That's not true depending on the model. Some of them the only things that aren't upgradable is the cpu and usually the video card.
Upgrading monitors is easy. There's a video output on the back. Plug monitor in as per normal. In fact, you can even plug normal keyboards, mice, etc into them if you're primarily using them as desktops (Which some people do).
I can see why laptops are replacing pcs now. They're about the same price, but they are also portable. Your computer can travel with you now, so its much more convenient. Not everyone is a hardcore gamer that needs the new wiz-bang video card..:)
Why not just go get a nice embedded system with a flash card? Doesn't produce much heat, doesn't have any moving parts. Just get one, toss linux or whatever on it, and poof. Insta whatever server for http://www.soekris.com/ http://www.mikrotik.com/
I use these for small low-power wireless APs and routers, but they are being used for low-power servers of all kinds as well. Why/. people always want to over-engineer is beyond me.;)
(Yes, this is offtopic, and its not meant as a troll.)
You really should try FreeBSD. I'm sure you'll love it. I'll even go through pains to tackle each of your problems with linux (most of which are valid even if you're not technical enough to be verbose or 'technically correct'):
1) The ports tree takes care of this automagically. If you don't want to install from source, the built-in-by-default option is to do pkg_add -r, and it'll go and fetch EVERYTHING and install it. You don't do anything at all. The other option is to install portupgrade, which will install some nice port/package utilities with actual SENSIBLE names like portinstall, pkg_add, etc.. My biggest problem in linux is everyone hacks their own damned management system, and every freakin' tool to use it is some convoluted inside joke. yum? what the hell? apt-get? C'mon. How about pkg_install or package_install or packageinstall? There ya go. That's the beginning of the BSD mentality.
2) Most BSD's have both from-source and from-binary options for everything, and make it exceedingly clear how to use either. And they BOTH work well. (As well as any system maintaining 20k+ utilities, and their recursive dependancies)
3) This is actually probably more of a complaint as to how your "distro" sets up X by default.
4) Almost the same here, but it really helps to not completely bork your kernel to the point where everyone has to re-write drivers for it every couple years from almost scratch. Most BSD's support modular device drivers and loading them on the fly. Linux does too, but good luck finding it. For example, in Gentoo there's 10 directories/files for 'modules' in/etc (WHY?!), and the modules it WILL load are in some wacky directory that includes the specific version of the kernel you're running. Fun stuff.;)
5) I agree, this is more of an KDE/GNOME thing in general, but it seems to be the whole mentality of the GNU and Linux OSS. If you don't like something, just fork it and hope everyone follows suit. But if they don't.. Well, you get 3542342 slightly different versions that sortof work together. Kinda.
6) Absolutely. I think your mindset also affects how easily you can read one groups' manpages over another's though. I can read FreeBSD manpages easily and understand what they're saying, but GPL'd software/Linux ones? Ha. Just a general idea.. Although, FreeBSD DOES have a nice user-friendly handbook + multiple exceedingly active ML's/forums/etc for newbies to get information quickly and easily.
7) This is where I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY HATE LINUX!!! Linux is just the kernel, and EVERYTHING ELSE is addon software. Not so with BSD. The kernel + userland is the base software, and ports/packages are the addon software. This is a very important distinction, as the behavior of installing and configuring apps is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Most things in BSDland go into/usr/local by default, and configs/startup scripts/etc for them go into/usr/local/etc/ and/usr/local/share/ with startups going into/usr/local/etc/rc.d/.sh. One of the nice things about this is that its VERY hard to accidentally 'klobber' the base system. Since its all in/usr, and NO packages go there without your explicit say-so.
8) I think most FreeBSD users, while zealotous, aren't crazed, rabid fanatics. Most of us subscribe to 'the right tool for the right job', which allows us to use anything, not just things that 'are compatible with license X' just because Mr. Bearded Crazyman said so. Most of us run heterogeneous network envronments. I personally use about 5 different OSes (including a linux box, ironically) where I work.
9) Same as #6, but there is ALOT of documentation on EVERYTHING. Why? Because EVERYTHING is thought-out and communally developed. Look into any of the developer ML's, and you'll see what I'm talking about. NOONE decides they're going to just patch som
1) First party games, which would be games produced/owned by Nintendo, COULD be free, and likely there will be alot of free ones out there.
2) Thrid party games, which would be games NOT Produced/owned by Nintendo, COULD be free IF the company who made it/owns the rights allows it to be such. However, they could also cost money if they felt they wanted to make money on it.
Not very hard here. There's already several games out there for the GameCube that have older NES games imbedded in them. Like Animal Crossing for instance. My girlfriend is always collecting them for when I decide to play (Never!).
He also was consistant in that he was always referring to the idea of removing access fees. He never once said that they would actually. Just that they were considering it.
Access to their content network, wether free or subscription based wouldn't necessarily allow you to have access to all content available. I'm sure there'd probably be a free base subscription, and then a multi-tiered price scheme like everything else.
The games? Think of it more like iTunes or something from what I gather.
Alot of people don't care if they got it for free. They are going to bitch, moan, whine and complain as soon as whatever it is that they got suddenly breaks or no longer 'does it' for them unexpectedly. The only thing money does is amplify the amount of complaints there are.
And, the sad part? It doesn't even matter if its their fault. They will STILL demand SOMETHING even if THEY broke it.:)
Dude, if my choices were to go back to the dark days of boot disks (Which you apparently did not have the mispleasure of experiencing), or simply not play those games, guess which I choose?
That's right. To not play them. No way in hell am I going to reboot my computer to play ANY game. That's what a console is for. Its a constantly bootdisk'd machine whose originally intended purpose was to play games.
You can keep your wacky livecd/dvd games for the pc. Me, I'll be playing it on my console:P
So that means we're getting ever closer to those gel-pack computers like in most sci-fi shows? That'd be really cool to start seeing those. Maybe the imac of 2050 or 2100 will be called the iGel, and will come in seven different colors?:)
That's true. It does become a subscription service. But, if you're like most gamers, you probably spend an average of $50-100 a month on new games. What if you could get all the new old games you wanted for $10 a month? Sure, it'd be a subscription service, but really. How often have you honestly played say Stellar Empire lately? Or Darksun? Or any of the old gold box games? It'd be nice to 'own' them, but you probably won't care after you've mastered them again anyways. And with new stuff always coming out, it's one shiny after the next..
As for steam, who cares? If valve goes away, so do all those cd key validation servers that allow you to play multiplayer. And chances are there won't be a legal patch to fix it anyways.
I would actually save money with a subscription service. I'd just constantly play new to me older games.:)
I think they are actually starting to. I've recently seen sega action packs that contain ALL of the sonic games for one of the consoles (all of them?). I've also seen another one I could've swore was put out by sega that seemed to have alot of old sega master system games on it...
Point is, they ARE attempting to redistribute them. I know I've seen all the nintendo favorites out for GBA recently, along with those stupid smart/magnetic trading cards with games on them.. Granted in Nintendo's case, they're trying to pawn off Zelda 1 for $40 when you can probably get an original NES + Zelda for half as much at your local used game store, but I digress...
Point is, if you want this stuff, its there. If its not there all it takes is writing a few letters and some patience. Well, and the willing to dish out another $40 for some 15-20 year old games you played as a kid.
I think the video game market needs to start rethinking the way they distribute their content. Look at stardock central or steam (Others?). Those two have GREAT content management systems. Just pay them some money, and download your games. That's where we should be going.
I think it'd be awesome to pay like $5 a month or something and be able to download any game that's over 5-10 years old. Hell, I'd be willing to pay that much to ALL the console companies and have a virtual library of games at my disposal.
Hrm, almost makes me want to start a company to do that for old PC games.
Linux kernel - 2.2.14 or higher with the following libraries or packages:
* glibc 2.3.2 or higher
* XFree86-3.3.6 or higher
* gtk+2.0 or higher
* fontconfig (also known as xft)
* libstdc++5
MAN! You mean, I can't run firefox on linux 1.13.2 with glibc xfree 2 and gtk 1?!?! Oh man. Better rip the OSS community for not being backwards compatible with my fifteen year old OS.:P
That's the problem with alot of slashdot users. Over-engineering. What ever happened to the 'keep it simple, stupid' mantra we got taught when I was a kid? Has it changed to 'make it complex, smartass!'?:)
Right, of course the victim (the 9 year old girl) probably doesn't even own a computer.
How 'bout the other child pornographers that he's likely sharing the pictures with? Oh, yea. Them. They'd probably also be using PGP, as I doubt they'd want their email sniffed/syphoned off and read in an unencrypted fashion.
And the last remark is uncalled for. Those children subjected to the whims of the pedeophiles might have no idea what they're doing, or they might be bullied, forced, coerced into doing so. How do you know? Maybe the pedophile is related to them?
But, eventually I got tired of it, and threw it all away. Didn't serve any real purpose other than to show machines with rediculous uptimes and physical age.
First, you realize that OpenBSD != Knoppix, nor is OBSD in any way, shape, or form even closely related to knoppix?
That said, the main complaints were that they couldn't find games or spyware that they were accustomed to?!
And then you ditched the whole effort, and fired the guy because one employee didn't back his project up at all, and managed to bork it while it was reading from a database?! You sure you should be his boss? Or that he was the one you should've fired?
Just a disclaimer: I dislike linux. Alot. I do use it though, and I have to say from your story, not only did you seem to be against it to begin with, you seemed to also dislike the employee, as you clearly let him do it just so you could find an excuse to undo it, and then fire him.
Otherwise, you'd have had him 'fix' the issues people had. Can't find notepad? Well here, use gvim/gedit. Can't find mspaint? Here's gpaint. kcalc?
What? You need a calculator? How 'bout xcalc, or All the stupidass games that are default in windows (solitare, minesweeper, mahjongg, hearts, pinball) are also pretty much defaults in kde.
Just a few hours with the affected employees and they'd have been retrained. And, if he'd edited the menus, he could've made it look so much like windows they'd have barely noticed.
There's lots of appliances (network, storage, etc) that don't actually have on/off/reset switches. They just turn on when you plug them in. No need to switch it on.:)
I'm not a windows fanboy, but there's loads of missing information in your comment.
I mean, did you already have the packages downloaded? extracted? ready to install? Have a local mirror with all the updates on it? Had your system already updated before?
I can't think of any OS at all that I can put up, wait a month, and then attempt to patch and have it NOT take anything less than fifteen minutes.
That's not the only 'cost', though. You have to take into question certain things like
- Will the patched/upgraded version of an app break something in another program, and if so, will I have to upgrade that too? And in doing the second app, will anything else break?
- Is there any sound reason to upgrade? Does local kernel exploit when user does insert-thing-here actually affect my cvs server that noone has local access to anyways? Would upgrading THAT break anything?
- What default configuration expectations have changed from the version of software I have to the current? (Example: Gnu-radius 1.2.x to 1.3, a radius attribute on by default changes to disabled without a specific entry in the default config)
- Would just upgrading everything to the newest and latest whatevers create incompatibilities in anything else (File/DB format changes, config changes, new/changed/removed dependancies, kernel module expectations, new specialized compilation requirements, etc)
Doing any kind of emerge sync && emerge -uD world in gentoo, or just portupgrade -yarR in FreeBSD, or any equivilant on any remotely production box is suicide. Might as well start playing russian roulette for money, because that's what it amounts to.:P
Slashdot Mirror
That's not true depending on the model. Some of them the only things that aren't upgradable is the cpu and usually the video card.
:)
Upgrading monitors is easy. There's a video output on the back. Plug monitor in as per normal. In fact, you can even plug normal keyboards, mice, etc into them if you're primarily using them as desktops (Which some people do).
I can see why laptops are replacing pcs now. They're about the same price, but they are also portable. Your computer can travel with you now, so its much more convenient. Not everyone is a hardcore gamer that needs the new wiz-bang video card..
Why not just go get a nice embedded system with a flash card? Doesn't produce much heat, doesn't have any moving parts. Just get one, toss linux or whatever on it, and poof. Insta whatever server for
http://www.soekris.com/
http://www.mikrotik.com/
I use these for small low-power wireless APs and routers, but they are being used for low-power servers of all kinds as well. Why
(Yes, this is offtopic, and its not meant as a troll.)
/etc (WHY?!), and the modules it WILL load are in some wacky directory that includes the specific version of the kernel you're running. Fun stuff. ;)
/usr/local by default, and configs/startup scripts/etc for them go into /usr/local/etc/ and /usr/local/share/ with startups going into /usr/local/etc/rc.d/.sh. One of the nice things about this is that its VERY hard to accidentally 'klobber' the base system. Since its all in /usr, and NO packages go there without your explicit say-so.
You really should try FreeBSD. I'm sure you'll love it. I'll even go through pains to tackle each of your problems with linux (most of which are valid even if you're not technical enough to be verbose or 'technically correct'):
1) The ports tree takes care of this automagically. If you don't want to install from source, the built-in-by-default option is to do pkg_add -r, and it'll go and fetch EVERYTHING and install it. You don't do anything at all. The other option is to install portupgrade, which will install some nice port/package utilities with actual SENSIBLE names like portinstall, pkg_add, etc.. My biggest problem in linux is everyone hacks their own damned management system, and every freakin' tool to use it is some convoluted inside joke. yum? what the hell? apt-get? C'mon. How about pkg_install or package_install or packageinstall? There ya go. That's the beginning of the BSD mentality.
2) Most BSD's have both from-source and from-binary options for everything, and make it exceedingly clear how to use either. And they BOTH work well. (As well as any system maintaining 20k+ utilities, and their recursive dependancies)
3) This is actually probably more of a complaint as to how your "distro" sets up X by default.
4) Almost the same here, but it really helps to not completely bork your kernel to the point where everyone has to re-write drivers for it every couple years from almost scratch. Most BSD's support modular device drivers and loading them on the fly. Linux does too, but good luck finding it. For example, in Gentoo there's 10 directories/files for 'modules' in
5) I agree, this is more of an KDE/GNOME thing in general, but it seems to be the whole mentality of the GNU and Linux OSS. If you don't like something, just fork it and hope everyone follows suit. But if they don't.. Well, you get 3542342 slightly different versions that sortof work together. Kinda.
6) Absolutely. I think your mindset also affects how easily you can read one groups' manpages over another's though. I can read FreeBSD manpages easily and understand what they're saying, but GPL'd software/Linux ones? Ha. Just a general idea.. Although, FreeBSD DOES have a nice user-friendly handbook + multiple exceedingly active ML's/forums/etc for newbies to get information quickly and easily.
7) This is where I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY HATE LINUX!!! Linux is just the kernel, and EVERYTHING ELSE is addon software. Not so with BSD. The kernel + userland is the base software, and ports/packages are the addon software. This is a very important distinction, as the behavior of installing and configuring apps is TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Most things in BSDland go into
8) I think most FreeBSD users, while zealotous, aren't crazed, rabid fanatics. Most of us subscribe to 'the right tool for the right job', which allows us to use anything, not just things that 'are compatible with license X' just because Mr. Bearded Crazyman said so. Most of us run heterogeneous network envronments. I personally use about 5 different OSes (including a linux box, ironically) where I work.
9) Same as #6, but there is ALOT of documentation on EVERYTHING. Why? Because EVERYTHING is thought-out and communally developed. Look into any of the developer ML's, and you'll see what I'm talking about. NOONE decides they're going to just patch som
I think he was consistant on two points:
1) First party games, which would be games produced/owned by Nintendo, COULD be free, and likely there will be alot of free ones out there.
2) Thrid party games, which would be games NOT Produced/owned by Nintendo, COULD be free IF the company who made it/owns the rights allows it to be such. However, they could also cost money if they felt they wanted to make money on it.
Not very hard here. There's already several games out there for the GameCube that have older NES games imbedded in them. Like Animal Crossing for instance. My girlfriend is always collecting them for when I decide to play (Never!).
He also was consistant in that he was always referring to the idea of removing access fees. He never once said that they would actually. Just that they were considering it.
Access to their content network, wether free or subscription based wouldn't necessarily allow you to have access to all content available. I'm sure there'd probably be a free base subscription, and then a multi-tiered price scheme like everything else.
The games? Think of it more like iTunes or something from what I gather.
Apparently you are young and not yet jaded.
:)
Alot of people don't care if they got it for free. They are going to bitch, moan, whine and complain as soon as whatever it is that they got suddenly breaks or no longer 'does it' for them unexpectedly. The only thing money does is amplify the amount of complaints there are.
And, the sad part? It doesn't even matter if its their fault. They will STILL demand SOMETHING even if THEY broke it.
Dude, if my choices were to go back to the dark days of boot disks (Which you apparently did not have the mispleasure of experiencing), or simply not play those games, guess which I choose?
That's right. To not play them. No way in hell am I going to reboot my computer to play ANY game. That's what a console is for. Its a constantly bootdisk'd machine whose originally intended purpose was to play games.
You can keep your wacky livecd/dvd games for the pc. Me, I'll be playing it on my console
You used Glieder twice.
So that means we're getting ever closer to those gel-pack computers like in most sci-fi shows? That'd be really cool to start seeing those. Maybe the imac of 2050 or 2100 will be called the iGel, and will come in seven different colors?
I think he just wants to blame the north and the southern ones. The rest are free of blame, I think.
That's true. It does become a subscription service. But, if you're like most gamers, you probably spend an average of $50-100 a month on new games. What if you could get all the new old games you wanted for $10 a month? Sure, it'd be a subscription service, but really. How often have you honestly played say Stellar Empire lately? Or Darksun? Or any of the old gold box games? It'd be nice to 'own' them, but you probably won't care after you've mastered them again anyways. And with new stuff always coming out, it's one shiny after the next..
:)
As for steam, who cares? If valve goes away, so do all those cd key validation servers that allow you to play multiplayer. And chances are there won't be a legal patch to fix it anyways.
I would actually save money with a subscription service. I'd just constantly play new to me older games.
I've actually seen this happen to a fairly new 19" LCD too. Man was the customer annoyed :/
I think they are actually starting to. I've recently seen sega action packs that contain ALL of the sonic games for one of the consoles (all of them?). I've also seen another one I could've swore was put out by sega that seemed to have alot of old sega master system games on it...
Point is, they ARE attempting to redistribute them. I know I've seen all the nintendo favorites out for GBA recently, along with those stupid smart/magnetic trading cards with games on them.. Granted in Nintendo's case, they're trying to pawn off Zelda 1 for $40 when you can probably get an original NES + Zelda for half as much at your local used game store, but I digress...
Point is, if you want this stuff, its there. If its not there all it takes is writing a few letters and some patience. Well, and the willing to dish out another $40 for some 15-20 year old games you played as a kid.
I think the video game market needs to start rethinking the way they distribute their content. Look at stardock central or steam (Others?). Those two have GREAT content management systems. Just pay them some money, and download your games. That's where we should be going.
I think it'd be awesome to pay like $5 a month or something and be able to download any game that's over 5-10 years old. Hell, I'd be willing to pay that much to ALL the console companies and have a virtual library of games at my disposal.
Hrm, almost makes me want to start a company to do that for old PC games.
For instance, check out the requirements for KDE 3.4 http://www.kde.org/info/requirements/3.4.php
Or XMMS:
http://www.xmms.org/download.php
Or even FireFox:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/system-re
MAN! You mean, I can't run firefox on linux 1.13.2 with glibc xfree 2 and gtk 1?!?! Oh man. Better rip the OSS community for not being backwards compatible with my fifteen year old OS.
Its really a shame we can't also have an option to 'hide stories written by roblimo but posted/submitted by someone else'
At least regedit has a pretty gui with smiling happy boucing folder icons, and twisty blingity key icons for entries?
That's the problem with alot of slashdot users. Over-engineering. What ever happened to the 'keep it simple, stupid' mantra we got taught when I was a kid? Has it changed to 'make it complex, smartass!'? :)
That makes me want to put my money down regardless of however I felt about the film before. Way to go dude. :)
Right, of course the victim (the 9 year old girl) probably doesn't even own a computer.
How 'bout the other child pornographers that he's likely sharing the pictures with? Oh, yea. Them. They'd probably also be using PGP, as I doubt they'd want their email sniffed/syphoned off and read in an unencrypted fashion.
And the last remark is uncalled for. Those children subjected to the whims of the pedeophiles might have no idea what they're doing, or they might be bullied, forced, coerced into doing so. How do you know? Maybe the pedophile is related to them?
I used to have hardware like that.
But, eventually I got tired of it, and threw it all away. Didn't serve any real purpose other than to show machines with rediculous uptimes and physical age.
First, you realize that OpenBSD != Knoppix, nor is OBSD in any way, shape, or form even closely related to knoppix?
That said, the main complaints were that they couldn't find games or spyware that they were accustomed to?!
And then you ditched the whole effort, and fired the guy because one employee didn't back his project up at all, and managed to bork it while it was reading from a database?! You sure you should be his boss? Or that he was the one you should've fired?
Just a disclaimer: I dislike linux. Alot. I do use it though, and I have to say from your story, not only did you seem to be against it to begin with, you seemed to also dislike the employee, as you clearly let him do it just so you could find an excuse to undo it, and then fire him.
Otherwise, you'd have had him 'fix' the issues people had. Can't find notepad? Well here, use gvim/gedit. Can't find mspaint? Here's gpaint. kcalc?
What? You need a calculator? How 'bout xcalc, or
All the stupidass games that are default in windows (solitare, minesweeper, mahjongg, hearts, pinball) are also pretty much defaults in kde.
Just a few hours with the affected employees and they'd have been retrained. And, if he'd edited the menus, he could've made it look so much like windows they'd have barely noticed.
There's lots of appliances (network, storage, etc) that don't actually have on/off/reset switches. They just turn on when you plug them in. No need to switch it on. :)
Lets hope they don't let Berman and Braga produce the next few if they do it. :)
I'm not a windows fanboy, but there's loads of missing information in your comment.
I mean, did you already have the packages downloaded? extracted? ready to install? Have a local mirror with all the updates on it? Had your system already updated before?
I can't think of any OS at all that I can put up, wait a month, and then attempt to patch and have it NOT take anything less than fifteen minutes.
That's not the only 'cost', though. You have to take into question certain things like
:P
- Will the patched/upgraded version of an app break something in another program, and if so, will I have to upgrade that too? And in doing the second app, will anything else break?
- Is there any sound reason to upgrade? Does local kernel exploit when user does insert-thing-here actually affect my cvs server that noone has local access to anyways? Would upgrading THAT break anything?
- What default configuration expectations have changed from the version of software I have to the current? (Example: Gnu-radius 1.2.x to 1.3, a radius attribute on by default changes to disabled without a specific entry in the default config)
- Would just upgrading everything to the newest and latest whatevers create incompatibilities in anything else (File/DB format changes, config changes, new/changed/removed dependancies, kernel module expectations, new specialized compilation requirements, etc)
Doing any kind of emerge sync && emerge -uD world in gentoo, or just portupgrade -yarR in FreeBSD, or any equivilant on any remotely production box is suicide. Might as well start playing russian roulette for money, because that's what it amounts to.
Well, bouncing shiny t words are nice. Another point for more CPU power! bouncing squishy parts! (That are *actually* squishy!)