difficult and the balance of winning/losing seems to sway back and forth just like it should. I absolutely love that you gain XP while PVPing, as well as cash and loot drops. This has got to be the most awesome thing ever. I've seen some nice drops during my PVP matches.
Warhammer has done PVP right, and I hope the 'end-game' PVE turns out just as good.