Just how many commercial Windows games releases are you seeing these days? Because I see very few...
Microsoft (whether intentionally or not) pretty much killed commercial PC gaming the moment that they fragmented DirectX versions across XP and Vista, it was the "straw that broke the camel's back" for most commercial software houses who didn't want that extra burden of developing game versions for XP and Vista. Hence they moved more to XBox and I've no idea whether or not Microsoft deliberately planned it that way.
Many of the PC games releases we do see these days are surrounded by controversy (e.g. Sim City) because commercial software houses want to apply the same kind of lock-in that they do to console games to the PC - the result is very little commercial games products coming out for the PC now.
With that said, PC gaming is still very vibrant as indie gaming development is bigger than ever, perhaps a slight return to the Golden Age Of Computing where much smaller programming teams or even individuals actually stand a chance of making some money from creative PC game ideas - those same indie developers take Linux into account far more than the commercial software houses ever did.
You say there are only 126 games for Linux on Steam, I do wonder what number would actually please you? Was Gabe supposed to get every Windows Steam game ported across to Linux before announcing Steam for Linux to the world? Personally, given the choice I'd not use any DRM on Linux and I'm one of these honest people that buys every piece of non-free software that I use, especially in these days of indie-gaming where buying early into the development cycle means that you get a genuine say in how the final product will look - go check out the superb "Kerbal Space Program" on Steam if you don't believe me,,, but I do accept that Steam is compromise between more people being forced to pay games developers for what they do and having a decent selection of games to play on Linux.
I accept that programs like DOSBox and WINE are not for everyone due to the level of "fiddling about" to sometimes get games to work but with modern PCs being as powerful as they are and both these products being as mature that they are, it's possible to get a very large number of Windows games working reasonably stable on Linux, thus vastly increasing the range of games you can play on Linux. So the story really is not as simple as you'd like to paint it here...
This time a year ago, I used Linux about 70% of the time at home and kept a couple of Windows XP instances about just for gaming - aside from what appears on Steam, I don't go a lot on modern games and the last commercial game I purchased and played was Fallout New Vegas. (I bought a licensed copy of Windows 7, tried it for 2 weeks and then removed it because it gave me nothing that XP didn't apart from lots of stuff moved about and renamed with a CPU-cycle burning GUI that did nothing for me.)
At this moment in time, I'm just scrapping my last XP installation and moving everything to Linux - yes, I like XP, I have half-a-dozen killer apps I run on it, but they run fine in WINE (with a bit of tweaking) and/or in a VirtualBox XP VM. As for the games side of things, I'm more than happy with everything - the stuff I originally purchased on Steam for Windows is slowly appearing on Steam for Linux, I accept it will take them time to port everything across, and I'd rather they take the time to port across slowly but properly - certainly I've had no real issues running on Linux any of the Half-Life/Source Engine stuff that's been ported across so far.
I think you'll find that most people (I'm not one of them as explained above), Windows users or not, will now own a console if they want to play all the very latest commercial releases anyway, so I don't know what you have left to complain about here.
I don't consider that I am pontificating, merely stating it as I see it through older and wiser eyes.
The original posting talks about a generation making a complete record of everything they have done, my point is that most of what any generation does is boring piffle and not worthy of recording anyway.
Today's world is information overload with most of that information being mindless chatter of little interest to most people, but that's not to say that the Internet and social media are not extremely useful and interesting tools once you filter out the halfwits prattling on about their own self-importance.
And because I'm an old fart, I much prefer socialising face-to-face with people over a beer or two - with some people I know, distance means that face-to-face communications is rarely, if at all, possible, and social media then provides an alternative, albeit (in my view) a sterile, way of socialising with others. But if the younger generation prefers doing most of their socialising at a distance, that's their choice.
The stuff in my life is of deep interest and importance to me, I don't for one minute believe any of it is of much interest to anyone else.
There's far too many talentless schmucks already parading themselves in front of me constantly vying for my attention on TV, advertising billboards and just about anywhere else I rest my eyes these days. Everyone else can get to the queue behind them, I'll get around to them at the point when my life becomes so boring that I have to poke my snout into the lives of others in order to feel I'm achieving something.
I actually take great pride in anonymity and having enough self-confidence just to go do what makes me happy without giving a flying f*ck what anyone else thinks - yep, it took middle age to discover that fully.
This type of comment always makes me smile... who is that impatient or has a life so busy that a 33 second difference in wait is really THAT important?
And that's not just asking you as an Apple user but anyone who gets all frothy at the mouth over "instant on" devices...
We're Linux users, we're used to short file and directory names.
The BASH command shell does allow for TAB filename completion and whilst Linux does allow spaces in file and directory names, they have to be sometimes treated differently ("escaped") at the command line or in shell scripts.
Linux users also have a home directory that is usually the same name as the user, and whilst usernames of more than 8 characters are supported, Linux usually only reads the first 8 characters anyway on login.
So the upshot is that at the command line we're used to keeping directory and file names short for zipping around the file system quickly, it's just one of the ways you do things to work quicker and more optimally.
And that isn't criticising people who like long descriptive file or directory names, whatever works for you.
For years, Microsoft has been more than happy sitting back and raking in the cash from Windows and Office licenses because the only IT skills kids learnt in our UK schools was how to use Office, Word and Powerpoint.
Now initiatives like the Raspberry Pi have started to show that kids can learn programming quickly and cheaply on Open Source and open standards-based programming tools, all of a sudden Microsoft takes an interest.
One can only assume it's to get the kids hooked into Visual Studio licensing before they turn into Open Source Communists...
Anyone want the publishing rights to my new 7 book fantasy series:
1. Henry Peters and The Philanthropist's Stain 2. Henry Peters and The Hamper of Secretions 3. Henry Peters and The Pensioner of Azerbajan 4. Henry Peters and The Goblin of Fear 5. Henry Peters and The Ordinance of Galaxians 6. Henry Peters and The Half Footprints 7. Henry Peters and The Deadly Heroes
Sonny, you really are wasting your time with the abuse you are levelling at me - I'm not going to repeat what I said to you in my last response in "Cue The Trolls" because it's all contained in there - read it or don't read it, the choice is yours.
But take the advice of an old man - any high ground you may think you have in any argument will be removed as soon as you resort to abuse and bad language - and when arguing with someone like myself, who is entirely capable of communicating clearly & succinctly in a calm fashion, I will consider that as a victory to me.
Actually, a back door is deliberately created to allow specific people to come into the system - like a known account name with a known password. Just because you know the back door is there doesn't mean you can use it if you don't know the user and password.
A vulnerability tends to be as a result of poor design or a software bug - and not usually placed deliberately.
According to your post in "Cue The Trolls" on July 30th, you said and I quote:
Don't you wonder why people with the money are working on BSD based Macs instead of Linux? Wake up. How many mechanics get told to build a smelter when their ratchet is defective? None. They find another ratchet. I too have decided to use a different tool that doesn't require me to keep building smelters.
I took that to mean that you'd already left Linux far behind but here you are, once again, telling us how much you don't like it. What are you, some kind of masochist?
Sonny, if you do not like Linux then go ahead and use something else. It clearly stresses you out very much, I can imagine big red bulbous veins standing out in your neck as I type, and the last thing any of us hippie sandal-wearers want is to be responsible for someone with a BRG accidentallly turning it on himself and ending up with a coronary.
I just buy the CD, rip it myself, put the CD on a shelf as it's own backup, copy the rips onto a portable hard disk and put the hard disk in my coat pocket.
I can access my music anywhere, not just where there's an Internet connection.
If I cared to fuck around with it all the time I would have no problem with Linux. You don't spend 15 years in and around Unix environments and not be able to fix them. I'm just sick and fucking tired of having to fix them all the time.
Sometimes I do also, but that's not because Linux, Unix, Windows, etc. are crap but because I'm at an age where I feel like doing something else to earn money. Big difference.
Linux stuff is mostly done by younger guys (MOSTLY... I don't give a rats ass if you're offended by that if you're in the minority) who don't bother to thoroughly test or are on projects lacking enough testers, and often drop code without telling anyone or testing beyond their agile addled unit test that they built because they had a good idea in a dream last night.
That's not my experience. I turned 50 this year (no, it's not a problem for me whatsoever) and the demand for my skills appears to be higher than ever - and whilst I enjoy technically training kids and younger people, I don't do very much of that these days because there are so very few to train. Computer science still seems to be an "uncool" subject to them meaning that old guys like me have plenty of work to do still.
All well and good because they don't make a living doing their socially consciousnesses open source thing... since they don't feel the impact except their annoyance over complaints of their flakey code breaking something somewhere.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. You seem to be a very angry person, go for a quick walk round the block, come back and wipe the spittle of your screen, think a bit more about sentence construction, then try explaining this to me again.
However, you seem to be trying to goad me over Open Source so I'll say this one thing in the hope it answers that unintelligible jumble of words above - Open Source is a great thing but programmers have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. So whether they program for free or for salary is entirely down to their personal choice and not for an old guy like me to judge. End of.
Meanwhile others have to spend hours figuring out what library is missing, or rebuilding the box because your rpm fucktard bullshit dependencies wants to delete kde because you try to back out a flakey package that is holding back a needed upgrade in another tool. Enterprise Redhat? Dude? Yeah been there done that. Won't ever touch another rpm distro ever again. EVER.
Again, not my experience. Developers I've sysadmined for in the past don't seem to have your pent up rage issues and just drop me an email saying "I need library x or package y installed". It's my job to get it on there so it's what they need, and since I usually get it right they don't need to worry how I got it on there.
And you are also exaggerating greatly, I'm afraid. "Dependency hell" is so last decade, package management has improved no end since then - sure, there's still a problem occasionally but usually fixable by someone patient, with the right skills and a lot less pent up rage than you.
By and large people are all right, but you exhibit one thing I just fucking hate in the Linux community: the overwhelming smugness and unthinking condescension of many that if someone has had it with the frustration of working with a pseudo stable desktop that they must not be technically proficient.
Sonny, I've spent 30 years fixing computers, I'm really good at it, and occasionally I come across youngsters like you that are jealous because I can fix things better than they can or earn twice their salary. But the fact is I never forget that I got as good as I am because I went and asked questions from great people who were prepared to explain stuff to me - it's that humility that means when people come to me asking a question, I do my best to help them also. I really do not care whether you believe that or not, I've seen your type a lot and I get even more pleasure knowing that I've still been able to respond politely and decently
A very valid point and of course they did a similar (and related) thing by using DirectX to fragment the commercial PC games market to boost X-Box and X-Box games sales.
I have never heard a convincing technical explanation as to why the DirectX 10 API was impossible for them to provide on Windows XP but by making it Vista only they managed to make it doubly difficult for PC games companies at a point when Windows XP was the most used OS in the world.
Incidentally, I actually don't think it's a bad thing because the PC games market was stale and being flooded with poor quality console ports and it seems to have kicked off a much more vibrant indie games market now - harking back to the days of the Golden Age Of Computing with lone programmers and small dev teams knocking out great games for ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s, Commodore Amigas, etc.
I'd also add that Linux is usually free from cost and hard disk space is very cheap - so there's nothing to stop you running one distro that is entirely untainted by proprietary software and another for proprietary software and Steam gaming.
If you had to buy Linux twice over then it would be worth discussing, but otherwise this is a non-issue and simply down to personal choice.
In 30 years of computing experience I've never once felt the need to own one single Apple product so cannot comment on Apple, but I have used both Linux and Windows a lot.
And I should have stated that there are also some excellent Windows people out there who also give great support in forums, especially to someone like me who knows Windows a lot less than he knows Linux.
He suggested Red Hat Linux in a response to the guy clearly having problems maintaining Linux himself. Yes, Red Hat Linux is not free but that's also because a degree of support from Red Hat comes in that cost, meaning that the end user's need to support Linux himself or herself is lessened.
The other alternative is you use a free equivalent like Fedora and be prepared to look after a lot of it yourself - despite the great people that dwell in Linux forums everywhere who invariably will help you out with any issue if you speak nicely to them.
In such a case Linux may therefore not be suitable for him. But please do bear in mind that even using Windows or OS X, you would also need to pay for support from Microsoft or Apple if you needed it.
And I have given Gates a bunch of money in the past, and don't have a problem with that. With Windows 8, next time I do buy a new system, I hate to admit it but I'll be forced to buy Apple. After Jobs, Bill Gates looks like a sweetheart to me... but Ballmer has fucked MS right up and W8 is a monkey's abortion. It looks like a stable Unity. But stable shit or unstable shit, they're still shit.
Nobody forces you to use Apple (or Linux or Windows) and the fact that you need to resort to expletives to get your point across in no way offends me but does lead me to conclude that you yourself are trolling. But I will bite...
I program on Linux, specifically on a Linux VM guest on a Windows 7 host. Everything else I use Windows. I have had Windows 7 since it came out. Yes I've had to re-install it twice. But I've had to nuke half a dozen or more instances of Linux in the same time. Sure I could have kept them if I wanted to spend hours fucking around when things stopped working, but even with the amount of time it takes, it is easier and faster to blow it away and rebuild.
Just because you state later on that you used Slackware in the 90s does not automatically make you a Linux expert. I cannot comment on Windows 7 because I've only just recently started using it over XP. I can tell you with having used XP since about 2005, I have had to do full reinstalls on some occasions because if it gets to a problem with, say, registry corruption, then there comes a point where you can do nothing else than a full reinstall if an earlier system restore also fails.
Using Linux since the mid-90s also, I have had to rebuild Linux systems much less than Windows ones. However, much of the reason for that is my expertise in Linux is better than in Windows, I can predict some bad events that might happen on Linux and make provisions for it - for example, if I compile a new kernel and it panics, I usually have the option of booting back into the old kernel or from a boot disk. Yes, I've had some pretty horrific library dependency issues in the past (but please bear in mind I'm a fiddler with Linux who regularly tries out new software), sometimes I've been able to fix without a rebuild, once or twice I've given up trying to fix it and doing a rebuild.
None of the above proves that Linux is better or worse than Windows and I know some very knowledgeable Windows sysadmins who could probably fix issues where I have done a full rebuild on Windows.
In other words your comments make no sense without that baseline definition of how well you know each operating system - something you in the past have felt the need to rebuild to fix maybe something that I could fix without rebuilding. Simply down to knowledge and ability, nothing more.
After the past week rebuilding my dev environment (this time moving it from a physical box where the video kept locking up the interface) I have vowed never use anything but a VM for Linux ever again as it is easier to clone that once it is installed to save the headache of rebuilding.
What you have said above is actually common sense and regularly used in organisations and homes across the world - have you never heard of "development" and "production" environments where you test software on a development server until you are happy with it to the point where you can put it into production with minimal risk of it causing problems? And if you don't physically have enough hardware to do that then running VMs to develop in is the next best option.
You really are stating something that sounds to you like a revelation but is already widely in practice. And as someone who regularly sysadmins, I would certainly challenge any developer who didn't understand the concept of building their stuff in a development environment first.
As much as Linux fanboys like to claim Linux is more stable, well it might just be as a server, but no way for a desktop.
That is a wildly sweeping statement that could be applied to any operating system. The main di
I'm old enough to remember "The Golden Age Of Computing" during the 1980s, and one of the the best things that happened then was programmers being forced to come up with neat techniques to squeeze that little bit more out of what were essentially very restricted and limited home computers.
The fact that the world is going back to "apps" and the fact that PC gaming is moving back into the Indie world does mean a partial return to that Golden Age where it's no longer the case that the likes of Electronic Arts and a few other big companies have a stranglehold.
So I do hope they stick with the model As and Bs for a few years yet - to give people the chance to program them, work with the limitations and to see how far they can push its capabilities.
Yep, I can't argue with your statement and no company is going to manufacture such a board if doing so makes them a loss.
But a £25 overall cost still puts in the "loose change" pricing bracket - plus they could have put it in a cheap but pretty plastic case with a nice logo on it and made a good margin by charging double the price.
As a fellow Linux user, I must say that you are missing the point entirely.
The whole concept of the Raspberry Pi is not to be the smallest, fastest or most powerful, it is simply designed to be extremely cheap to buy but with enough processing power to make it a reasonably good programming platform, especially for kids and students.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity, it has been set up to further IT skills in schools, and the reason it was introduced and sold the way it was a few months ago was specifically to get the units out to those people who are keen on doing interesting things with them, and to feed back what they've done into the Foundation to get the schoolkids even more interested in programming on one.
Your comments about it being "nothing special" would be entirely valid were it being sold for profit and you were comparing specifications to similar items - but that is not the case.
Incidentally, I have no personal connection with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but I support any efforts done altruistically, especially in IT education where it might get kids learning proper skills that they can build careers on and make a living from.
Slashdot Mirror
Just how many commercial Windows games releases are you seeing these days? Because I see very few...
Microsoft (whether intentionally or not) pretty much killed commercial PC gaming the moment that they fragmented DirectX versions across XP and Vista, it was the "straw that broke the camel's back" for most commercial software houses who didn't want that extra burden of developing game versions for XP and Vista. Hence they moved more to XBox and I've no idea whether or not Microsoft deliberately planned it that way.
Many of the PC games releases we do see these days are surrounded by controversy (e.g. Sim City) because commercial software houses want to apply the same kind of lock-in that they do to console games to the PC - the result is very little commercial games products coming out for the PC now.
With that said, PC gaming is still very vibrant as indie gaming development is bigger than ever, perhaps a slight return to the Golden Age Of Computing where much smaller programming teams or even individuals actually stand a chance of making some money from creative PC game ideas - those same indie developers take Linux into account far more than the commercial software houses ever did.
You say there are only 126 games for Linux on Steam, I do wonder what number would actually please you? Was Gabe supposed to get every Windows Steam game ported across to Linux before announcing Steam for Linux to the world? Personally, given the choice I'd not use any DRM on Linux and I'm one of these honest people that buys every piece of non-free software that I use, especially in these days of indie-gaming where buying early into the development cycle means that you get a genuine say in how the final product will look - go check out the superb "Kerbal Space Program" on Steam if you don't believe me,,, but I do accept that Steam is compromise between more people being forced to pay games developers for what they do and having a decent selection of games to play on Linux.
I accept that programs like DOSBox and WINE are not for everyone due to the level of "fiddling about" to sometimes get games to work but with modern PCs being as powerful as they are and both these products being as mature that they are, it's possible to get a very large number of Windows games working reasonably stable on Linux, thus vastly increasing the range of games you can play on Linux. So the story really is not as simple as you'd like to paint it here...
This time a year ago, I used Linux about 70% of the time at home and kept a couple of Windows XP instances about just for gaming - aside from what appears on Steam, I don't go a lot on modern games and the last commercial game I purchased and played was Fallout New Vegas. (I bought a licensed copy of Windows 7, tried it for 2 weeks and then removed it because it gave me nothing that XP didn't apart from lots of stuff moved about and renamed with a CPU-cycle burning GUI that did nothing for me.)
At this moment in time, I'm just scrapping my last XP installation and moving everything to Linux - yes, I like XP, I have half-a-dozen killer apps I run on it, but they run fine in WINE (with a bit of tweaking) and/or in a VirtualBox XP VM. As for the games side of things, I'm more than happy with everything - the stuff I originally purchased on Steam for Windows is slowly appearing on Steam for Linux, I accept it will take them time to port everything across, and I'd rather they take the time to port across slowly but properly - certainly I've had no real issues running on Linux any of the Half-Life/Source Engine stuff that's been ported across so far.
I think you'll find that most people (I'm not one of them as explained above), Windows users or not, will now own a console if they want to play all the very latest commercial releases anyway, so I don't know what you have left to complain about here.
I don't consider that I am pontificating, merely stating it as I see it through older and wiser eyes.
The original posting talks about a generation making a complete record of everything they have done, my point is that most of what any generation does is boring piffle and not worthy of recording anyway.
Today's world is information overload with most of that information being mindless chatter of little interest to most people, but that's not to say that the Internet and social media are not extremely useful and interesting tools once you filter out the halfwits prattling on about their own self-importance.
And because I'm an old fart, I much prefer socialising face-to-face with people over a beer or two - with some people I know, distance means that face-to-face communications is rarely, if at all, possible, and social media then provides an alternative, albeit (in my view) a sterile, way of socialising with others. But if the younger generation prefers doing most of their socialising at a distance, that's their choice.
...get to 40 years old, then get over yourself.
The stuff in my life is of deep interest and importance to me, I don't for one minute believe any of it is of much interest to anyone else.
There's far too many talentless schmucks already parading themselves in front of me constantly vying for my attention on TV, advertising billboards and just about anywhere else I rest my eyes these days. Everyone else can get to the queue behind them, I'll get around to them at the point when my life becomes so boring that I have to poke my snout into the lives of others in order to feel I'm achieving something.
I actually take great pride in anonymity and having enough self-confidence just to go do what makes me happy without giving a flying f*ck what anyone else thinks - yep, it took middle age to discover that fully.
Gates had stated through his entire career at Microsoft that he would give most of his fortune to charity and he does appear to be doing that,
I do not wish to speak ill of the dead but Jobs was not renowned for any charitable works and certainly made little mention of them.
It boots in 7seconds rather than 40 seconds.
This type of comment always makes me smile... who is that impatient or has a life so busy that a 33 second difference in wait is really THAT important?
And that's not just asking you as an Apple user but anyone who gets all frothy at the mouth over "instant on" devices...
We're Linux users, we're used to short file and directory names.
The BASH command shell does allow for TAB filename completion and whilst Linux does allow spaces in file and directory names, they have to be sometimes treated differently ("escaped") at the command line or in shell scripts.
Linux users also have a home directory that is usually the same name as the user, and whilst usernames of more than 8 characters are supported, Linux usually only reads the first 8 characters anyway on login.
So the upshot is that at the command line we're used to keeping directory and file names short for zipping around the file system quickly, it's just one of the ways you do things to work quicker and more optimally.
And that isn't criticising people who like long descriptive file or directory names, whatever works for you.
For years, Microsoft has been more than happy sitting back and raking in the cash from Windows and Office licenses because the only IT skills kids learnt in our UK schools was how to use Office, Word and Powerpoint.
Now initiatives like the Raspberry Pi have started to show that kids can learn programming quickly and cheaply on Open Source and open standards-based programming tools, all of a sudden Microsoft takes an interest.
One can only assume it's to get the kids hooked into Visual Studio licensing before they turn into Open Source Communists...
Anyone want the publishing rights to my new 7 book fantasy series:
1. Henry Peters and The Philanthropist's Stain
2. Henry Peters and The Hamper of Secretions
3. Henry Peters and The Pensioner of Azerbajan
4. Henry Peters and The Goblin of Fear
5. Henry Peters and The Ordinance of Galaxians
6. Henry Peters and The Half Footprints
7. Henry Peters and The Deadly Heroes
Sonny, you really are wasting your time with the abuse you are levelling at me - I'm not going to repeat what I said to you in my last response in "Cue The Trolls" because it's all contained in there - read it or don't read it, the choice is yours.
But take the advice of an old man - any high ground you may think you have in any argument will be removed as soon as you resort to abuse and bad language - and when arguing with someone like myself, who is entirely capable of communicating clearly & succinctly in a calm fashion, I will consider that as a victory to me.
Huh? Who mentioned Opera?
Actually, a back door is deliberately created to allow specific people to come into the system - like a known account name with a known password. Just because you know the back door is there doesn't mean you can use it if you don't know the user and password.
A vulnerability tends to be as a result of poor design or a software bug - and not usually placed deliberately.
That's a clear distinction...
Hey, it's the man with the BRG (Big Rage Gun),
According to your post in "Cue The Trolls" on July 30th, you said and I quote:
Don't you wonder why people with the money are working on BSD based Macs instead of Linux? Wake up. How many mechanics get told to build a smelter when their ratchet is defective? None. They find another ratchet. I too have decided to use a different tool that doesn't require me to keep building smelters.
I took that to mean that you'd already left Linux far behind but here you are, once again, telling us how much you don't like it. What are you, some kind of masochist?
Sonny, if you do not like Linux then go ahead and use something else. It clearly stresses you out very much, I can imagine big red bulbous veins standing out in your neck as I type, and the last thing any of us hippie sandal-wearers want is to be responsible for someone with a BRG accidentallly turning it on himself and ending up with a coronary.
Agreed. Someone in Slashdot needs to read up on the differences between "vulnerability" and "back door".
I just buy the CD, rip it myself, put the CD on a shelf as it's own backup, copy the rips onto a portable hard disk and put the hard disk in my coat pocket.
I can access my music anywhere, not just where there's an Internet connection.
....so looking forward to using MATE when it's finished compiling some time in 2014. :-)
If I cared to fuck around with it all the time I would have no problem with Linux. You don't spend 15 years in and around Unix environments and not be able to fix them. I'm just sick and fucking tired of having to fix them all the time.
Sometimes I do also, but that's not because Linux, Unix, Windows, etc. are crap but because I'm at an age where I feel like doing something else to earn money. Big difference.
Linux stuff is mostly done by younger guys (MOSTLY... I don't give a rats ass if you're offended by that if you're in the minority) who don't bother to thoroughly test or are on projects lacking enough testers, and often drop code without telling anyone or testing beyond their agile addled unit test that they built because they had a good idea in a dream last night.
That's not my experience. I turned 50 this year (no, it's not a problem for me whatsoever) and the demand for my skills appears to be higher than ever - and whilst I enjoy technically training kids and younger people, I don't do very much of that these days because there are so very few to train. Computer science still seems to be an "uncool" subject to them meaning that old guys like me have plenty of work to do still.
All well and good because they don't make a living doing their socially consciousnesses open source thing... since they don't feel the impact except their annoyance over complaints of their flakey code breaking something somewhere.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. You seem to be a very angry person, go for a quick walk round the block, come back and wipe the spittle of your screen, think a bit more about sentence construction, then try explaining this to me again.
However, you seem to be trying to goad me over Open Source so I'll say this one thing in the hope it answers that unintelligible jumble of words above - Open Source is a great thing but programmers have mortgages to pay and kids to feed. So whether they program for free or for salary is entirely down to their personal choice and not for an old guy like me to judge. End of.
Meanwhile others have to spend hours figuring out what library is missing, or rebuilding the box because your rpm fucktard bullshit dependencies wants to delete kde because you try to back out a flakey package that is holding back a needed upgrade in another tool. Enterprise Redhat? Dude? Yeah been there done that. Won't ever touch another rpm distro ever again. EVER.
Again, not my experience. Developers I've sysadmined for in the past don't seem to have your pent up rage issues and just drop me an email saying "I need library x or package y installed". It's my job to get it on there so it's what they need, and since I usually get it right they don't need to worry how I got it on there.
And you are also exaggerating greatly, I'm afraid. "Dependency hell" is so last decade, package management has improved no end since then - sure, there's still a problem occasionally but usually fixable by someone patient, with the right skills and a lot less pent up rage than you.
By and large people are all right, but you exhibit one thing I just fucking hate in the Linux community: the overwhelming smugness and unthinking condescension of many that if someone has had it with the frustration of working with a pseudo stable desktop that they must not be technically proficient.
Sonny, I've spent 30 years fixing computers, I'm really good at it, and occasionally I come across youngsters like you that are jealous because I can fix things better than they can or earn twice their salary. But the fact is I never forget that I got as good as I am because I went and asked questions from great people who were prepared to explain stuff to me - it's that humility that means when people come to me asking a question, I do my best to help them also. I really do not care whether you believe that or not, I've seen your type a lot and I get even more pleasure knowing that I've still been able to respond politely and decently
A very valid point and of course they did a similar (and related) thing by using DirectX to fragment the commercial PC games market to boost X-Box and X-Box games sales.
I have never heard a convincing technical explanation as to why the DirectX 10 API was impossible for them to provide on Windows XP but by making it Vista only they managed to make it doubly difficult for PC games companies at a point when Windows XP was the most used OS in the world.
Incidentally, I actually don't think it's a bad thing because the PC games market was stale and being flooded with poor quality console ports and it seems to have kicked off a much more vibrant indie games market now - harking back to the days of the Golden Age Of Computing with lone programmers and small dev teams knocking out great games for ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s, Commodore Amigas, etc.
I'd also add that Linux is usually free from cost and hard disk space is very cheap - so there's nothing to stop you running one distro that is entirely untainted by proprietary software and another for proprietary software and Steam gaming.
If you had to buy Linux twice over then it would be worth discussing, but otherwise this is a non-issue and simply down to personal choice.
And I apologise.
In 30 years of computing experience I've never once felt the need to own one single Apple product so cannot comment on Apple, but I have used both Linux and Windows a lot.
And I should have stated that there are also some excellent Windows people out there who also give great support in forums, especially to someone like me who knows Windows a lot less than he knows Linux.
You are in a circular argument unfortunately.
He suggested Red Hat Linux in a response to the guy clearly having problems maintaining Linux himself. Yes, Red Hat Linux is not free but that's also because a degree of support from Red Hat comes in that cost, meaning that the end user's need to support Linux himself or herself is lessened.
The other alternative is you use a free equivalent like Fedora and be prepared to look after a lot of it yourself - despite the great people that dwell in Linux forums everywhere who invariably will help you out with any issue if you speak nicely to them.
In such a case Linux may therefore not be suitable for him. But please do bear in mind that even using Windows or OS X, you would also need to pay for support from Microsoft or Apple if you needed it.
And I have given Gates a bunch of money in the past, and don't have a problem with that. With Windows 8, next time I do buy a new system, I hate to admit it but I'll be forced to buy Apple. After Jobs, Bill Gates looks like a sweetheart to me... but Ballmer has fucked MS right up and W8 is a monkey's abortion. It looks like a stable Unity. But stable shit or unstable shit, they're still shit.
Nobody forces you to use Apple (or Linux or Windows) and the fact that you need to resort to expletives to get your point across in no way offends me but does lead me to conclude that you yourself are trolling. But I will bite...
I program on Linux, specifically on a Linux VM guest on a Windows 7 host. Everything else I use Windows. I have had Windows 7 since it came out. Yes I've had to re-install it twice. But I've had to nuke half a dozen or more instances of Linux in the same time. Sure I could have kept them if I wanted to spend hours fucking around when things stopped working, but even with the amount of time it takes, it is easier and faster to blow it away and rebuild.
Just because you state later on that you used Slackware in the 90s does not automatically make you a Linux expert. I cannot comment on Windows 7 because I've only just recently started using it over XP. I can tell you with having used XP since about 2005, I have had to do full reinstalls on some occasions because if it gets to a problem with, say, registry corruption, then there comes a point where you can do nothing else than a full reinstall if an earlier system restore also fails.
Using Linux since the mid-90s also, I have had to rebuild Linux systems much less than Windows ones. However, much of the reason for that is my expertise in Linux is better than in Windows, I can predict some bad events that might happen on Linux and make provisions for it - for example, if I compile a new kernel and it panics, I usually have the option of booting back into the old kernel or from a boot disk. Yes, I've had some pretty horrific library dependency issues in the past (but please bear in mind I'm a fiddler with Linux who regularly tries out new software), sometimes I've been able to fix without a rebuild, once or twice I've given up trying to fix it and doing a rebuild.
None of the above proves that Linux is better or worse than Windows and I know some very knowledgeable Windows sysadmins who could probably fix issues where I have done a full rebuild on Windows.
In other words your comments make no sense without that baseline definition of how well you know each operating system - something you in the past have felt the need to rebuild to fix maybe something that I could fix without rebuilding. Simply down to knowledge and ability, nothing more.
After the past week rebuilding my dev environment (this time moving it from a physical box where the video kept locking up the interface) I have vowed never use anything but a VM for Linux ever again as it is easier to clone that once it is installed to save the headache of rebuilding.
What you have said above is actually common sense and regularly used in organisations and homes across the world - have you never heard of "development" and "production" environments where you test software on a development server until you are happy with it to the point where you can put it into production with minimal risk of it causing problems? And if you don't physically have enough hardware to do that then running VMs to develop in is the next best option.
You really are stating something that sounds to you like a revelation but is already widely in practice. And as someone who regularly sysadmins, I would certainly challenge any developer who didn't understand the concept of building their stuff in a development environment first.
As much as Linux fanboys like to claim Linux is more stable, well it might just be as a server, but no way for a desktop.
That is a wildly sweeping statement that could be applied to any operating system. The main di
I'm old enough to remember "The Golden Age Of Computing" during the 1980s, and one of the the best things that happened then was programmers being forced to come up with neat techniques to squeeze that little bit more out of what were essentially very restricted and limited home computers.
The fact that the world is going back to "apps" and the fact that PC gaming is moving back into the Indie world does mean a partial return to that Golden Age where it's no longer the case that the likes of Electronic Arts and a few other big companies have a stranglehold.
So I do hope they stick with the model As and Bs for a few years yet - to give people the chance to program them, work with the limitations and to see how far they can push its capabilities.
Yep, I can't argue with your statement and no company is going to manufacture such a board if doing so makes them a loss.
But a £25 overall cost still puts in the "loose change" pricing bracket - plus they could have put it in a cheap but pretty plastic case with a nice logo on it and made a good margin by charging double the price.
As a fellow Linux user, I must say that you are missing the point entirely.
The whole concept of the Raspberry Pi is not to be the smallest, fastest or most powerful, it is simply designed to be extremely cheap to buy but with enough processing power to make it a reasonably good programming platform, especially for kids and students.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity, it has been set up to further IT skills in schools, and the reason it was introduced and sold the way it was a few months ago was specifically to get the units out to those people who are keen on doing interesting things with them, and to feed back what they've done into the Foundation to get the schoolkids even more interested in programming on one.
Your comments about it being "nothing special" would be entirely valid were it being sold for profit and you were comparing specifications to similar items - but that is not the case.
Incidentally, I have no personal connection with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but I support any efforts done altruistically, especially in IT education where it might get kids learning proper skills that they can build careers on and make a living from.
Wow! I think those same people need to go get some interesting stuff to fill all that spare time they clearly have.